A conversation with historian of science Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the book The Collapse of Western Civilization. The book is a work of science-based fiction that presents a deeply disturbing account of how the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies failed to act, and brought the collapse of Western civilization by climate change.
Naomi Oreskes is professor of history of science and affiliated professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” cited by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth (2006), led to Congressional testimony in the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. With Erik Conway, she is the author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. And theirs latest, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future.