Harvard Historian Oreskes Documents Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, authored the first peer-reviewed paper to document the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, a 2004 essay that has been cited more than 2,500 times. Her 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik M. Conway, exposed the deliberate strategies used by fossil fuel interests to manufacture doubt about climate science.
Oreskes's 2004 essay "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" was published in Science and became a landmark reference in climate policy debates, featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth and in a Royal Society publication on climate facts and fictions. Her book Merchants of Doubt has been translated into nine languages and adapted into a documentary film produced by Participant Media and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. In 2018, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.
Her body of work, including The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014) and Why Trust Science? (2019), directly addresses the political and social dimensions of climate inaction, providing a framework for understanding why scientifically established risks have not translated into proportional policy responses. This analytical framework is directly relevant to the energy finance research conducted by IEEFA and similar organisations that seek to translate climate science into investment and regulatory action.
Oreskes's research on the history of science, including her book Science on a Mission (2021) examining how military funding shaped ocean science knowledge, also informs broader debates about the independence of scientific research and the role of funding sources in shaping research outcomes. This dimension of her work has relevance for India and other emerging economies navigating competing pressures from fossil fuel interests and international climate finance frameworks.
Key figure — 2,500+ citations — total citation count for Oreskes's 2004 paper documenting the scientific consensus on climate change
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