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Naomi Oreskes is an Associate Professor, History Department and Program in Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. She has been at UC San Diego since 1998. Her home page at UCSD is here.

Dr. Oreskes received her Bachelor of Science in Mining Geology from The Royal School of Mines Imperial College University of London in 1981, and worked as a Research Assistant in the Geology Department and as a Teaching Assistant in the departments of Geology, Philosophy and Applied Earth Sciences at Stanford University starting in 1984. She received her PhD in the Graduate Special Program in Geological Research and History of Science at Stanford in 1990. She was the 1994 recipient of the NSF Young Investigator Award.

She has worked as a consultant for the EPA and NAS, and has also taught at Dartmouth, Harvard and NYU. She is the author or has contributed to a number of books, the most recent being Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth (with Homer Le Grand ) Westview Press, 2001) She is also a member of the History of Science Society.

Dr. Oreskes wrote an essay on science and society BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Magazine in 2004. This essay has often been used to support the view that there is an obvious scientific consensus on the subject of global warming.

There has been some controversy on the essay itself. One of the reasons is that as originally published the essay had an error with the search term "global climate change", used to derive the results, was originally written in the article as “climate change”. That error has since been corrected by Science and elsewhere. Further research into the major point of contention, the breadth of the search itself, has also been disputed. Benny Peiser has been the most vocal critic of the essay and methods. The debate on Naomi Oreskes and Benny Peiser, a faculty member at John Moores University in Liverpool, is covered in more detail at Scientific opinion on climate change.

Details and comments on this issue are onTim Lambert's blog, on Dr. Peiser's web site, and in an editorial by Dr. Oreskes herself in The Washington Post, Undeniable Global Warming.