What Is the Social Responsibility - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

What Is the Social Responsibility
of Climate Scientists?

Naomi Oreskes

Do scientists have a responsibility to act affirmatively to ensure that our findings are
已知的, 明白了, and put to use to protect our fellow citizens, even if it means
expanding our activities beyond the field and the laboratory? I argue that scientists
have a sentinel responsibility to alert society to threats about which ordinary people
have no other way of knowing. 然而, the same expertise that makes a scientist
an appropriate sentinel in one or several domains almost necessarily makes them
inexpert in other domains. I believe that we should exercise restraint when asked to
intercede in areas beyond our proximate expertise.

M any years ago, I read psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s work on Nazi doc-

tors.1 That work has been a touchstone for me in thinking about sci-
entists’ social responsibility and how scientists see their place in the
世界. 除其他事项外, it taught me at an early age not to assume that educat-
ed people can be relied upon to do the right thing.

In hindsight, nearly all right-minded people are appalled by the ways in which
large segments of the German medical establishment not only failed to oppose
Nazi genocide, but participated with Nazi programs to exterminate Jews, 男人-
tally and physically handicapped citizens, and others thought by the Nazis to be
undesirable. Would American physicians have behaved differently? Would they
behave differently today?

Throughout the late twentieth century, more than a few American doctors
collaborated with the tobacco industry, whose products are responsible for eight
million preventable deaths each year.2 Historian Robert Proctor has called this an
“Auschwitz an annum,” which sounds inflammatory, but is quantitatively an un-
derstatement.3 We also know that even doctors who did not work for or with the
industry often blithely accepted industry safety reassurances, without making the
effort to scrutinize those claims in light of industry intentions and motivations.4
Physicians have also collaborated in dubious ways with Big Pharma: 历史学家
Nicolas Rasmussen has argued that physician-pharma collaboration has biased
clinical trials in ways that favor the drug companies at the expense of good science
and patient health and safety.5 Historians have collaborated with the tobacco in-

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工业化的, 还有, leading to distortions in our understanding of this history.6 And
冷战期间, various social scientists and artists collaborated with the CIA
in ways that sat in tension, if not overt conflict, with the goals of objectivity and in-
tellectual freedom. Some scholars who claimed to be working to defend intellectu-
al freedom were in fact engaged in projects that undermined and denied it.7

Most scientists, ethicists, and other observers would agree that scientists
should not participate in morally dubious activities, nor engage in collaborations
that undermine academic freedom and objectivity. 这些都是, as ethicists would
说, negative considerations: things we should not do. But what about positive
considerations? Do scientists have an obligation to speak out against dubious
实践, or to call public attention to threats to public health and well-being? Is
it enough to do good science and publish it in reputable peer-reviewed journals,
or do scientists also have the obligation to be witnesses, testifying to matters that
they as the relevant experts are uniquely positioned to observe, understand, 和
explain to the rest of us?

A famous example from the earth and environmental sciences involves the

ozone hole. 20世纪90年代, atmospheric chemist Sherwood Rowland shared
the Nobel Prize for his work predicting that chlorinated fluorocarbons
could destroy stratospheric ozone, endangering the existence of life on Earth. 但
Rowland was not just a great scientist; a decade before, he had become a public fig-
乌尔, not only alerting the public and political leaders to the threat but insisting that
something needed to be done to address it. As an expert who understood the cause
of ozone depletion, he considered it obvious that the solution was to control the
chemicals that had caused the problem. 不出所料, he was criticized might-
ily by the chemical industry.8 But he was also criticized by scientific colleagues
who took issue with his “activism.” Rowland knew as much about ozone as any-
一, yet some colleagues argued that he should be excluded from ozone science
assessments, because his activism undermined–or could be viewed as undermin-
ing–the objectivity of the process (even though the assessment panels sometimes
included industry scientists).9 Rowland’s response to this was to ask: “What’s the
use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, 到底, 全部
we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?”10

What is the point of researching issues that involve public health and safety if
we are afraid to warn the public, for fear that we will be viewed as biased? 如何
can politicians or other leaders act on pertinent science if scientists don’t inform
them about it? Is the obligation of scientists simply to do the best science possible
and leave it to others to explain, publicize, and act upon? Or do scientists have a
responsibility, as Rowland believed, to act affirmatively to ensure that our find-
ings are known, 明白了, and put to use to protect our fellow citizens, 即使它
means expanding our activities beyond the field and the laboratory?

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesWhat Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?

I come to this issue having faced these questions in my own work, both as a

geologist and as a historian. My original training is in Earth science. I earned
an undergraduate degree in mining geology, choosing that specialty because
I liked its real-life, dirt-under-your-fingernails, shower-after-work quality, 和,
not incidentally, I wanted to be able to get a job when I graduated. (I also wanted
to travel.) I worked for three years as an exploration geologist in the Australian
outback, where I helped to evaluate and develop a large polymetallic ore depos-
它. One of the metals in the deposit was uranium, and my company came under a
great deal of scrutiny from Australians opposed to nuclear power. There were pro-
tests at our site. Antinuclear activists camped out around the drill rigs that I was
supervising.

This was in the early 1980s and the anticipated customer for our uranium was
日本. While I wasn’t entirely convinced of the universal virtues of nuclear power,
I did think it was a reasonable option for that country, which had few other ob-
vious energy resources. No one I knew in the mining industry seriously doubted
that civilian nuclear power was a reasonable thing to pursue, and therefore that
uranium mining for it was likewise reasonable, but I encountered some very neg-
ative reactions from people I knew outside the industry. Many people questioned
the allegedly sharp distinction between civilian nuclear power and nuclear weap-
onry, and considered it not unlikely that at least some Australian uranium would
end up in bombs. More than a few folks blamed me, personally, for things they
didn’t like about nuclear power. Some people I met–at parties, at dances, on va-
cation–could not believe that I would actually work for a uranium mining compa-
这. I remember one party in Melbourne, where a nice young man asked me what I
did for a living. When I told him, his reply was: “Really? REALLY?” “Yes, really,” I
说, and there the conversation ended.

That was my first personal encounter with the issue of the social responsibility
of scientists. I sat at the lowest possible level in my company. I had no executive
权威. But many people acted as if I were personally responsible for the ills of
nuclear power and nuclear weapons (often combined, rightly or wrongly, in peo-
ple’s minds). In some ways they were right. While I was a low-level employee in a
position of no authority, if I worked in uranium mining, then I did bear some re-
sponsibility, however small, for the consequences of nuclear technologies. My job
was at the base of the nuclear fuel cycle: doing the basic science that enabled our
company to find and mine uranium ores, to be processed in nuclear fuel rods used
in nuclear reactors.

I took on board the responsibility to become educated about nuclear power.
The more I learned about the history of American nuclear power, including its
two central failed promises–of electricity “too cheap to meter” and of easy waste
disposal–the less persuaded I became that it made much sense, 特别是在
United States where we had other, better options. I didn’t think that nuclear pow-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Naomi Oreskes

er was evil–and I still don’t. I believed that the distinction between reactor-grade
and weapons-grade fuel was pertinent: the uranium ore we were mining could
not be easily converted to fuel for a bomb. But I realized that there were many sig-
nificant unanswered questions, and that people’s discomfort with nuclear tech-
nologies was not irrational. 尤其, I learned that the U.S. government had
a long history of lying and dissembling on matters nuclear, as well as overstating
the promise and downplaying the risks of civilian applications. And then, 在 1986,
the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred.

Many American scientists insisted that the Chernobyl disaster wasn’t “rele-
vant” to the safety of American and European reactors, because the accident had
happened in the Soviet Union, which was obviously corrupt, and because the re-
actor was a graphite-cooled one, a dangerous design that was not used in U.S.
commercial reactors. 同时, I had moved on to graduate school, where I was
in the process of becoming a historian and philosopher of science. Nuclear power
generation more or less faded as a pressing issue from my life, although I tracked
the progress (or lack thereof ) of the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca
Mountain, where many geologists were then employed.

I also made a surprising discovery, one that revealed to me how closely the
nuclear fuel cycle was intertwined with American science, writ large. As part
of my Ph.D. 研究, I undertook geochemical modeling of the ore deposit on
which I had worked in Australia, only to discover that there was surprisingly little
high-quality thermodynamic data available for common minerals in our ore de-
posit, including quartz (SiO2) and hematite (Fe2O3), yet astonishingly good data
for rare and obscure lanthanide and actinide series minerals. The reason? The lat-
ter had been closely studied by the U.S. Department of Energy for their pertinence
in nuclear waste disposal. 因此, I developed an early insight into how political
considerations shape what we do and don’t know about the world.

F ast-forward twenty years. I am now, in the mid-2000s, a historian working

at the University of California on the history of climate science. As I began
to write and speak about the scientific consensus on climate change, 我曾是
personally attacked. I started to receive hate mail and threatening telephone calls.
A group of people filed complaints against me, challenged my work, and tried to
get me fired from my job. A senator from Oklahoma, of whom I had at that time
never heard, accused me of being part of a “liberal conspiracy to bring down glob-
al capitalism.” This was all very odd. All I was doing–in my own mind–was ex-
plaining the state of the science. But others did not see it that way.

That was a frightening time, far more troubling than what I encountered in
澳大利亚. In Australia, I knew that my company–rightly or wrongly–would
be influenced not one iota by bedraggled, antinuclear protesters. I did not know
whether the University of California would be influenced by my attackers, 部分地

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesWhat Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?

because largely I did not know who they were and the one I did know was a U.S.
senator! 而且, 在澳大利亚, I considered it possible that the protesters were
正确的. But in California, I knew, for sure, that the attacks on science that I was un-
covering were deeply wrong. I knew I had discovered something important. 我真的-
ized that if someone was trying to shut me down, it meant I had to stand up. But I
would be lying if I didn’t admit to more than a few sleepless nights.

I share this personal story to make clear that I understand and sympathize with
colleagues who want to lay low. In Australia, it would have been easy simply to say
to myself, “that’s above my pay grade.” In California, it would have been safer to
retreat. 而且, it’s not just a matter of safety. Most scientists just want to do
科学. It is what we trained to do. It is what we are good at. On some level, 这是
who we are. But the world sometimes forces us to make choices that no one pre-
pared us for.

When I got attacked, I could have been frightened and intimidated. I was fright-
伊德. But I also realized that something significant was going on. One thing that
made a difference for me (in addition to the fact that the University of California
did stand by me) was that I soon learned that I was not alone. Several climate sci-
entists had been attacked, 也. It helped that I was a historian as well as a scientist,
because I began to think about what was happening to me not in personal terms,
but in historical ones: Why am I (和别的) being pressured when we speak up
about the facts of climate change? Where is this coming from and who are these
人们? Why would a senator from Oklahoma attack a historian of science over a
paper in a peer-reviewed journal? Most scientific papers never even get read; 为什么
had mine loosened a torrent of political abuse?

T here are different ways that we can respond to outside pressure, and in the

past few years I’ve tried to understand why scientists respond in the ways
that they do. 尤其, I’ve tried to understand why it’s been so diffi-
cult for most of my scientific colleagues in the Earth sciences to respond in effica-
cious ways.

I now think that scientists are different from other professionals in that other
professionals have clients. Physicians have patients. 律师, psychologists, 和
engineers have identifiable clients paying for their time. These professionals all
recognize some kinds of obligations, often articulated by professional codes of
执行. According to these codes, certain forms of public statements or actions
may be disallowed or, alternatively, obligatory. Often these codes of conduct are
historically linked to professional licensing arrangements. A physician who egre-
giously violates medical norms can lose her license, a lawyer can be disbarred, 一个
engineer can be decertified. But in science, although we may have identifiable pa-
trons, we don’t have clearly identifiable clients. 和, with some exceptions, 我们
don’t have formal licensing agreements. Perhaps for these reasons, we have few

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149 (4) Fall 2020Naomi Oreskes

formal codes of conduct that govern our behavior. Scientists are for the most part
left to our own devices to figure out how to behave.

Scientists can be discredited, but there’s no formal means to exclude, dishonor,
or shame a scientist who has misbehaved (or might be construed to have misbe-
haved). 在多数情况下, there’s no formal code of conduct that enables us to say that
a scientist has transgressed. 然而, and perhaps for this reason, scientists are
very sensitive to their community norms. In my experience, scientists tend to be
extremely sensitive to the opinions of their colleagues, more than to any sense of
obligation to funders or to society as a whole. Many scientists, 例如, 有
told me that they are cautious in what they say about climate change for fear of
damaging their reputations. The harm they fear is not public censure, but collegial
disapproval, and they anticipate that disapproval to arise primarily from speaking
向上, grandstanding, or overstating a threat. The societal harm that may come from
understating a threat seems (大多数情况下) to be of much less concern.11 Perhaps
a lack of formal codes of conduct makes scientists more sensitive to community
norms than other kinds of professionals, because community norms are all that
scientists have.12

These concerns came to the fore in my work with climate scientist Michael
Oppenheimer and philosopher Dale Jamieson on scientific assessments for envi-
环境政策. We found that earth and environmental scientists are highly at-
tuned and sensitive to community norms and fearful of collegial censor. 什么时候我们
asked scientists about speaking up in public, many said things along the lines of:
“I’ll lose credibility.” But with whom do they fear losing credibility? Our evidence
suggests it is not the public (whoever they conceive that to be), nor political lead-
呃, but their professional colleagues.13

As a cautionary tale, many climate scientists point to climate modeler James
汉森, who first testified in Congress in 1988. They say things such as, “Just look
at Jim Hansen.” (I can remember colleagues in the late 1980s and early 1990s crit-
icizing Hansen for being too vocal, too public. Many thought he had gone “out on
a limb.”) Hansen himself has criticized his colleagues for reticence, which he has
identified as a community norm.14 But I know of no evidence that the public at
large considers Hansen to have lost credibility when he became a public figure. 在
相反, to many in the public today, Hansen is a hero.15 He is almost certainly
the most well-known of climate scientists. And he has won innumerable prizes, 的
both the scientific and the public sort. 在 2007, 例如, he won the Dan David
Prize, a sort of Nobel Prize in areas not recognized by the Nobel itself. This hardly
suggests a loss of public credibility.

Why should scientists involved in environmental assessments criticize col-
leagues who speak out on environmental matters? 毕竟, these assessments ex-
ist to inform public policy on issues that potentially affect large numbers of peo-
普莱, or even the entire population of the planet. Surely, the very fact of participat-

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesWhat Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?

ing in such an assessment implies a sense of larger obligation? 理论上, 也许,
but we have found that scientists do not generally express a strong sense of obliga-
tion to the entire population. (And sometimes they express no sense of such obli-
gation at all.) 他们是这样, 然而, express a strong sense of obligation to each other,
and to their disciplines. I think this explains why Hansen bothers them. 气候
scientists see Hansen as someone who stepped outside the fold: he called atten-
tion to himself, sounded an alarm, and didn’t wait for the rest of his colleagues to
reach the same conclusions that he had reached.

Science is a collective enterprise in which scientists attend with great serious-
ness to the work and conclusions of their colleagues, for it is through this atten-
tion that scientific questions are mooted and resolved.16 This is what makes sci-
ence reliable, but it can also make scientists behaviorally conservative. 他们是
always metaphorically–and sometimes literally–looking over their shoulders to
see what their colleagues think.

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A nother line of argument relating to scientific responsibility emerges from

my work on the history of Cold War Earth science, and the role of U.S.
Navy funding of oceanography and marine geophysics during World War

II and the Cold War.17

During the twentieth century, there was a major change in how earth scien-
tists interacted with people outside of their discipline. Before World War II, 最多
American earth scientists were poorly funded; what little funding they had came
from state governments, private philanthropy, private industry, or from the pub-
lic through book royalties, payments for magazine and newspaper articles, 和
public lectures. Scientists who wrote popular books or gave public lectures had to
find ways to communicate to nonspecialists. They had to be concerned with pub-
lic interests and opinions.

During the war, 然而, this changed, and in the late 1940s and 1950s, the rise
of scientific research support through specialized federal government agencies
such as the National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects
机构 (DARPA), and the Office of Naval Research made scientists less depen-
dent on the general public and more dependent on governmental patrons. 这
shifted their sense of where their obligations lay. 而且, these postwar agen-
cies often had program directors who were themselves scientists. 日益,
scientists obtained funding from programs that were designed by scientists, 和
in quite a few cases, run in part by scientists. Many American scientific communi-
ties became what historian Paul Edwards has called “closed worlds,” in which the
demands of military secrecy limited their interactions with people outside those
worlds, and even with other scientists outside their fields of specialization.18

As the Cold War progressed, scientists increasingly worked in these closed
worlds. They had far less interaction with general publics (and even with scien-

149 (4) Fall 2020Naomi Oreskes

tists in other fields) than they did before World War II. The Cold War also created
a context in which speaking up about certain kinds of threats could be perceived as
disloyal. Many scientists in the Cold War came to feel that if they spoke up against
American weapons programs, 例如, that would be perceived as being dis-
loyal to America, which famously happened to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.19
These conditions have left a lasting legacy. One example is documented in my
forthcoming book Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do
and Don’t Know about the Ocean. It involves a major controversy that erupted in the
1990s, when physical oceanographers proposed a project to demonstrate global
warming by measuring the warming of the oceans. These oceanographers had a
long history of collaboration with the U.S. 海军, but no history of engagement
with environmental groups and scant engagement even with biologists. 也许
for this reason, they failed to consider the effects that their project might have on
marine life. This led cetacean biologists–along with many others–to oppose the
项目. The oceanographers also failed to realize that, because it could adversely
affect marine life, their proposed project might violate the law (specifically the
Marine Mammal Protection Act). A consortium of environmental, 社区,
and animal protection groups filed a lawsuit to stop the project. And they suc-
割让. Although the project might well have been valuable scientifically, 它是
stopped.

The physical and intellectual isolation of Cold War oceanographers affected
their sense of the scope and character of their responsibilities, and to whom they
thought they had obligations. Physical oceanographers working with the U.S.
Navy understood that they needed Navy approval–for funding, for the use of in-
strumentation, for access to infrastructure–but they failed to consider that they
also needed the approval of scientists in other fields, of environmentalists, 和的
the public. They even failed to consider that they needed to obey the law! 什么时候
they took on the task of measuring the temperature of the ocean, they did so in
the name of “society,” who, they insisted, needed a definitive answer to the ques-
tion of whether the planet was warming up. But their approach failed because it
was insensitive to what “society” as a whole really wanted. Some parts of society
didn’t want an answer to the question, and many of those who did didn’t want it
in the form that scientists were offering.

T he available evidence suggests that the group to whom natural scientists

feel responsible–and whose censure they fear if things go wrong–is not
社会, but fellow scientists, 和, 更具体地说, scientists in their own
discipline. This accounts for the reticence about which James Hansen has com-
plained and that my colleagues and I found in our own research: scientists are
afraid to speak out on policy-sensitive issues lest their colleagues criticize them
为了它. But it also puts them in an awkward position: the public or policy-makers

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesWhat Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?

may want scientists to tell them clearly if something dreadful is about to happen,
but scientists are often afraid to do so lest their colleagues disapprove.

What many scientists fail to appreciate, 然而, is that our views of the ap-
propriate role of science and scientists are historically contingent. During the
冷战, many distinguished physicists, including Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, 铝-
bert Einstein, and Philip Morrison, spoke strongly about the risks of nuclear pro-
liferation, and many argued the need for arms control. These men were highly ar-
ticulate spokespeople who helped to shape the public conversation over nuclear
武器. They were able to do so, 部分地, because their expertise qua physicists
gave them a particularly acute appreciation of what an uncontrolled arms race
would lead to.

现在, a new set of issues have come to the fore, but the basic situation–of an
existential threat that scientists are in a position to understand and explain–is
comparable. Physicists served as sentinels in the Cold War; climate scientists are
serving as sentinels now. And that, 在我看来, is as it should be, because scien-
tists do have a general obligation to the society they serve, particularly when our
research is taxpayer funded. 在美国, that is most basic research, 和
a good deal of applied research, 也. It includes scientists working in national lab-
oratories and federal agencies, and most scientists working in academia. 在那里面
感觉, we do have clients, and they are the American people. To the extent that we
justify our work by its value to humanity, then our clients are all humanity.

This obligation, in my view, includes education and communication, 和
which most scientists are reasonably comfortable if they get the right institution-
al support. But there’s a more specific obligation. It is what I have called the senti-
nel obligation.20 It is, 有效, a duty to warn.

Many areas of scientific research are of interest and significance primarily, 或者
even exclusively, to other scientists. But not all. There are certain kinds of prob-
lems in the world that matter profoundly beyond the halls of science, but we
would not know about were it not for scientific expertise. Think again about Sher-
wood Rowland and the ozone hole. If he and his fellow atmospheric chemists had
not spoken up to alert us to the possibility that chlorinated fluorocarbons could
deplete stratospheric ozone, we would not have known that was the case, 和我们
would not have had the Montreal Protocol.

Now imagine the following scenario. Fast-forward fifty years. Physicians have
noted that the rate of cataracts and skin cancer is skyrocketing. Horticulturalists
have noticed that certain plants are exhibiting strange pathologies. Farmers have
noted increased livestock mortality and decreased crop yields. These alarming
phenomena are noticed by different experts and lay people, and at first no one re-
alizes that they are part of a single story.

At some point, 然而, someone suggests that they might be related, or at
least the skin cancers and cataracts, since these are known to be caused by exces-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Naomi Oreskes

sive exposure to ultraviolet radiation. A commission is empaneled, perhaps at the
美国国家科学院. The commissioners dig through the scientific lit-
erature and they find that, 在 1979, Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina, and Paul
Crutzen predicted stratospheric ozone depletion, which can cause exactly the ef-
fects now being observed. 然而, the scientists had only ever published their
work in scientific journals, so the public and political leaders never learned of
it and therefore nothing was done. 现在, fifty years later, it is too late to fix. 这
world must scramble to build a new form of wholly indoor life, or invent UV pro-
tective clothing or some other means to live on a now very dangerous planet.

Fortunately for us, Rowland and his colleagues did speak out. They acted as
sentinels–alerting us to an imminent danger–and our political leaders acted suc-
cessfully to avert the threat and protect life on Earth. Disruptive climate change
is bigger and more difficult to solve than the ozone hole, but the ozone example
demonstrates the essential role that scientists play as sentinels. Scientists need to
be sentinels on emerging problems about which ordinary people have no other
way of knowing. They must do this; there is no one else who can.

H ow far should scientists go in accepting a public role? Once one adopts

a sentinel role, one will likely soon face the question: “So what do we
do about it?” Then things get more complicated. 有一个巨大的
temptation to answer that question, because there you are. You are being asked
and of course you have an opinion. If you’re a scientist, you may think that you are
a good deal smarter and better informed than most citizens. And perhaps you are.
But if you are a natural scientist, then the very expertise that enabled you to be
a sentinel also makes you unlikely to be an expert about the solutions, which often
are largely legal, 技术性的, 经济的, 监管, or otherwise social. Solving
the problems that natural scientists identify usually means passing the baton to
other experts. 因此, my colleagues and I have introduced the concept of proximate
expertise. As professionals, we have expertise that makes us the appropriate indi-
viduals to speak up on particular challenges, 问题, and threats, but that very
expertise means that we will typically not be experts on other matters. On those
other matters, we should in most cases exercise restraint.

例如, as a geologist/geochemist, I have some degree of expertise to talk
about carbon sequestration, because I know quite a bit about how carbon diox-
ide reacts with water and rocks in the subsurface. I also know something about
the problem of overpressuring of the subsurface. 实际上, I know more about these
matters than many climate modelers. Expressing a view on carbon sequestration
可以, 所以, be viewed as within my range of proximate expertise. As a per-
son with broad knowledge of the Earth sciences, I might have a well-informed ex-
pert opinion on solar radiation management, 还有. 然而, I am not an expert
about many other possible questions related to the solutions to climate change.

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesWhat Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?

As a historian, I may have insights into how certain proposed solutions are likely
to work or fail, or what it might take to generate broad support for them. But I am
certainly not an expert, 例如, on carbon pricing systems. 为此, I need to
turn to other people.

An obvious cautionary example of scientists disrespecting the boundaries
of expertise appears in my work with historian Erik M. 康威. In Merchants of
Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to
Global Warming, we showed how a group of prominent physicists rejected the con-
clusions of their colleagues in public health and oncology to make common cause
with the tobacco industry and cast doubt on the science that demonstrated the
harms of tobacco use. From there, they went on to cast doubt on the science that
demonstrated a set of other environmental and public health threats: acid rain,
the ozone hole, and global warming. In our book, we argue that the range of sci-
ences across which they spread doubt should have been a red flag to any onlooker:
no one could be a credible expert on so many different topics. The fact that they
cast doubt on science in scientific findings in radically diverse domains was a “tell”
that they were motivated by something other than their own scientific knowledge
and expertise.

E xpertise is by definition specific, and so the obligation to speak up in our

areas of expertise implies a reciprocal obligation to respect the expertise of
其他的. Put another way: we have obligations both to speak and to listen.
We need to speak up, to act as sentinels, and to be witnessing professionals in our
domain of expertise, but we also need to act with respect for colleagues who are
the appropriate witnessing professionals in other domains.

This is not to say that as scientists, we give up our rights as citizens when we
earn our Ph.D.s. 作为公民, we will all have views on many matters and we are al-
ways within our rights to comment, talk, discuss, and vote according to our views.
而且, sometimes it will be appropriate for us to stand up and be counted as
both citizen and scientists, for example on matters that involve defending science,
or the environment, or public health generally.

Expertise, 而且, is not an either/or proposition; there are areas about
which I know a great deal, areas about which I know more than the average person
but less than the experts, and areas about which I know very little. It can be tempt-
ing to express opinions, particularly in that middle domain, even when it would
be better to refer people to others with greater expertise. It requires humility and
mindfulness to exercise appropriate restraint, particularly when others press you
for an answer.

What I am proposing is admittedly not always easy. I have had the experience
of trying to refer journalists to more appropriate experts, only to have them insist
that I was the “name” in their Rolodex, that they did not have time to make an-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Naomi Oreskes

other phone call before their 5 下午. deadline, or even that they needed a quotation
from someone in the “Ivy League.” (One reporter once told me that if he quoted
someone at Harvard who turned out to be wrong, his editor would be unvexed,
but if he quoted someone from the University of Oklahoma who turned out to
be wrong, then he’d face a pile of questions about why he had quoted that per-
son.) This is laziness, against which we should push back. Even when journalists
resist, I often say, “Look, I’m not an expert on that issue, but my colleague, Irene
Doe, 是. Please call her. Here is her number.” Besides being the right thing to do, 它
also reminds my interlocutors that expertise is a complex thing. If we really want
to understand and solve any problem, particularly one as multifaceted as climate
改变, we must employ all the expertise that we have.

关于作者

Naomi Oreskes, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2017, is the Henry
Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and Affiliat-
ed Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She is the author, with Erik M. 骗局-
方式, of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from
Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010) and The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View
from the Future (2014); as well as Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for
Environmental Policy (with Michael Oppenheimer and Dale Jamieson, 2019) and Why
Trust Science? (2019). Her next book, Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped
What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean, will be published in late 2020.

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尾注

1 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (纽约:

基础书籍, 1986).

2 World Health Organization, “Tobacco,“ 可能 27, 2020, https://www.who.int/news

-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco.

3 Robert Proctor, Golden Holocaust: The Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Aboli-

的 (天使们: The University of California Press, 2012).

4 Allan Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, 落下, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that De-

fined America (纽约: 基础书籍, 2007); and Proctor, Golden Holocaust.

5 Nicolas Rasmussen, “The Drug Industry and Clinical Research in Interwar America:
Three Types of Physician Collaborator,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79 (1) (2005):
50–80.

6 Nicolas Rasmussen and Robert Proctor, “From Maverick to Mole: John C. Burnham, 到-
bacco Consultant,” Isis 110 (4) (2019): 779–783. See also Jon Wiener, “Big Tobacco and

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesWhat Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?

the Historians,” The Nation, 二月 25, 2010, https://www.thenation.com/article/
big-tobacco-and-historians/.

7 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

(伦敦: The New Press, 2000).

8 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. 康威, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured
the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (纽约: 布卢姆斯伯里, 2010);
and Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, 等人。, Discerning Experts: 这
Practices of Scientific Assessment for Public Policy (芝加哥: The University of Chicago Press,
2019). On the science of ozone depletion, see also Erik M. 康威, Atmopheric Science at
NASA (巴尔的摩: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

9 Oppenheimer et al., Discerning Experts.
10 Nathan J. 罗宾逊, “If Property Rights Were Real, Climate-Destroying Companies Would
Be Sued out of Existence,” Current Affairs, 二月 4, 2019, https://www.currentaffairs
.org/2019/02/if-property-rights-were-real-climate-destroying-companies-would-be
-sued-out-of-existence.

11 Elisabeth A. Lloyd and Naomi Oreskes, “Climate Change Attribution: When Is It Ap-
propriate to Accept New Methods?” Earth’s Future 6 (3) (2018): 311–325; and Michael E.
Mann, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, and Naomi Oreskes, “Assessing Climate Change Impacts
on Extreme Weather Events: An Alternative (Bayesian) Approach,” Climatic Change 144
(2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2048-3.

12 It seems plausible that scientists would worry that collegial disapproval could lead to loss
of funding, or to papers not making it through peer review, but the scientists we inter-
viewed did not discuss this. Their concern seemed to be a more general one about harm-
ing their reputations, in an abstract way, rather than specific concrete consequences.

13 Oppenheimer et al., Discerning Experts.
14 James E. 汉森, “Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise,” Environmental Research Letters
2 (2007). See also Keynyn Brysse, Naomi Oreskes, Jessica O’Reilly, and Michael Op-
penheimer, “Climate Change Prediction: Erring on the Side of Least Drama?” Global
Environmental Change 23 (1) (2013): 327–333, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/
article/pii/S0959378012001215.

15 The popular press often refers to him as a hero. 看, 例如, Ben Block, “A Look Back
at James Hansen’s Seminal Testimony on Climate,” part one, 格里斯特, 六月 16, 2008, https://
grist.org/article/a-climate-hero-the-early-years/. I have referred to him as a tragic hero;
see Oliver Milman, “Ex-NASA Scientist: 30 Years On, World Is Failing ‘Miserably’ to
Address Climate Change,“ 守护者, 六月 19, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/
environment/2018/jun/19/james-hansen-nasa-scientist-climate-change-warning.
16 Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? (普林斯顿大学, 新泽西州: 普林斯顿大学出版社, 2019).
17 Naomi Oreskes, Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know

about the Ocean (芝加哥: The University of Chicago Press, 即将推出 2020).

18 Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America

(剑桥, 大量的。: 麻省理工学院出版社, 1997).

19 Jessica Wang, American Science in a State of Anxiety (教堂山: University of North Caroli-

na Press, 1999).

20 Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientist as Sentinel,” Limn 3 (2013): 69–71.

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149 (4) Fall 2020Naomi Oreskes
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