Naomi Oreskes

Merchants of Doubt: Disinformation, Mistrust, and Confusion

Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world-renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author of the best-selling book, Merchants of Doubt (2010) and a leading voice on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.
Oreskes is author or co-author of 8 books, and over 150 articles, essays and opinion pieces, including Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010), The Collapse of Western Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2014), Discerning Experts (University Chicago Press, 2019), Why Trust Science? (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change, (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, was the subject of a documentary film of the same name produced by participant Media and distributed by SONY Pictures Classics, and has been translated into nine languages. A new edition of Merchants of Doubt, with an introduction by Al Gore, was published in 2020.
Her latest book, with Erik Conway, is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loath Government and Love the Free Market, which has been translated to French and Italian.
In 2025 Dr. Oreskes and Alexander Kaurov published an article highlighting ethical problems with an earlier article published in 2000. The original article, defending the safety of using Roundup, was proven to have been ghost written by Monsanto employees.
Naomi’s article posed the question: what impact did this ghost written paper have? The answer was: a huge impact.
At that point Oreskes and Kaurov requested the original journal retract the article, which they did.
The original article had been cited 822 times. The corporate authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse. The retraction has caused a major shift in the public conversation about the safety of Bayer’s product. It has also demonstrated the negative influence of some large corporations on scientific integrity.
Oreskes wrote the Introduction to the Melville House edition of the Papal Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, Laudato Si, and her essays and opinion pieces on climate change have appeared in leading newspapers around the globe, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, the Times (London), and Frankfurter Allegemeine. Her numerous awards and prizes include the 2019 Geological Society of American Mary C. Rabbitt Award, the 2016 Stephen Schneider Award for outstanding Climate Science Communication, the 2015 Public Service Award of the Geological Society of America, the 2015 Herbert Feis Prize of the American Historical Association for her contributions to public history, and the 2014 American Geophysical Union Presidential Citation for Science and Society. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2018, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2019 she was awarded the British Academy Medal. In 2024, she was awarded the Nonino Foundation “Maestro del Nostro Tempo” award. And in 2025, she was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize for her contributions in “shaping our understanding of how scientific knowledge is collectively constructed and addressing the challenges of misinformation in public discourse.”