The lecture investigates the impact of Cold War geopolitics on American earth science by examining what happened to oceanographers when the Cold War ended and the geopolitical context motivating oceanographic research changed. Throughout the Cold War, oceanographers had studied the oceans primarily as a theatre of warfare. At the end of the Cold War, oceanographers shifted their focus to environmental issues, particularly climate change. They expected to find natural allies in environmentalists and the general public, but this turned out not to be the case: environmentalists were distrustful of scientists who had spent their careers studying the oceans as a theatre of warfare rather than as a venue of great natural beauty or an abode of life. In the end this distrust prevented the scientists from pursuing what they believed to be the single most effective means at their disposal to prove the reality of climate change.
Naomi Oreskes is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego and Adjunct Professor of Geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She is the author of The Rejection of Continental Drift (Oxford University Press, 1999); Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury Press, 2010, with Erik M. Conway), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography in the Cold War and Beyond, forthcoming at the University of Chicago Press, and the co-editor of Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth (Westview Press, 2001).