Naomi Oreskes, noted climate change scientist and author, will explore in a talk April 17 at the University of Nevada, Reno how the same people who reject the real history of the environmentally disastrous DDT also reject the reality of man-made climate change.

In her presentation in the final Discover Science Lecture Series of the semester, "Rachel Was Not Wrong: Why the Science Surrounding DDT Matters Now More than Ever," Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, explores the claims of groups who reject man-made climate change. She shows how the claims are scientifically unfounded and why the groups are involved in rejecting both Rachel Carson's work "A Silent Spring" and the reality of man-made climate change.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Oreskes is one of many renowned scientists from around the country who the University's College of Science has brought to the Reno community in the series of lectures at the University's Davidson Mathematics and Science Center.

Besides her work at the University of California, San Diego, Oreskes is an adjunct professor of geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, an internationally renowned historian of science and an author.

For the past decade, she has primarily been interested in the problem of anthropogenic climate change. Her 2004 essay, "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" (Science 306: 1686), has been widely cited, both in the United States and abroad, including in the Royal Society's publication, "A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change," in the Academy-award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, and in Ian McEwan's novel, Solar. Her opinion pieces have appeared in The Times (London), The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Nature, Science, The New Statesman, Frankfuter Allegemeine, and elsewhere. Her 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming, co-authored with Erik M. Conway, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Her Discover Science lecture will be held from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Redfield Auditorium in the Davidson Mathematics and Science Center at the University of Nevada, Reno. Admission is free. Parking is reserved for the event on the upper level of the Brian J. Whalen Parking Complex. For more information, call (775) 784-4591 or visit the College of Science.