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Show Notes
It’s the Not Cool series finale, and by now we’ve heard from climate scientists, meteorologists, physicists, psychologists, epidemiologists and ecologists. We’ve gotten expert opinions on everything from mitigation and adaptation to security, policy and finance. Today, we’re tackling one final question: why should we trust them? Ariel is joined by Naomi Oreskes, Harvard professor and author of seven books, including the newly released Why Trust Science? Naomi lays out her case for why we should listen to experts, how we can identify the best experts in a field, and why we should be open to the idea of more than one type of "scientific method." She also discusses industry-funded science, scientists’ misconceptions about the public, and the role of the media in proliferating bad research.
Topics discussed include:
- Why Trust Science?
- 5 tenets of reliable science
- How to decide which experts to trust
- Why non-scientists can't debate science
- Industry disinformation
- How to communicate science
- Fact-value distinction
- Why people reject science
- Shifting arguments from climate deniers
- Individual vs. structural change
- State- and city-level policy change
References discussed include:
- Why Trust Science? (Oreskes)
- Merchants of Doubt (Conway & Oreskes)
- Unprocessed Red Meat and Processed Meat Consumption: Dietary Guideline Recommendations From the Nutritional Recommendations (NutriRECS) Consortium (Annals of Internal Medicine)
- Meat Consumption and Health: Food for Thought (Annals of Internal Medicine)
- Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice. (The New York Times)
- Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties (The New York Times)
- The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (Oreskes)
- The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear (Mnookin)
- Climate Change Deniers’ New Battle Front Attacked (The Guardian)
- Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think (Oreskes & Stern)
We have people out there who are just doing everything in their power to keep the fossil fuel economy alive and to continue to make profits by selling fossil fuels, come hell or literally high water. That tells me that this is fundamentally a political problem, that we have to fight the political power of the fossil fuel industry.
~ Naomi Oreskes
