Authors

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway are the co-authors of The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014) and Merchants of Doubt (2010), which has been translated into nine languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and was made into a 2014 documentary film by Sony Pictures Classics.

Explore why top researchers have added Merchants of Doubt to their lists of books that make sense of climate change, scientific rejection, and perils to democracy on Shepherd.

Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. An internationally renowned scientist and historian, she is a leading voice on the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the history of efforts to undermine climate action.

Oreskes is the author or co-author of nine books, including Why Trust Science? (2019) and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (2021), and over 150 scholarly and popular articles. In 2015, she wrote the Introduction to the Melville House edition of the Papal Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, Laudato Si. In 2018, she became a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2019 was awarded the British Academy Medal.

She publishes a monthly column with Scientific American.

Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology and rocketeer. He works for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

He is the author or co-author of seven books and dozens of articles and essays, including A History of Near Earth Objects Research (with Donald K. Yeomans and Meg Rosenburg, 2021) and Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars (2015). In 2017 he was the winner of the American Geophysical Union’s Athelstan Spilhouse Award, became a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022. He lives in Altadena, California.