 Naomi Oreskis, I'm a professor of history of science at Harvard University and I work on the history of climate science Well, I've had a fun career. I I am really glad about all the things I've done. So I started as a geologist I went into geology because I liked science, but I hated pre-meds and Because I love being outdoors the obvious choice for me was to go into geology So I became a geologist and my first real job was working in Australia In South Australia based in Adelaide But working in the northern part of South Australia as an exploration geologist and that was an absolutely great experience Totally unforgettable and I still have lots of great friends in South Australia I like to say I like going back to Australia because I feel like I'm a more fun person when I hang out with my Australian mates We had a great time. It was a great job. I loved what I did and then I came but I was always interested in a lot of other things I was always one of these people for whom like I picked geology because it was fun and I got to be outside, but I Had a lot of other interests as well, and I have always Loved reading fiction. I've always been interested in politics I've always been interested in the question of how to understand science in relation to society and how to understand How scientists know the things they know or how they decide that yes I have enough evidence to say that I believe this because you know here's the interesting thing about science will say it's evidence-based We collect all this data Okay, but then what there's this sort of you know leap of something. I mean some Scientists in the early 20th century used to call it The inductive leap right that you have all this data and evidence But somehow you still have to get from there to your general beliefs about the world and how does that happen? So in graduate school, I started taking classes in philosophy of science Met a wonderful professor Peter Gauss and who was a historian of science Which I didn't know the history of science existed as a field and that was my Eureka moment because then I discovered There was a field where all these disparate or seemingly disparate interests of mine Which I used to think it was a problem Like I had this problem that I was interested in too many different things Suddenly it wasn't a problem something. It was like oh, this is good This is good And you like to read and you like to write and you're interested in politics and science and here's a field where all that Is good So I ended up moving into history of science as a profession The consensus paper was sort of an accident I have been interested in scientific consensus for a long time and the question of how scientists come to consensus How they decide they have enough evidence to say yes, we know this and also the question of Well, if scientists have a consensus, how do we know they're right? And so I got invited in 2003 to do a talk at triple as the George sardin memorial lecture So it's a pretty kind of big deal lecture And I decided I would do the talk on the question of scientific consensus The title of the talk was consensus and science. How do we know we're not wrong? So I was trying to address that issue if consensus is our marker for scientific agreement But we know that's a show a social category not an epistemological category How do we think about the connection or disconnection between the social definition and the kind of epistemological definition? That's what it was really about. So it wasn't about climate science, but I had a couple of different examples a couple of examples from history Where we would say we kind of know the truth and then I thought well, let's use an example from You know something that's going on now and so I thought let's talk about climate change because that would be topical interesting And so I read the IPCC reports in the National Academy of Sciences reports And it was clear that you know these were very that these reports were very clear that climate change was underway And it's being driven by human Activities, but I thought well, yeah But you know just because the leadership of a scientific society say it that doesn't really prove that it's what the rank and file believe I mean that's sociology one-on-one just because the leaders say it doesn't mean doesn't make it true for the people So I thought how could I how could I test that? How could I judge whether or not the IPCC reports and the National Academy reports are accurate reflections of what? Working scientists actually think I thought well, I could do a science citation index Survey I could look at you know I could do a sample of thousand papers look at them and see what they say and so that's what I did And it was just a small part of the lecture It was an hour-long lecture was one slide out of you know more than a hundred slides And I didn't even really think it was that big a deal. I thought it's just I thought of it as a kind of cross-check When the lecture ended and there were about 600 people in the room The only thing anyone want to talk about was that one slide and all these people were stunned They were like oh my god. I had no idea and I thought oh really like people don't know this I really didn't think of it as being that big a deal But because people were so interested and I thought okay, I should try to publish this So after the lecture was over I went home and I wrote up just that little piece of it And I sent it to science magazine and they published it the paper essentially Just says that if you look at what scientific experts have to say on the subject of Whether or not climate change is underway and whether it's mostly caused by human activities The scientific community is clear the answer to that question is yes And so the paper was simply just saying that that's it. That was the whole thing nothing more Yes, this is what scientists have to say Because I thought that was an important message because it seemed like a lot of people didn't actually know that and because the media was Presenting it as a great big debate. So the paper doesn't make any recommendations about what to do about climate change It doesn't talk about the details of climate models doesn't talk about the uncertainties All it does is say if you ask the experts, this is what they've said I didn't model the paper on any previous example that I knew of It was just kind of an idea I had I don't know if it was ever really looked It's possible that nobody had done that before and after the paper was published lots of people came up to me They said how did you think to do that? I was like, I don't know. It seems sort of obvious It seemed kind of obvious if you're trying to figure out what scientists think we'll go to the science citation index and see But I don't know. I don't know if anybody else had done it before maybe they didn't maybe I invented a new method I don't know People have suggested that I do it for different aspects of science like sea level rise or You know, what's the modal prediction for temperature rise like some of this Details and of course one could do that one one could do it for any question science really But I haven't felt that motivated to do it. What was the response to the paper after it came out? Well, that's when I started getting attacked and that was when life sort of changed It was a bit like, you know going through the looking glass I started getting hate email and all kinds of weird things from people in strange places I remember very clearly one email from some guy in Finland Basically arguing with me and this was before I knew anything about the whole denial machine So I remember writing back a very detailed letter explaining my methodology and what I had done and you know Why I was confident that this result was was robust thinking that this was you know an honest colleague wanting to have an honest conversation And then little by little it began to become clear that something else was happening so What other forms of attacks besides emails? Well, the weirdest day of my whole life practically was the day I got a phone call from a reporter in Tulsa, Oklahoma Who said to me are you aware of the fact that Jenner senator James in half is attacking you? I was like at that time. I honestly didn't even know who senator in half was in fact I think I'd been to Oklahoma maybe once, but I mean So yeah, and I said no I have no idea why I mean I first I thought he was making a mistake Like this was some other well, I have a very unusual name. So it didn't seem plausible. It was some other Naomi Yeah, and then he had he read to me from the speech that This that in half was making you know, and it was part of what we all are very familiar with now that I was part of the global conspiracy The scientific conspiracy to bring down global capitalism and I remember thinking Conspiracy scientists are not that organized. So the whole thing was very strange But yeah, and then attacks on email hate phone calls threatening phone calls Yeah, all kinds of weird and strange things that again now we now these things are familiar because we've we've seen it You know, I'm not the only person that's had these experiences But at the time it was very strange and I didn't know what was going on. It was kind of frightening I mean to be suddenly, you know, your history of science history of science It's kind of a boutique field, you know Most of the time we do what we do and not too many people are paying attention and we complain That people aren't paying more attention because we think what we do is interesting But I was happy. I liked my work. I thought what I was doing was good And I had a certain following in the scientific community for my work So I didn't feel like I was a completely neglected Scholar, but this was completely unlike anything that had happened before Did you were any of the tax or criticisms directed through your institution? Not at that time that happened later at that time. It was just personal and so what happened then was I Mentioned to a couple of colleagues what was going on and one of my colleagues at Scripps at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Said to me you should talk to Ben santa Something sort of similar happened to him and that's when I first got to know Ben and started talking to him And that's when the whole merchants of doubt stories stories started to unfold that Ben told me what had happened to him And then the pieces began to come together Because one of the people who had attacked Ben santa was Fred Singer and he was one of the people who was attacking me And then I met Eric Conway and Eric made the link to what had happened over the ozone hole And then we started doing research started digging a little bit Found this link from Fred's sites back to the tobacco industry and that I remember very clearly because I remember that day I called Eric on the phone and I said Eric. We need to write a book You know, I'm trying to remember now because we had all kinds of other different working titles We had at one point there was a title of fighting fats We had a title challenging knowledge and we had all kinds of you know double entendre stupid puns So I can't remember was our editor, you know, so now I feel bad that I can't remember I don't think it was me. I feel pretty sure that actually it was not I'd like to take credit for it But I can't but I do remember it I think it was our editor or someone on the editorial team because I do remember thinking that's that's it That's the right title. Yeah, my husband always says that when they started attacking me They didn't really know what they were up against and I I hate to say something that's it sound egotistical That's not really how he means it But it's one thing to attack a scientist who isn't thinking about the political or social context of their work But it's another thing to attack a historian of science because the whole point of history of science is to understand science in social context and to recognize that even though scientists are trying to do something which they Understand as a pure intellectual activity. They're trying to understand how the world works The reality is that we all live in society. We all live in a world that has politics and economics and Funding and pressures of all different kinds And so part of the job of a historian of science is to understand that and to understand how scientists try to Learn about the natural world as real people living in real worlds with Institutional constraints and funding needs and all of those different things and that's what I was actually working on at the time That all this happened. I was running a book about the history of oceanography about Cold War and oceanography Trying to understand how oceanographers had made common cause with the US Navy to learn about the ocean so You know, this is my stock and trade is what I do for a living So when I started getting attacked by people and the attacks, you know clearly had a kind of political Undercurrent because I started being accused of being a communist and that way, you know, where is this coming from? So it was an obvious thing for me to sort of turn the tables or you know Turn the lens and say well, who are these people and why are they attacking me? And why are the same people attacking me that attacked Ben Center and attacked Sherry Rowland and worked for the tobacco industry? Clearly, there's some kind of story here. There's got to be some kind of story that makes sense of what other seems like You know, otherwise seems like a really Bizarre set of activities a bizarre set of coincidences Well have been asked about this several times including some things by Deans and provost and I send them copies of my book and I say I'm actually when I started getting attacked institutionally That's what I did. I sent my vice chancellor copy of the book I said you need to read the book to understand what's happening here and I even Send him to particular chapter in the book, you know so One of the things that I think is really important is that by writing about these things and by Documenting it and by writing about it in a scholarly way You know with high standards of documentation We can explain to our colleagues or institutions Editors a journal and the public and the media what this is because this is not a scientific debate I mean if I have one message, that's what this my message has been all long and it still is this is not a scientific debate It's a political debate But it's a political debate being made to look like a scientific debate being Camouflaged as science being dressed up like a scientific debate and we now know why people do that Because it's a very very effective strategy because if you can make people think it's a scientific debate Then people will think it's too soon to act but if people see the truth if they realize that this is certain if it's a political debate that it's related to people's ideologies to their Value structures that gives a whole different cast so it's very very important for people to understand the character of what this thing is and so all of the scholarship that I've done with Eric Conway on this is really geared towards that to helping people both inside and outside the scientific community Understand the character of what has taken place here The use of scientists with credentials is absolutely critical to this strategy because if a tobacco industry executive said well You know, I'm not convinced that smoking is really harmful that wouldn't pass the laugh test but if a distinguished scientist says it then it seems like there's a scientific debate and so a journalist who might not Feel compelled to quote a tobacco industry executive will feel compelled to quote a distinguished scientist so a key part of the tobacco strategy and we can trace this back to the 1950s this has been going on for more than half a century Was to recruit scientists one of the earliest scientists to work for the tobacco industry was a man named C.C Little who was a famous geneticist, but also a eugenicist who thought that all cancers were hereditary and Therefore that they weren't caused by smoking. So this is an interesting example of a kind of Strange bedfellows little was sincere. He wasn't just a liar for hire. He wasn't a shill He truly believed that all cancers were genetic and so when the tobacco industry says well Why don't you come work for us because we think the cancer is genetic too and we're really interested in your work Oh, and we will pay you quite a bit of money You know, he's not compromising his principles because he agrees with them And so that was very very powerful and that set the stage for what the tobacco industry did then for the next 60 years Which was to find sympathetic scientists Scientists were sympathetic either because they were genetic determinists or because they were ideologues who Agreed with the tobacco industry arguments that the government should not be interfering and so a very powerful argument that the tobacco industry used in the 1960s and 70s was the argument that this is personal choice that Grown-ups can decide for themselves Whether or not to smoke and the government should not be telling us what to do And that was part of the reason that Fred Sykes one of the original merchants of doubt went to work for the tobacco industry because he agreed with that argument and in the film version of our book our filmmaker Robbie Kenner found this wonderful footage in which Fred Sykes looks the reporter in the eye and says it's the smokers responsibility And then the reporter says well, what about after all the scientific evidence came out And we really knew that smoking was harmful and Sykes just sits there and he calmly says the smokers responsibility So he has this notion of personal responsibility That enables him to think that the tobacco industry is doing nothing wrong even though We know now and they knew then that they're selling a harmful product that's killing people So for Fred Sykes and his colleagues, it's not just about tobacco. It's about a broader ideological belief in free market economics and a belief that protecting the free market protects your political and Personal freedoms as well and this is very very much tied up with the Cold War So Fred Sykes Fred Singer Bill Nuremberg Bob Jastrow the four key players in our book were all physicists And they were all physicists who came of age in the Cold War and who had worked on American weapons and rocketry programs And who had risen to quite high levels of power influence within American science and American science Advising through their work on these rocketry and weapons programs and I think it's fair to say that all of them Honestly believed That the Soviet Union was a serious threat They honestly believe that communism was a threat to the world that the communists Menace the communist threat the threat of communist expansion was real and that science and technology had played a crucial role in the Cold War in Protecting the West from Soviet and communist expansionism. I think they believed all of that authentically To me the kind of mistake the sort of logical mistake They make is that when the Cold War ends instead of being happy and popping some champagne corks They look for a new enemy and that new enemy is what they see as a kind of reds under the bed Which is environmentalists they think that environmentalism is going to become a slippery slope to socialism because they fear that environmental issues will be used as a justification for government regulation government encroachment in the marketplace and ultimately the government taking control of our lives so in a couple of Places they say this explicitly. There's one particularly explicit discussion in the 1990s about secondhand smoke The US EPA is moving to regulate secondhand smoke because it's been demonstrated Scientifically that secondhand smoke can kill you and it can kill your husband and your wife and your children and Leads a sudden infant death syndrome. I mean a lot of seriously bad things But the merchants of doubt work with the tobacco industry and they say well once the government starts to regulate dangers like secondhand smoke There's no limit to what the government can do So it's a slippery slope argument and like all slippery slope arguments, you know, there's a kernel of truth in it I think most of us would agree that we don't want the government interfering in our personal lives You know to think as much as possible. We'd like to be the masters of our own destiny But at the same time we also recognize that if a company is selling products that are killing people and lying about it That's a problem, right? And so somewhere between those two extremes, you know There's an appropriate level of government involvement So in a way this becomes a question about the appropriate role of government and that to me You know, I feel like when we were doing this research when I realized that I thought well, why can't we just have that conversation, right? That's a legitimate question. I'd be happy to sit down with well Fedsites may he rest in pieces and with us any longer But if you were you'll be happy to talk sit down any day with any intelligent person and talk about well How do we sort that out? But that's not what they did instead of saying that this is a question about the appropriate role of government They demonized environmentalists and they began this campaign of trying to undermine the scientific data In order to prevent government regulation and I think in their own minds They persuaded themselves that what they were doing was right and that's this story is so filled with ironies from beginning to end But to me one of the saddest ironies is that I can remember as a child being taught that what was wrong with communism Was not that they were trying to build a better world Or that it was an unrealistic sort of utopian dream But that they had the ideology that the ends justified the means and so that the Bolsheviks had done a lot of terrible things In the name of defending the proletariat right but the irony to me is that so these merchants of doubt That's what they do they begin to do all kinds of really inappropriate things dishonest things But they justify in their own minds because they think they're protecting democracy The means were dreadful. I mean the means were shameful. They included Clearly misrepresenting scientific information cherry-picking scientific data One egregious example that we talk about in the book is an early work by Jim Hansen That Bill Nirenberg Bob Jastrow and Fred Scythes Take out of context and use it to argue that climate change is caused by the Sun When in fact if you go back to the original paper Hansen is arguing exactly the opposite and so Bill Nirenberg Fred Scythes and Bob Jastrow who were the original merchants of doubt had all were either deceased or Ill by the time we were writing our book, which is also one reason we didn't interview them I mean that they get very stressed and like the Marshall Institute will say oh, but a risk has never even interviewed them I will to them we're dead a little hard to interview them and one of them was already Seen out and actually I actually tried to interview Fred Scythes But I was told by people close to him that he was not able to give an interview So yeah, the tactics get taken up by other people And then yes, so taking your work out of context misrepresenting it Claiming you said things that you never actually said the most recent one I've experienced is being Accused of defamation for saying something that actually never even said so now people all over the internet and Twitter are saying You know we are eschists of fames, you know This and that Because she's called them x y and z I never called them those things so they lie about what you've said And then they accuse you of defamation for saying the thing that you actually never said of course historians are not Psychologists so the best you can do is work with the materials you have But I think all the evidence that we had about the original gang of four Not so much about some of the people who joined on later, but the original gang of four I think they believed I think that what they believe politically they believed authentically I think they felt it very strongly. I mean I think having lived these Cold War lives. They really They really interpreted their own life and their work particularly their scientific work in this kind of Manic key and way of seeing you know good and evil the Soviets versus the US the East versus the West Totalitarianism versus freedom and I think all of that was authentically held if perhaps in some ways Exaggerated and excessively dichotomized So when they begin to engage in these other activities, I think they kind of justified in their own minds That they're doing the right thing and I think I mean the one person in the story that I knew Well personally was Bill Nuremberg and I interviewed him on a couple of occasions Not about the merchants of doubt story because I didn't know about it yet but about other things he had worked on in the history of geophysics and oceanography and Bill was a very adamant man, you know, he reminds me of it sometimes said about Arthur Eddington that he was Sometimes wrong but never unsure so Bill Nuremberg was like that, you know And he's a big guy physically and kind of energetically and I think he just was absolutely persuaded of two things first of all I think he thought he was smarter than everybody else I think he just thought he saw things that other people didn't see and maybe that was often true I mean, he was an extremely smart guy So these are very very brilliant people But I think who to some extent lent it let their brilliance go to their heads a little bit there I mean Bill was brilliant, but also extremely immodest He saw himself as a world historical figure and in a way he was because he had helped to build the atomic bomb He'd been a science advisor in NATO. He'd given scientific advice to presidents So he is a world historical figure, but again, it kind of goes to his head He becomes disrespectful of other people's expertise and he begins to think that He understands things that other people don't see so I think he starts to view his own scientific colleagues as Little people who are kind of down in the trenches and I think he thinks that they are exaggerating it because and here I'm speculating, but I've thought about this a lot Sometimes scientists do exaggerate the significance of their own work because you know It's lonely in the trenches and you would like to get a little attention and you'd like to say, you know Look what I found in my ice core, right and I think Bill saw that You know, he was the director of a big institution for a long time So I think in his own mind he thought yeah, yeah, well these guys, you know, they've got to pump themselves up because the reality is, you know A lot of it's not a lot of it's pretty small bore. So they're they're kind of exaggerating. They're exaggerating the threat Yeah, they'll be a little bit of climate change here or there But don't worry. We'll be fine. We'll adapt technology. We'll take care of it And he wrote that explicitly in the 1983 report he wrote for the National Research Council He wrote that yeah, they'll probably be a little bit of climate change But we'll adapt and there's this one particularly Telling paragraph where he writes. Yeah, it's true climate change. There'll be a little disruption But people can move people have always moved, you know, and they've taken their horses and their dogs with them That was classic Bill Nirenberg, right and the idea that yes people move but they suffered They lost their homes They died those horses and dogs died along the way and that there was huge suffering, you know Calamity suffering that it doesn't seem to have penetrated his consciousness Nor did it penetrate his consciousness that the world today is not the same as the world of the Neanderthals I mean once upon a time people were nomadic people could pick up and move in response to climate change No big deal, but that's not the world we live in in the 20th century that's not the world of rigid nation-state boundaries the world of hardened infrastructure the world where people have invested millions of dollars in Homes at sea level. So I think there was a bit of a disconnect there that he didn't really take seriously. I don't think he ever even really thought about What history or anthropology or sociology would tell us about what the world would look like today if all of a sudden Tens or hundreds of millions of people had to get up and move and take their horses and dogs with them well a key part of the strategy from the very beginning is to undermine the idea of scientific consensus because If there are many many studies that show this and and one of the things we know about the tobacco industry and also Some of the early work by done by the fossil fuel industry is they actually studied these things They did market research with folks groups to figure out What is effective in changing people's minds about these matters and one of the things they discovered in their own market research Was that if you can persuade people that there's no scientific consensus then people will think that it would be premature to act So if you're the tobacco industry the government is proposing regulation Proposing tobacco control and you're trying to push back tobacco control you say well, hold on a minute We don't really know that smoking is dangerous There's no scientific consensus and market research shows that if you persuade people that there's no consensus They say yeah well in that case. Let's wait and see so it's a very very powerful strategy That we know works and this is why you hear them saying is a kind of mantra There's no consensus the science isn't settled, you know, we have experts who don't agree There's still a lot of uncertainty There's considerable uncertainty, you know, you hear this phrase considerable uncertainty repeated over and over again and of course part of the Strategy is to stay on message. So they'll say this over and over and over again, you know There's a lot of doubt there's considerable uncertainty And this is where the the title merchants of doubt came from because they're selling doubt and of course we know that They even admitted that themselves because one of the most famous documents and all the tobacco millions and millions of pages of tobacco Documents is a document in which an industry executive says doubt is our product These guys have always been way ahead of us and actually if you go back to Edward Bernays and some of the original You know the history of propaganda You realize that people were studying this in 1920s and 30s and the tobacco industry was on the forefront of marketing market research propaganda and Bernays who worked closely with the tobacco industry Most people don't know this but he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud we know that The whole reason that the tobacco industry and also now various think tanks have challenged the scientific consensus is Because they understand how powerful it is so to see that ground to me is to raise a white flag It's to surrender so I don't understand why anyone would take that view one thing that we've seen a lot of Unfortunately is that a lot of scientists in a way suffer a little bit from what I could call the bill Nuremberg disease You know, they think they know they think that because they're smart people that they're smart about everything But the fact is that any area of life one can do research and one can learn from evidence And what social science does for us is to give us evidence about important issues that involve human behavior human reactions You know, and this is why Private industry does tons of market research. I mean nobody no big company in the private sector launches a product without do market Research and yet we launch our products all the time without any market research I mean look at the IPCC they've spent years Developing a product these very elaborate very expensive reports that put huge amounts of work into getting the wording Right the details the graphs, you know arguing about this graph that graph what the colors the graph should be But then they pay no attention whatsoever To the questions of how to get the message out and then the message is distorted by either people in media Who just don't understand it or who can't understand it or by people who have a vested interest in deliberately distorting it and if you suggest to scientists that they should pay a little bit more attention to You know what we could broadly call the marketing aspects. They don't like that. It feels Dirty it feels like no, that's not what we do. We just do truth And we want truth to speak for itself We want the facts to speak for themselves and we've all been raised with a kind of faith in truth You know, it's like truth justice in the American way. I mean science is all about believing in the power of truth but the empirical evidence is against that hypothesis so we don't actually pay attention to the evidence and this is one of things that I talk about when I talk to scientists and say look we have evidence about these things and Sometimes it changes. I mean one thing I think some social scientists do that. I don't agree with Sometimes social scientists talk in very absolute terms about things that are historically contingent So they will say people respond in X way to Y messages Well, that's true to that group of people that they did their experiments with on May 15th 2009 and chances are if their university research is it was undergraduates, right? So there's always a big question about external validity with all research all social science research but there's also a Question about time and place and one of things that I think is also important for scientists to understand is that these things are moving Targets and what was true 10 years ago might not be true today and vice versa And so we need to think through what is the political and cultural and social situation that we find ourselves in now Today and it's different than it would have been 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 years ago What worked for Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution in London in the 19th century might not work for us Then again it might because the other thing is that we could learn a lot more from history than we do we pay almost no attention to history and I've talked about this many times in public the fact is a lot of time scientists will say well The public's just not interested in what we do Well, that wasn't always true. In fact, there was a time when the public was incredibly interested in science in England in the 19th century thousands of people used to go to public lectures on geology astronomy biology Electricity and magnetism people would flock to the Royal Institution to hear Michael Faraday talk about electricity and magnetism now The world is different now. He didn't have to compete with television But still there are things we could do to reach out much more than we do And when we assume that people are not interested that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I love Michael Faraday He's one of my heroes and one of the things that was brilliant about Faraday is that he knew how to make his work visual and he Showed magnetism to people just using iron filings, right? So a very simple idea some ordinary Something that you could have lying around in the 19th century when iron filings could be found in almost any factory And just say, you know, electricity and magnetism seems weird. It seems a cult You can't see you can can't feel it, but actually you can see it and here it is and here's the filings, right? Yeah, how great is that? Climate change denial in the United States is almost entirely motivated by politics A lot of scientists have thought that it was a problem of science illiteracy That it was a problem of public understanding that if we just explain the science better that then we would solve this problem And that doesn't work because the problem is not being driven by lack of Accessed information although that may play a role in some cases The problem is being driven by people not wanting to believe the science because they don't like its implications So this is what some people refer to as implicatory denial If you take climate science seriously, it means we need to do something We need to do something that changes the way we operate And that something could be very personal could be changing the way you live Could be becoming a vegetarian or not traveling or you know building a Zero energy home But it also could be Something that the government does and a lot of the early attention about climate change particularly focused on governance It focused on either the idea of international governance in the form of say the un framework convention on climate change Or focused on national governance in the form of a carbon tax or an emission trading system So these are government interventions in the marketplace So if you don't like the idea of a government intervention in the marketplace because you believe in free market economics Or you just worry about government encroachment you worry about Expanding government then the kinds of solutions that are being put forward for climate change are things you don't like And so that's a major probably the single major reason why The americans who reject climate science do it because if you look at the data on it What you see is that the strongest correlation between climate change denial Is with a certain kind of conservative politics that emphasizes the free market. It's not correlated with race It's not correlated with age or gender or even religious belief With one exception that's tied to conservative politics, right? Which is a certain sector of the evangelical community, but it's tied to a set of conservative beliefs about governance And so that's why I say it's political because it's about what you think about politics about politics that makes That conditions your reception or rejection of the science That's a hard question and I and I don't know that I Even entirely know the answer to that question. I think different things can work in different situations But I do think that right now the most important thing Is not to get stuck in where we were a few years ago. So at AGU this year We heard a talk in which somebody put up statistics about how all these people don't believe in climate change But actually The recent polls show that the american people actually do now that the by and large the vast majority of americans Except that the climate is changing And the majority of them even that it's driven by human activities. So american people actually get this So despite 20 years of disinformation and well-funded denial The reality is nevertheless sinking in so I think it would be a mistake for us to like Be arguing with where people were five or ten years ago or even three years ago Give people credit where credit is due people have come on board now So now the key thing is to build on that understanding and that's why in my most recent talks I've said the most important thing we can do now is not to argue the climate change is happening people get that But to argue about how it is we understand that greenhouse gases are the key drivers Because if we're asking people to now support policies to control greenhouse gases Like here in the united states the epa carbon rule People need to know why that's the right solution And I found in many of my talks that people don't understand that that they may Get it that climate change is happening But they still think that maybe we're not really sure what's causing it or they don't really know How we know and this question of like how do we know it's not the sun? What about volcanoes even people who are on board and think climate change is real and who are not in denial Are still confused about this issue. So we need to be much clear about What is the evidence that leads us to understand the role of greenhouse gases and also deforestation as the drivers of climate change I mean the other thing I think we need to do is talk about the solutions because I think There is a lot of good research in my own experiences consistent with this People do get depressed if you tell them we have an incredibly horrible problem And I don't know what the heck to do about it That's not really like a good thing to tell people And I do find that when I give public lectures people always say, okay So what do we do about it and that's tricky because of course that takes us out of our expertise Because as scientists as climate scientists most of us really don't actually know what the solutions are So I think that's a delicate one for scientists. I think that If you tell people this horrible bad new story, and then they say well, what do I do about it? And you say I don't know. I'm just a scientist. That's pretty unsatisfactory But at the same time if you start Expounding about things that you're not an expert. You really don't know that's not good either So is there some kind of mill ground? And that's why I've become interested in this idea about explaining more about the drivers So I'll give you a concrete example When Susan Solomon was interviewed in the New York Times after ar Ford came out. She was asked explicitly Okay, the IPCC says warming is unequivocal. So what do we do about it? And she said I'm a scientist I don't recommend policy and as it happened I was teaching a class on science and policy that day And I had a very distinguished scientist of an earlier generation who had spent many years working in science policy In class that day. So we talked about this and we had a very very wide ranging discussion And the students, you know students are very smart and they're creative And so by the end of the hour we had kind of come to something along these lines And I love Susan's there's not a criticism of her personally because I think we all struggle with this We all struggle is like what's the right balance? But she could have said something like this I'm a scientist. So I'm not going to recommend a particular policy But what I can tell you is that it's we know It's not just that we know that climate change is happening We also know what's causing it and what's causing it is the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere So whatever policy we adopt it's got to be a policy that gets greenhouse gas emissions under control Period Right and that would be totally consistent with her expertise It would not be overstepping at all, but it would tell people Where we have to look in terms of policy solutions Well, the idea that scientists are in it for the money is idiotic because scientists are all intelligent people And if they wanted to make money, there's a lot of better things they could do Then go to graduate school and live on seven thousand dollars a year for six years and Then suffer as a postdoc and all the other things we do I mean I spent a lot of years where I made no money, you know and had no clothes And you know, I mean my husband when I met him said to me I mean I was a woman who had way more books than clothes and my husband said to me He wasn't my husband time was my boyfriend time. He said to me I should spend more money on clothing. I told this to a friend of mine, and she said marry this man immediately So Yeah, I mean nobody goes into it for the money because there's just there's really a lot of money I mean you can have a good living you can have a nice middle or upper middle class lifestyle, but you'll never I mean not an air science. I mean maybe in biotech you could become rich But I mean almost no scientists become rich. So you don't go into it for the money. Why do people become scientists? I think it's a mix. Um, I think there are different things I think that a lot of scientists are just naturally curious people There's like what we could call the natural historical scientists the people who who like to collect rocks and bugs and things And I was one of those, you know kids who have rock collections, right? So a lot of geologists have rock collections when they were kids So I think those are the sort of curious about the world around them types Then there are people go into science because they're really good in math And if you are talented in math There's a lot you can do as a scientist There are a lot of problems in the world that if you have quantitative skills You can adjust those things in ways that other people can't so it's math is a powerful toolkin And if you have that toolkit science is a great place where you can use it Some people go into science because what they're good at you know, that's what Jim Hanson says He says I went into science because I was good at it It's where their talents lie so they don't necessarily collect bugs as kids But they do well in science and school and then they get encouraged because A lot of people can't do science and to some extent that's what happened to me too When I was a girl growing up I was good in science But I was good in a lot of other things too But being good at French or English didn't seem special Being good at science did and people I mean I had teachers who said to me explicitly You know if you can do science you have to and then I said that seemed actually a little weird when you think about But but remember I'm also the Sputnik generation, right? We were raised to think that it was almost a kind of National duty a patriotic duty to go into science if you could and then as a girl of a certain age I'm just old enough that There was a kind of gender incentive to go into science that science was just beginning to open up to women And so there was this feeling that you know if you could do science and you're a woman you absolutely should You know science needs you the world of science needs you So there was a lot of positive reinforcement to go into science And I think lots of people in science Got that positive reinforcement because I know plenty of scientists who play musical instruments or write poetry or love literature But there isn't the same kind of social reinforcement for wanting to be a poet that there is for being a scientist and honestly There's not a huge amount of money in science But you know there's plenty of good regular jobs in science Whereas making a living as a poet is you know for most people just about impossible So if you have to choose science poetry, you know most people they'll choose science It's simple. It's basic physics and chemistry It's physics and chemistry that we have known since the 19th century carbon dioxide's a greenhouse gas That means that it's relatively transparent to visible light But relatively opaque to infrared or make it even simpler light comes in he gets trapped So if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere more heat gets trapped and sooner or later the earth has to warm up That's basic physics and there isn't really any Other possibility and if you read the work that scientists were writing say back in the 1950s and even 40s and 30s when they first started worrying about this This is what almost all of them said Almost all of them said well, we don't know for sure when this will happen But sooner or later unless we're missing something the earth has got to warm up And guess what that sooner or later has passed right and here we are, you know, and the earth has warmed up