On March 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Willamette University’s Hudson Hall, Naomi Oreskes will present the 2017 Dempsey Lecture, “Climate Change: What Now?” The Harvard professor and environmental scientist will share how industry-funded researchers can delegitimize scientific consensus — as in climate change — to mislead policy makers and the public.
“By hampering action on climate change, denialists pose an enormous threat,” says Joe Bowersox, professor of environmental and earth sciences at Willamette. “Oreskes describes how big polluters deny anthropogenic climate change by relying on the same techniques the tobacco industry used to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer.”
Sponsored by the Dempsey Foundation, the Luce Scholars Program, and Willamette University’s Department of Environmental and Earth Sciences, the lecture is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
About Oreskes
Oreskes is a professor of the History of Science and an affiliated professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. With co-author Erik M. Conway, she wrote the 2010 book “Merchants of Doubt,” which looks at how the tobacco industry attempted to cast doubt on the link between smoking and lung cancer, and the 2014 book “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future,” which looks back at the present from the year 2093.
