"Attacked by the White House, Congress & His Own University"
John Stossel tells my story
Last month I was in New York, and sat down with John Stossel who invited me to come talk with him about my experiences in the climate debate over the past 20 years or so. The result is the short video above (just 13 minutes). I am floored by how well done and high quality it is — Already more than 215,000 views. You can also find it on YouTube here.
Please check it out!
While I have you, here is a link to an op-ed I had in The Washington Post last week on RCP8.5 RIP — ungated here.
Note: The annual subscription for THB increases to $100 on June 1.
Don’t wait — Lock in your support at a lower level!
Before you go: If you think cancel campaigns are a bad idea please click that “❤️ Like” button to let everyone know. More likes means more readers of THB. Thanks!
Comments, questions welcomed!
In 2016, I went to meet Judy Curry at a Starbucks near Georgia Tech. The former Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences had just left that prestigious university under similar (yet less severe) circumstances that Roger faced at Colorado. (I had met her 7 years earlier at a conference, in August 2009, where she was on a panel, after which I introduced myself and engaged her in a 30 minute conversation about her work and views. We both know what happened a couple months later that made her start to ask some really uncomfortable questions that did not make her popular among many of your peers…).
Over coffee at that Starbucks near GA Tech in 2016, we discussed her situation and yeah, we discussed yours, too Roger. I will use the same term I did with her: f#%king shameful.
She and Peter Webster had just taken CFAN out of the GA Tech innovation lab and turned it into a business. Today, utilities, agriculture, energy and other industries pay her for her high resolution hurricane tracking and forecasting tools, climate forecasts, and other valuable abilities.
I have not asked her, but if I did ask “would you go through it all again to get where you are today?” it would not surprise me if she smiled and quietly said “absolutely”.
And so, Roger, I will say to you now what I told her then: “In the not too distant future, the scientific community will record you as a hero. You may or may not live to see it, but that is my prediction.”
That was ten years ago next month. I stand by the prediction.
She may live to see it. She is a few years older than me.
But you, my friend, will live to see it.
Some who have been studying this intently for 15+ years saw this day coming. Not in our biases out of anger for how you, Judy and others were treated, but simply in the observed data, as it increasingly diverged from the apocalyptic projections. Judy having the audacity to questions things after the fall 2009 UEA email hack I mark as the beginning of the witch hunts. The reactions to that, and your work on severe storm “trends,” and in particular storm damage normalization, were the “tell” for me.
The other “tell” was how you both conducted yourselves by comparison to the witches who were hunting you. Holdren’s and Obama’s angry uncle memos, etal.
And the farthest you will go in the wake of all that is to say with a smile that “science is self-correcting,” “it was not a fun time,” poke some sorely needed (and instructional) fun at NY Times, etal, and “if I had to go through it all again to get where I am today I would do it.”
My hat is off to you. You’re a better man than I.
From where i sit, humans contribute to climate change (not just from FF emissions) but it was never an apocalypse; what you and Judy and others have suffered is shameful yet self-correcting, but always at the expense of the courageous; and Lindzen’s quote about what future scientific historians will write is correct and that you and Judy will be prominent in that history.
Hats off. 👏
Excellent interview. As Mr. Pielke learned, when the left talks about "consensus", what they are really talking about is a process of elimination, where all dissenting voices are eliminated so that only those who adhere to their dogma remain.