Education

Globetrotting Harvard Prof Takes Break From Jet-Setting To Gripe About Climate Change Deniers

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Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University professor who flies around the world in pollutant-spewing jumbo jet airliners to proclaim that climate change is a terrible menace, has co-written another book warning about the planet’s dire environmental situation.

The book, called “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future,” is a tale told with sound and fury by a historian living in the year 2393 who looks back on global collapse caused by global warming.

While The Daily Caller is not about to spoil it for you by giving away the role globetrotting Ivy League professors and their ilk play in Oreskes’s science fiction potboiler, The Guardian published an interview on Thursday in which she suggests that climate change “deniers” are diabolical marketing geniuses.

The professor describes “the denial industry” as a motley crew of “very cynical individuals” “with little or no regard to the consequences for others” as well as people who believe that environmentalists are “green on the outside, red on the inside — and that climate change is just an excuse to bring in socialism by another name.” Still others, she says, think climate change is a “fad” that will pass or have such a vested interest in “the fossil fuel industry” that they are willfully blind.

Whatever the case, Oreskes told The Guardian, “They’ve dismissed the science. They’ve pooh-poohed the mounting evidence that disruptive climate change is already underway. They’ve assumed scientists were over-reacting.”

“It’s the same old, same old,” the professor added, “defend the free market, deny the reality of market failure, block action that could actually address those failures.”

It’s not clear when Oreskes will take her next lengthy flight, but in her lengthy and very impressive curriculum vitae, she outlines with a scholar’s specificity her penchant to fly around the globe routinely.

Truly, Oreskes has been an airline’s very best friend for years now. With a carbon footprint most climate change deniers could only rub their hands together deviously and dream about, she has spoken in a slew of American cities and at countless prestigious campuses domestically.

Abroad, her important environmental work has taken her on emission-emitting trips far and wide.

Just since June 2008 when then-candidate Barack Obama promised that his presidency would usher in “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Oreskes has visited Norway, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand and Switzerland — just to name a few places. She also took an extensive tour of Australia in 2010 to promote a book she co-wrote, “Merchants of Doubt: How A Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”

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