People in this thread may want to research her work.

Naomi Oreskes (born 1958) is an American historian of science, professor at Harvard University, and author. She's best known for studying how scientific consensus forms and how industries sometimes create doubt about science.

Some key points about her:

Expertise: History of science, especially climate science and earth sciences.

Famous work: Merchants of Doubt (2010, with Erik Conway) showed how a small group of scientists, often with ties to industry, cast doubt on evidence about tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole, and climate change.

Influence: Her 2004 paper in Science analyzed published research and showed a clear scientific consensus on human-caused climate change widely cited in climate policy debates.

Other books: Why Trust Science? (2019), The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014, with Conway).

She is a leading voice in explaining how science works, why consensus matters, and how misinformation spreads.



SHORT:

Wow, I'm fascinated because I've always felt there was a major problem with this one aspect of our marketplace: JUNK MAIL!

Every day I open my mailbox and someone has put a bunch of trash in it which I must pay trash service to take away.
Not only is it an intrusion upon me, but then the truck drives away and takes it to a landfill - which is a blight upon all of society.

And I wondered, why is this junk mail industry not taxed for their pollution and imposition upon all of us?

This activity is what's known in economics as a NEGATIVE EXTERNALITY.

And another negative externality is climate change brought upon by the fossil fuel industry. Enter Harvard's Naomi Oreskes and her book THE BIG MYTH.

Quote:

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Naomi Oreskes' The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (written with Erik M. Conway, published 2023) is a sweeping history of how U.S. corporations and allied groups promoted the ideology of "free market fundamentalism."

Here's a breakdown:



Core Argument

The book argues that what many Americans see as "natural" the belief that markets are inherently efficient, self-correcting, and morally superior to government is actually the product of a deliberate, decades-long campaign by businesses and industry associations.

This "big myth" was spread to resist regulation, taxation, labor protections, and environmental safeguards, even when markets failed to address real harms (like pollution, unsafe products, or financial crashes).



Key Themes

1. Origins of the Myth
Traces back to the early 20th century when corporations, facing regulation of railroads, child labor, and monopolies, began promoting the idea that government intervention was dangerous.

2. Propaganda & Messaging
Industries used movies, radio programs, school curricula, and public campaigns to teach Americans that capitalism and freedom were synonymous, and that regulation was un-American.

3. Business vs. Democracy
Oreskes and Conway show how big business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers actively shaped public opinion to align economic liberty with political liberty even though unregulated markets often undermined workers and communities.

4. Climate Change as a Case Study
In modern times, fossil fuel companies leveraged this myth to block carbon pricing, emissions regulation, and climate policies. The belief in unfettered markets helped delay action on climate change.



Style and Scope

It's not just a climate book. It's a political, cultural, and economic history, ranging from the Gilded Age to the present.

The style is historical storytelling, backed by archival research, similar in spirit to their earlier Merchants of Doubt, but broader.



Reception

Widely praised as a powerful work of intellectual and cultural history.

Some critics note that it's very U.S.-centric, but that's intentional, since it's tracing how American business shaped American attitudes toward markets and government.



In short:
The Big Myth is about how the ideology of the "free market" especially the idea that government regulation is inherently bad was consciously manufactured by American business interests, and how that myth continues to shape debates about issues like climate change.

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2498509-antarctica-may-have-crossed-a-tipping-point-that-leads-to-rising-seas

dateline october 2nd, most easily read with javascript mode switched off in your favorite browser.


> The satellite record for sea ice measurements only began in 1979. Using proxy data from Antarctic weather stations, Raphael and her colleagues extended the time series back to the start of the 20th century.
>
They concluded that, based on historical data alone, the chance of 2023's sea ice minimum happening was less than 0.1 per cent. "We really are looking at extreme behaviour in terms of sea ice," she said in a presentation at the Royal Society meeting.
>
The sudden decline in ice formation has the hallmarks of a climate tipping point, says Alexander Haumann at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. He told delegates that the change happened suddenly, affected the entire continent and will cause outsized impacts on the wider climate and ecology of Antarctica.
>
"What we are seeing now is that the entire Antarctic sea ice is responding as a whole," he told New Scientist at the meeting. "And the changes that we are observing are very long term and seem to be retained in the system for a long time."

# eat dessert first