Naomi Oreskes

Erik M. Conway

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Merchants of Doubt

The year is 2393, and a senior scholar of the Second People's Republic of China presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment, the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies, entered into a Penumbral period in the early decades of the twenty-first century, a time when sound science and rational discourse about global change were prohibited and clear warnings of climate catastrophe were ignored. What ensues when soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, drought, and mass migrations disrupt the global governmental and economic regimes? The Great Collapse of 2093. This work is an important title that will change how readers look at the world. Dramatizing climate change in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, this inventive, at times humorous work reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called Òcarbon industrial complexÓ that have turned the practice of sound science into political fodder. The authors conclude with a critique of the philosophical frameworks, most notably neo-liberalism, that do their part to hasten civilizationÕs demise. Based on sound scholarship yet unafraid to tilt at sacred cows in both science and policy, this book provides a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate change literature. It includes a lexicon of historical and scientific terms that enriches the narrative and an interview with the authors.

A View from the Future

The Collapse of Western Civilization

"A carefully researched work of intellectual history, and an urgently needed political analysis." --Jane Mayer “[A] scorching indictment of free market fundamentalism ... and how we can change, before it's too late.”-Esquire, Best Books of Winter 2023 The bestselling authors of Merchants of Doubt offer a profound, startling history of one of America's most tenacious--and destructive--false ideas: the myth of the "free market." In their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, they unfold the truth about another disastrous dogma: the “magic of the marketplace.” In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labor. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the Little House on the Prairie books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan's political career. By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy.

How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

The Big Myth

Big Myth

NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945--1999 (New Series in NASA History)

High-Speed Dreams

"Provokatif ve son derece büyüleyici olan Batı Uygarlığının Çöküşü, okuru sağduyulu yönetimlerle hala önlenebilecek bir geleceğe götürüp, bırakıyor." -Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature ve Climate Change kitaplarının yazarı "Oreskes ve Conway'ın bu şaşırtıcı ve makul yüzyılının hikayesi, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley gibi, yaklaşan felaketleri çok önceden gözleyen, yazarak peygambere dönüşen bütün yazarların zihninde yazılmış bir kitaptır. Gireceğimiz Uzun Ekolojik Felaketlerle dolu yüzyılı detaylı ve inandırıcı bir şekilde resmeden unutulmayacak bir metin." -Kim Stanley Robinson, Shaman, 2312, Science in the Capital ve Mars üçlemesi'nin yazarı "İnsanlık tarihinin nasıl olabileceğine dair korkutucu bir bakış. Aldırış etmemekle, bu senaryonun olasılığı artıyor. Bu kitabı okuyarak, ve ihtarlarına uyarak belki dehşetli kehanetlerini önleyebiliriz." -Timothy E. Wirth, Birleşmiş Milletler'in Başkan Yardımcısı, eski ABD Senatosu ve Temsilciler Meclisi Üyesi

Batı Uygarlığının Çöküşü

Historians, along with participants in current aerospace research programs, will gain valuable perspective on the interaction of politics and technology.

NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945–1999

Conway recounts one of the most important stories in aviation history: the evolution of aircraft landing aids that make landing safe and routine in almost all weather conditions.

Low-Visibility Operations in American Aviation, 1918–1958

Blind Landings

Although the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has become synonymous with the United States’ planetary exploration during the past half century, its most recent focus has been on Mars. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the Mars Phoenix mission of 2007, JPL led the way in engineering an impressive, rapidly evolving succession of Mars orbiters and landers, including roving robotic vehicles whose successful deployment onto the Martian surface posed some of the most complicated technical problems in space flight history. In Exploration and Engineering, Erik M. Conway reveals how JPL engineers’ creative technological feats led to major breakthroughs in Mars exploration. He takes readers into the heart of the lab’s problem-solving approach and management structure, where talented scientists grappled with technical challenges while also coping, not always successfully, with funding shortfalls, unrealistic schedules, and managerial turmoil. Conway, JPL’s historian, offers an insider’s perspective into the changing goals of Mars exploration, the ways in which sophisticated computer simulations drove the design process, and the remarkable evolution of landing technologies over a thirty-year period. "A masterpiece of research and writing."—Quest: History of Spaceflight Quarterly "A 'must' for any reader of modern astronomy who wants insights into how the lab conducts its research, solves problems, and handle[s] technological challenges."—Midwest Book Review "A great tale of ambition, mishap and recovery, building on extensive archival research and interviews with JPL managers, scientists and engineers, to deliver a detailed overview of each mission's feats and failures . . . Exploration and Engineering is a great book for everyone seriously interested in the struggles and achievements of JPL as NASA's centre for Mars exploration."—Sky at Night Erik M. Conway is a historian of science and technology at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars

Exploration and Engineering

This book offers an informed and revealing account of NASA's involvement in the scientific understanding of the Earth's atmosphere. Since the nineteenth century, scientists have attempted to understand the complex processes of the Earth's atmosphere and the weather created within it. This effort has evolved with the development of new technologies -- from the first instrument-equipped weather balloons to multibillion-dollar meteorological satellite and planetary science programs. Erik M. Conway chronicles the history of atmospheric science at NASA, tracing the story from its beginnings in 1958, the International Geophysical Year, through to the present, focusing on NASA's programs and research in meteorology, stratospheric ozone depletion, and planetary climates and global warming. But the story is not only a scientific one. NASA's researchers operated within an often politically contentious environment. Although environmental issues garnered strong public and political support in the 1970s, the following decades saw increased opposition to environmentalism as a threat to free market capitalism. Atmospheric Science at NASA critically examines this politically controversial science, dissecting the often convoluted roles, motives, and relationships of the various institutional actors involved -- among them NASA, congressional appropriation committees, government weather and climate bureaus, and the military. -- Kristine C. Harper

Erik M. Conway

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