Pielke on the Fringe

My wide-ranging discussion last week with Bryce Nickels

This month marks five years since THB started. Today, to help newer subscribers get to know me a bit better, I share the transcript of a lengthy podcast I did last week with Prof. Bryce Nickels of Rutgers University. Prof. Nickels hosts a podcast-focused Substack called Science from the Fringe which I highly recommend. In this episode, I go into some considerable detail about my reasons for leaving the University of Colorado Boulder, my recent Congressional testimony on weather modification, and larger issues of politics and science. Thanks Bryce!

I’ve opened up the comments on this one to everyone! Enjoy!

Note: I’ve lightly edited the transcript for readability. If you’d prefer to watch the video or download the podcast, please head over to Science from the Fringe — and then feel free to come back here and let me know what you think or to ask any questions.

Bryce Nickels — Welcome, everyone, to Science from the Fringe. My name is Bryce Nickels. I’m a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, and I’m honored to be joined today by Roger Pielke, Jr. Roger is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on science and technology policy, the politicization of science and energy and climate.

He’s also a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, a distinguished fellow at the Institute of Energy Economics in Japan, a research associate of Risk Frontiers in Sydney, Australia, and an honorary professor of the University College London. So Roger, thank you very much for joining me today and getting up early.

I know you’re in Boulder right now. It’s very early there.

Roger Pielke Jr. — Thanks for having me. It’s great. And thanks for that very generous introduction.

Bryce Nickels — Well, you’ve got a lot of titles. I’m glad that I was able to get through it and I won’t have to go back and edit it. So I wanted to talk to you today about several things. First, we’re going to cover academic cancel culture and how that affected you.

Then we’re going to talk about weather modification and scientists playing God and sort of link it to a subject that I’m interested in, which is You know, scientists playing God with viruses versus with the weather, as you’re focused on. But before we get into that, I wanted to ask you about, just mention that you have a very successful substack and it’s called the Honest Broker. And you began this about five years ago, in fact, in October of 2020, to highlight data analysis and commentary that’s missing from public discussions of science, policy and politics.

Can you tell us a little bit about why you started your subsec and where the name comes from?

Roger Pielke Jr. — Yeah, thanks. It’s kind of a long story. In my research, my background’s in mathematics and public policy with a focus on science and technology policy, but I really focus on just one thing. I focus on contested science on issues that are politically contentious. So I spend a lot of time in energy and climate.

As you know, I’ve dabbled in the virus, COVID virus origins, discussions and debate, transgender athletes eligibility in elite competition. And my career started, I was on my way to get a PhD in the physical sciences, had a chance to spend some time working for the House Science Committee in Washington, D.C.

And I got to see things from that perspective. And I realized, wow, this intersection of policy and science for me was just a lot more compelling and interesting than just science. doing science. And so I embarked on a career in science technology policy. Somewhere along the way, I decided, you know, we social scientists, we spent a lot of time criticizing scientists for not engaging with the public or not engaging with the social science literature. And we publish our findings in esoteric, jargon-filled social science journals. So I decided to write a book. It was really kind of a field guide for experts trying to navigate policy and politics.

And I titled that The Honest Broker, which is one of a number of categories I developed in that book for the relationship of scientists and policymakers. Basically said that our job, the most overlooked role, there’s plenty of advocates out there. But the most overlooked role are people who can provide options to decision makers.

Everyone knows what an honest broker is. You go to a travel website to see where to fly. You’re not looking for advertisements. You’re not looking for airlines who pay to have their their ranking higher in the list. You just want to know what are my options? When can I leave? How much does it cost? What are the stops in between? That’s an honest broker. So I named my book that.

And for my Substack, it’s kind of an inside joke because honest brokering, I say, can’t be done by an individual. It’s a group activity. Yeah, we need to do it together. So we’ll get into it. But flash forward, when I decided I was going to leave academia, one of the things you have to figure out is how you’re going to pay the mortgage and things like that. So I was on sabbatical in Oslo.

And as most people know, we academics get half a salary when we’re on sabbatical.And I didn’t take any other funding that year. And my wife and I lived just great on half a salary. So I said for my Substack, if I can get to half my salary, then I’m out of here. I’m moving on. And so really, it was an intentional attempt to try to do something different as a scholar.

Being an academic, which we can talk about, has its very strong positives and, in my view, some very strong negatives. And The Honest Broker has been great. It’s allowed me a lot of freedom to write what I want to write. It has, surprisingly, an enormous reach. And it also, I think, has facilitated my joining the American Enterprise Institute, which is an absolutely fantastic institution for academic freedom, and its connections and reach are unmatched.

Bryce Nickels — Right, and I obviously recommend people subscribe to your Substack. I really enjoy your writing, actually. Well, at least the stuff that I get for free, because I’m not a paid subscriber now,

Roger Pielke — Go on and subscribe! Run, don’t walk. Run, don’t walk.

Bryce Nichols — So you mentioned that your time in the academic space before you and this is recent that you fully left and became an emeritus professor. Can can you walk us through what exactly happened? And this is when I referred to academic cancel culture. You were, I would say, a victim of this. Can you kind of give us a bit of an overview of what happened to you and how you got to where you are now?

Roger Pielke Jr. — Yeah. And let me start. Let me just preface everything by saying I don’t use the term cancel culture and I don’t certainly don’t see myself as a victim. I have a greater platform today than than probably I’ve ever had in my career, my Substack has subscribers in 171 countries. I’m out there and so I don’t view it that way, i view it that this is something that has happened to academia and not to me.

But it’s a long story. I grew up on a college campus.

My dad was a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He’d take me to work on days I didn’t have school when I was just a little kid. And, you know, he’d give me a dollar to play video games and say, you know, see at five. And I wandered around the campus.

I went to Alderman Library. I looked at the murals in Clark Hall. And, you know, my favorite department was always astronomy walking around. And I thought, oh, I’m going to be a scientist one day. And so I love universities. I think that their mission is essential. It’s important. I’ve always enjoyed teaching.

So after I got my PhD, I got a postdoc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which hired me as a scientist. And NCAR, for people who don’t know, it’s like a university without students. For an early career scholar, it’s a great place because you can just research, crank out publications, compile a really impressive resume.

I was there for eight years, and then the University of Colorado called and said, “Hey, we want you to come to the University of Colorado and start up a science and technology policy center?” And for me, it was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass. So in 2001, I joined the University of Colorado.

I was given two tasks.

One was to start this new center, and one was to develop the graduate program in environmental studies, which I focused on environmental policy. Everything went great, really, until blogging started and the climate wars developed.

And we could get into this, but very quickly in the climate space, a small group of very visible climate scientists decided they needed to police the debate. And it was really about politics, because there was a fear that if notions of uncertainty or a lack of consensus slipped into public discourse, it would slow down the chances of climate policy being enacted.

And for people who may be aware of the climate issues, at the center of this was the hockey stick of Michael Mann, My work is on science and policy, and I don’t see uncertainty as an obstacle to action. In fact, I think when scientists admit uncertainties, it reinforces public faith and policymaker belief.

But, you know, long story short, climate science and climate politics became very partisan.

In my career, I first got invited to testify before the U.S. Congress, I think in 2001. And for about a decade, I was only invited by Democrats. And then things shifted. I started to get invited by Republicans.

And what I’ve always find curious is if you look at my testimony, not much has changed over that time. I think that the parties have kind of changed where they stand on the issue.

Anyway, flash forward. In 2014, 2013, I testified before Congress about extreme weather. There was a report that was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Extreme Weather Events [SREX 2012]. I was asked to come testify and basically summarize in plain English for the elected representatives, what did this report say?

And even at that time, the hype over extreme weather had gotten far out in front of where the IPCC was. And so I gave my little five-minute opening statement. And I don’t know how this happened or why this happened, but it went viral. Within two weeks, it got 400,000 hits on YouTube. and that got a lot of attention.

A few months later, President Barack Obama’s science advisor — and I voted for Barack Obama two times, and I’d probably vote for him again if he was still able to run — his science advisor, John Holdren, testified before the same committee.

And as we say here in Colorado, he got a little forward on his skis in what he was saying about extreme weather events, and he got called out by one of the members. who unfortunately referenced my testimony in the IPCC. So John Holdren went back to the White House and he wrote a memo about me and posted it on the White House website.

It was the sort of thing like your crazy uncle might write and put on Facebook. It didn’t make a lot of sense. It didn’t really address any of the points I made which certainly didn’t contradict the IPCC. But that put a target on my back.

It wasn’t much later, probably about 10 months later, my university got a letter from Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-NM), who recently passed away, who asked the university to investigate me for my testimony. He said, we have reason to believe that Professor Pielke — and they sent letters to a few other scholars — may be receiving money under the table from companies such as ExxonMobil in exchange for his testimony.

I was in the New York Times, I was in the local paper, professor investigated for financial irregularities. The university went through the investigation.

Of course I wasn’t taking any money from Exxon or anybody else.

Well, my Ferrari’s plates did say XON but that was that was separate.

And, you know, it’s a very common tactic. It still exists today in the climate debate. I’m sure you’ve seen it, that when people disagree on normal, basic scientific questions, like how many hurricanes have there been, the immediate go-to response is, oh, you must be funded by the fossil fuel industry or you must be a Republican.

Not recognizing that 85% of our economy is powered by fossil fuels, right? And it turns out the Republicans are in charge of all three branches of government right now.

So if those things are illegitimate, that leaves a very little small sandbox to have policy discussions.

Anyway, at the moment that that investigation was announced, things changed for me dramatically on campus. I thought it would have been a great opportunity for the university president to say — “We value academic freedom Professor Pielke, one of our most accomplished scholars, we stand behind his research.”

Well, no. The only people I heard from on campus during the entire time, really up to today about that investigation was from university lawyers who had search keys to search through my email and ask for financial documents and things like that.

It started this, I guess, slow motion exit from the university.

The first thing that happened was I was told that the center that I had been recruited to found and direct, the funding couldn’t be guaranteed. Nobody said, “Oh, it’s because of the investigation” — but it’s the world leading center on science technology policy.

And so, you know, I took the hint and, you know, there’s a long story. A lot of things happen, but, you know, I decided, I’m going to take a break from climate stuff, work on another one of my passions.

So I talked to the athletic director at Colorado Department of Athletics and said, I wanted to start up an academic unit inside the athletic department. And we’re going to focus on sports governance and in particular issues where science intersects with sport governance. And that included things like doping, gender eligibility in sport, the role universities have in college athletics, which by the way has gone nuts.

That went well. That went really well. We started a great center. And then something similar happened. And I think this was because we started focusing a lot on the compensation of college athletes, which around 2017, was not yet an accepted reality by university administrators.

It’s amazing to see where that’s gone. Rutgers and Colorado have a lot in common there. So the university said, we’re going to stop supporting this effort. And so you’re gonna go back to the Environmental Studies program.

While I had been developing the Sports Governance Center, The university literally lost its mind on climate politics.

The faculty governance body had issued something like five or seven statements about how we should orient all teaching in all departments on climate advocacy. And as I was someone who, I’m a big supporter of climate policy, but the policies I support are somewhat different than what the environmental community supports.

The decision to put me in the environmental studies program set up a situation where a few faculty members just didn’t want me around.

So things moved from there. I didn’t get an office. When I asked for an office, they put me in literally a storage closet. No computer, no phone. And the pandemic happened.

The I didn’t need an office. Yeah, I went with it. Eventually, a new dean came and said, well, this is not tenable. We’re going to take PIelke out of the environmental studies program. But they didn’t put me anywhere. They gave me an office. It was a good-sized office in the stadium. I call it an island of misfit toys.

But I had no classes, no department, no way to have grad students, no way to have research funding, no service. I have joked often about it like George Costanza working for the Yankees. Maybe I just show up and collect a paycheck. But I thought, all right, it’s obvious they don’t want me here.

Nobody’s gonna do anything about it. I talked to all sorts of administrators, or at least I complained to them about my situation. Nobody was willing to do anything.

And that’s when I had one last sabbatical, which was a great time spent at the University of Oslo, which reminded me of what it’s like to be in a collegial environment with colleagues who respect what you do and administrators who support you.

And at that point, I decided, all right, there’s a Substack thing. Seems to be taken off. Maybe I should really get on board.

I was having kids during the dot-com era, so I missed all that. So I thought, all right, if I’m going to do the Substack thing, this is the time. And eventually I decided, I think it was, when you have a sabbatical, you have to return for a year to campus. That’s the contractual agreement.

And after that, I said, all right, I’m going to leave. I was aiming to be the youngest emeritus professor in the U.S., and since then I realized I missed it by a large mark. I left the university before I was offered a position at AEI.

I was fully thinking I’m going to be an independent scholar and do my own thing. I had an AEI affiliation as a nonresident fellow, but it wasn’t a job.

AEI has been fantastic. Robert Doar, the president of AEI, has been probably the most supportive administrator I’ve ever worked for over generations of university administrators.

He repeatedly tells me, “You do what you do. Whatever it is you do, you do it. And we respect that.”

And he says that to all the AEI scholars, and it’s a diverse community. intellectually healthy environment, which is obviously very close to policy. So when people say, well, you were canceled at the university, I guess in some respects, I was certainly pushed out. But if I had to go through the last decade again to get to where I am today, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I have no regrets, none whatsoever. I hold my head up high. about my time at the university. I think I made it a better place.

And yeah, I still hear from former students. I have grad students who are in important positions. So it’s all good. I do think the story, my story is a cautionary tale to university administrators about the sort of things that can happen when you don’t support academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and your faculty.

I mean, sometimes I think administrators forget they work for us, us faculty members. We don’t work for them. You know, the faculty are the heart and soul of the university. And if you don’t support them, you’re going to find yourself in some trouble. And not just the sort of trouble that, you know, we’ve seen in the Trump administration, which we can talk about, which is pretty horrible in itself. \

So, that’s my story. And, you know, I figure I published something a while ago that said that the median age of a tenured professor is 55. I’m 56. So I figure, you know, I’m mid-career still. I’ve got a lot of gas in the tank.

Bryce Nickels — Yeah, thanks for going through that. I find that really an interesting story in part because, well, actually, first of all, you neglected to say when you had the office in the stadium, weren’t they redoing the scoreboard so you didn’t get access to the stadium?

Roger Pielke Jr.

I moved into the stadium office, and I thought for a moment, okay, things are looking up. I got an office. I’m going to find a new department. I literally contacted, and I do science and policy, so I could be in a lot of different places, a lot of institutes on campus.

I literally contacted a dozen places on campus. And a lot of places were like, yeah, we’ll take you, but does this mean we’re going to have to sacrifice a future faculty line if we bring you in? It was that sort of thing. I mean, no one was really concerned about the big P politics.

It was more campus politics and budgeting. And without administrators willing to put me someplace, no unit wanted to risk losing a future faculty line to take in a seior professor.

I was in my stadium office for three months in the center of campus. And then I got a notification three days before Christmas, that said, starting tomorrow, you won’t have access to your office. We’re putting a new, new video scoreboard in above it. There won’t be any electricity, no heat — you can get back in sometime next year.

The university didn’t give me any alternative office arrangements. And that was one of the last straws when I thought, OK, well, message received.

But it was a nice office, which I couldn’t access. I had a room for my books. I had a window, which I hadn’t had for years, for a decade.

Bryce Nickels — When you were in the closet, I saw... You know what I mean? When you were in the closet office, the office that was the closet, there was... You published a photo where they started stacking up empty file cabinets in your office that they had removed from the climate center or whatever because they’re... Basically, your story is a cautionary tale of... Or, like, it shows how, because you had tenure, how the universities sort of make it uncomfortable for you to be there when they don’t want you there.

Roger Pielke Jr. — Yeah, there was one... I don’t know what the right word is, campaigning department chair, whose mission apparently was to get me out of the university. And yes, they moved in boxes and empty file cabinets into my little closet office, making it unusable. I didn’t touch them because I didn’t want them to accuse me of anything.

I asked many times for those to be removed. And no, of course not, they were never removed until I left for the stadium office.

Later, that same department chair opened a farcical investigation of me. The accusation was that I had received an NSF grant outside the university’s grant office. I mean, it’s already difficult enough to go through the grant office.

I don’t know how any faculty member would get one outside the grant office. It was obviously false, but it consumed a year. Administrators took it seriously. It was... I mean, it was that sort of constant low-level, I would call it harassment, that was kind of the background of a couple years there at the end.

Bryce Nickels — Would you ever return to academia if you were offered a position? Would you consider that?

Roger Pielke Jr. — You know, that’s a good question. I have to say that with the Trump administration’s attacks on universities and the idea that universities are full of lefties, which has some degree of truth to it, of course —

Bryce Nickels

Studies have shown that.

Roger Pielke Jr.

— I did speak to a— I’ve published a bunch of that stuff, and it is— I’m pretty much a political centrist. I was registered as an independent when I turned 18 and always been independent. People on the right love my climate change work, and people on the left love my transgender athlete stuff. So pick what you want.

I’m happy to talk about my politics to anybody, but I think by virtue of me being at AEI and being fairly visible, I’ve been contacted by more universities in 2025 about possible faculty positions than, over the last 10 years.

The short answer is, at present, no.

I can’t even imagine going back to a university. You know, maybe there are some universities where things are happening. Johns Hopkins is one of them, Vanderbilt’s another, where university leaders recognize that universities have kind of lost their way in some respects, and I’d be happy to talk about that. But at present, I can’t imagine.

The only thing that I miss being at a university that I have now is working with students closely.

At AEI, I taught an honors class this past summer, which is fantastic. Great students. They get the pick of the litter. They get fantastic students. They come to class prepared, look me in the eye, shake my hand. Connect with me on LinkedIn after the first class. Do all the readings.

So I do miss that. But at this point, I don’t need research funding. And honestly, I’m senior enough that I don’t need tenure. So my choices wouldn’t be, I think, for everyone who’s thinking about academia.

I do want academia to work. I want it to be improved.

AEI has an effort on reforming U.S. universities that I’m affiliated with. And in my position, I get to meet with a lot of university leaders. So I intend to be fully engaged with the university ecosystem, but returning to a faculty position doesn’t look in the cards right now.

And I’ve often said it, I can’t think of a worse job on the planet than being a university administrator. So I don’t think that’s for me either . . .

Bryce Nickels — Well, look, I am trying to arrange a new professorship. It’s called the ExxonMobil Professor of Climate at Rutgers. And so maybe we could consider you for that — that’s a joke. Just kidding. But what I was going to point out is I find your story quite fascinating. You started like two centers, right? Two successful centers.

Like you were doing way more than the average faculty member. In fact, like it seems like you were innovating and Doing all these things that I thought that university professors are supposed to do. And that kind of made you in some ways like a bit of a pariah. It’s almost like they want mediocrity.

And so they push out somebody that’s innovative and think and actually ahead of their time in a way. You know, not to I’m not trying to blow smoke here. It just seems like you started two successful things and that the sports governance program like that’s really interesting.

I find I actually thought about doing some sort of like sports science thing back when I was involved with my kids, you know, athletics. I really thought there were some, linking, you know, taking scientific approaches and applying them to athletics would be something a university would be interested in. You, in fact, you know, you did something and you should be sort of you should have been celebrated for it. But instead, they gave you a closet, stacked some file cabinets in and then sort of slowly moved you out. So I commend you on sort of sticking with it. And I mean, congratulations on being in a place right now where you’re happier.

And, you know, probably it’s a blessing. Sounds like that it really, in a way, was a blessing that that happened to you, because it seems like you found your lane and the place that’s most appropriate for you.

Roger Pielke Jr. — Yeah, I mean, I think that’s right. I do think, I mean, I do think there is, and I’m interested in your views on this too, at some, many, most universities, especially, you know, what we call R1 or the leading research universities, there is this rush to mediocrity.

The idea that you don’t want to be the university that’s out in front. You don’t want to be seen to be the one that’s out in front. You want to copy something that’s been done elsewhere. I mean, our Sports Governance Center, I am tremendously proud of that. I think to this day, that is the only institutionalized effort at any division one sports university where a tenured professor was rostered in an athletic department.

I taught classes that were rostered from the athletic department and the classes that I taught were not underwater basket weaving for athletes trying to stay eligible, but they were rigorous classes that were enormously popular across campus.

I had visitors from around the world come to those classes. I had people calling me up to visit. Lance Armstrong came. Hope Solo came to my classes. Had players from the NFL, administrators from the NCAA. Chris Fowler came.

It was a very successful effort, but it was also the only one of its kind in the nation. And I do think people, administrators in particular, look over their shoulder. Like, you know, why are we doing this? But, you know, the peers that we look up to aren’t doing this sort of thing.

And so that was probably one of the greatest frustrations.

And, you know, the other one was, and you probably see this, on-campus campus politics — set aside Left-Right Republican-Democrat. Campus politics are extremely pathological for for universities and and really get in the way of universities achieving their mission which is teaching, research, and professional service and that’s it.

Bryce Nickels — Honestly, listening to you tell that story it’s just very frustrating, like you say mediocrity is celebrated and people that sort of think out of the box are, I mean, I guess maybe you were a victim of academic marginalization. Let’s not call it cancel culture. Let’s call it academic marginalization.

I would maybe put it as they didn’t get you. Maybe they were, I don’t know. It seems like they just maybe were jealous in some ways. I don’t know. Who knows what the motivations were, but it does seem like people like yourself that used to make up the major portion of the faculty would be

I think maybe people like yourself that were, you know, thinking beyond themselves and looking to do new stuff has been replaced by most people sort of siloed into their own little small, small lane of expertise. And they get afraid when you see they see people sort of doing more innovative things. I could be wrong.

And this partially is a bit of my own frustration.

Roger Pielke Jr. — I do have a theory. I mean, it is unique to the University of Colorado. I want to be charitable. I mean, there’s a lot of good people there and a lot of good administrators trying to do good things. But at the same time, there’s a lot of people who probably are focused on mediocrity or just getting ahead inside the university environment.

But unique to the University of Colorado — I’m a policy professor. I teach policy. Colorado is maybe the largest university in terms of research budget in this country without a dedicated policy school or policy program.

And the culture of doing policy research is different than doing hypothesis-driven statistical social science or measuring the mass balance of glaciers.

When you do policy research, guess what? You are out there in the public talking about things that people care about and are political. And the fact that the University of Colorado has never had an administrator who really has the sense of what we do in policy research meant that I was always going to be kind of viewed as kind of a foreign entity on campus.

We had a science policy research center. Our job wasn’t to advocate for science budgets, but our job was to ask difficult questions of complicated science technology issues.

Are the research portfolios that we’re spending money on, are they fit for purpose to inform policymakers on climate change? And Colorado is one of the universities that has one of the biggest research budgets for climate change research. So here you have a professor poking around and saying, hey, maybe our priorities aren’t in line.

It’s a little bit like asking, like, well, should we be doing gain-of-function research? Well, if you’re a gain-of-function researcher, you don’t want anybody poking around asking those sort of busybody questions.

In sports governance, if you’re going to talk about the eligibility of transgender athletes, guess what? People are going to get upset.

And that’s okay, because that’s the nature of policy and policy research. So I do think that there was a cultural clash there.

It’s just perfectly normal I mean, any day, pick up the paper and you’ll see someone from, you know, the Ivy Leagues or University of Chicago or California schools talking about policy. And inevitably some people will complain about them. And that’s okay. That’s what academic freedom is for. That’s why universities exist, to provide a place where we can have these difficult discussions about things that are contentious in the public sphere.

Bryce Nickels — Okay. Yeah, that’s a good point, that maybe your situation happened to be worse because of the institution you have wasn’t really something wasn’t set up to handle a person that was so heavily involved in policy, particular policy around climate. And that actually is a good transition to what I wanted to talk to you about, which was your recent congressional testimony in a hearing titled Playing God with the Weather, a Disastrous Forecast. So as you mentioned before, you’ve testified in front of Congress numerous times. How many times would you estimate that you’ve given testimony?

Roger Pielke Jr. — A good question — I would say 15 plus or minus two or three.

Bryce Nickels — Okay, so can you give us a bit of a overview of what this latest hearing was about? What’s the background on why this hearing was called? Like, when did you first learn about it? When were you asked to testify?

Roger Pielke Jr. — Congressional hearings are super interesting, and they’re part of the way that the Congress establishes a record, a substantive record on topics that they care about.

The way that it works is the majority gets to invite a majority of the witnesses and the minority gets to invite one or two. You have to be clear-eyed about this you are invited as a witness because the the staff and the members think there’s some political advantage to having you testify and that’s just the way that it is.

I was invited to this hearing, like almost every hearing. The staff calls you up a couple weeks before and says, we’re thinking about having this hearing. It’s a little bit, you know, for many people, if they get called for the first time, they’re kind of feeling you out, like — who are you? What do you sound like? What are your perspectives?

I’m kind of a known quantity in a lot of places these days. Yeah. I have written on what’s called geoengineering. In my book, The Climate Fix, I had a chapter discussing geoengineering. I wrote a paper on the economics of geoengineering.

Geoengineering is the idea we’re gonna put aerosols or particulates into the stratosphere, which is the super high atmosphere above where the weather occurs to dim the sun in order to cool the planet.

I am a signatory to an international statement put together by a group in Europe calling for a geoengineering non-use treaty — The idea that governments around the world should come together and say, we’re not going to be tinkering with the stratosphere with trying to blot out the sun for a lot of reasons but you know the main one is — We’re not omniscient enough to know what the consequences might be and there could be some really bad consequences.

We’re already messing with the climate inadvertently by emitting carbon dioxide through the use of fossil fuels. So let’s not, you know, compound that mistake by putting stuff up in the stratosphere.

So the chair of the subcommittee, it was the Doge subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) and there is this confusing mix up between um weather modification — efforts to to seed clouds to get more rainfall or snow which has been done for the last 70 years — with with what I would argue is little knowledge of its effectiveness, and geoengineering.

There are some conspiracy theories out there that sit alongside that focused on what are called chemtrails — The idea that people look up and they see aircraft contrails and they think, oh, that’s the government changing the weather.

And to be honest, Chair Green has promoted some of those conspiracy theories. So for me, it was an opportunity to come testify and try to clarify what the science says and doesn’t say about weather modification and geoengineering, I didn’t talk much about chemtrails because I think it’s not really worth talking about. Another witness, Chris Martz, basically debunk that idea.

So for me, anytime you’re invited to testify before Congress, I look at it on two levels. One is opportunity to participate in the democratic process, to interact with the legislators and their staff.

That’s important.

But also it’s an opportunity for me to prepare my testimony that is a written testimony that’s going to be part of the congressional record for the rest of time. And so I take a lot of time to prepare that because the audience for my testimony goes well beyond the members who are sitting there that day.

So I tried to put together a very careful summary of what the science says and doesn’t say about weather modification and geoengineering, drawing on peer-reviewed consensus science, reports of the Government Accountability Office, and Congressional Research Service.

For me, it was a great opportunity. But the hardest things are that, number one, they usually give you about a week or 10 days to basically write a report. And the other thing is you have to sit there in front of them and be ready to answer any question about anything.

It’s been a while since I have been personally attacked by a member of Congress. But, you know, there was a time 10 or 15 years ago, the former congressman from California, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), had a go at me, which, it’s fine. It’s their right. It’s their time.

But I felt like at this hearing, the members asked serious questions and they took the issues seriously.

Bryce Nickels — And so I guess a couple things about what you just said. One is with relation to... So you’re talking about chemtrail? What do you call it? Contrail? What is the actual term?

Roger Pielke Jr. — Yeah, so the conspiracy theory... is focused on a word called chemtrails, C-H-E-M. Chemtrails. Like chemical trails.

Bryce Nickels — Right, but maybe, okay, so this has come up. One reason I wanted to bring this up was I guess I do find it worthwhile sort of mentioning that there were experiments that were done by the And then they didn’t admit it for many, many years later. So with that history, it’s not surprising to me that members of the public would find, you know, it, you know, they, I guess I’d say, how do you convince members of the public that there aren’t efforts to modify the weather by dispersing agents from planes when there is a history at least of, where the government has done similar things, like not to modify weather, but to experiment with what a biological agent or a chemical agent attack, how that would, you know, that agent would disperse on populations.

Roger Pielke Jr. — In my testimony, I referenced — and this was an effort to modify the weather — there was a secret program that the military had during the Vietnam War, or Laos in Vietnam to try to seed clouds to basically flood and muck up the jungle so it was more difficult for the Viet Cong to move.

It is a problem when the government projects are intransparent or secret. It creates an unhealthy suspicion that can go very wild places.

The notion that commercial airlines are working with the government... to load up planes with chemicals to try to alter the weather is one of the more easily debunked conspiracy theories that are out there. I mean, we’ve been trying to modify the weather as a country and around the world. I don’t know what the number is, I think it was like 60 countries have weather modification programs. But if you look at the peer-reviewed literature, there is absolutely no consensus about the effectiveness of these projects. There’s some sense of the theoretical effectiveness.

So the idea, number one, that the government could organize itself in such a way to effectively modify the weather gives government a lot too much credit for what is possible. But scientifically, it’s pretty straightforward to debunk that. And it is kind of a fringe theory.

That said, there are scientists, and there was one that testified at this hearing, who are all gung-ho about injecting particles in the stratosphere to modify the weather via geoengineering. And so, you know, maybe that’s adjacent to this chemtrail theories. But, you know, having Dr. Strangelove-like approaches to tinkering with the Earth system is not far-fetched.

So one of the things I recommended in my testimony, there is a tabulation, a record, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has, NOAA, for weather modification projects. But it’s almost impossible to sort through it. It’s hard to find. There needs to be much more radical transparency about efforts to modify the climate and the weather, to let the sunshine in.

There also has to be some regulation. I think it’s important for the government to say, here are things we are not going to do. And that’s why I signed on to the non-use treaty for geoengineering so that people know.

As you know, I had a chance to testify or prepare testimony on gain-of-function research, proximal origins and all that. It’s the same thing with regulating potentially harmful, dangerous biological studies.

Bryce Nickels — Right. Can you talk about the connection there? I was going to ask you that later, but since you brought it up now, can you discuss the parallels you see in the sort of climate scientists that are trying to modify the weather and also the gain-of-function virologists? And perhaps maybe... If you also want to mention, you did say in your testimony there’s issues with like the terminology and the way that language is used to sort of muddy the waters, so to speak, in your space or in the space of like weather modification. There’s also use and misuse of deliberate misuse of language to sort of muck up, you know, the gain of function debates. I don’t know if you see a parallel with that as well.

Roger Pielke Jr. — Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if I use the phrase gain of function, research of concern, you know, half your listeners are going to go to sleep. And it’s a sort of turgid jargonization of what should be more transparent and open discussions. Yeah. so weather modification and geoengineering have different definitions, what falls under them, as well as what’s an experiment, what’s implementation.

I had a few comments after my testimony that said, well, what you’re talking about are experiments. It’s not really implementation, and these are just words. I mean, if you’re doing research on dangerous viruses, sure, call it an experiment. You’re not, you’re not rolling it out, you know, operationally. but you still could have some pretty bad stuff that actually results from it.

Bryce Nickels — So they’re saying that this is okay because it’s happening basically on a small scale? Is that the idea, that like a research project that’s just being done in a field somewhere is not weather modification because it’s not affecting, like it’s not done like across the globe or something? Is that what they’re doing?

Roger Pielke Jr. — Yes, that’s one argument that’s made is that, well, we’re just – We’re not “implementing” it at a global scale, but we do want to tinker with the atmosphere or the ocean or clouds in certain places because if we want to have that in our toolbox in the future, then we need to actually go out in the field and see what the effects are.

Bryce Nickels — The term geoengineering refers to if you do this at scale and weather modification. So what terms are used as far as the confusion?

Roger Pielke Jr. — Geoengineering refers to the big picture like we’re engineering the planet — but what do you call it if you decide oh we want to put some particles up in the stratosphere, say, just over the the west coast of the us and just see what the effects are.

Is that geoengineering? Is that a geoengineering experiment? Is that a precursor to geoengineering?

I’d call it stupid. I’d call it idiotic. That’s why I signed the non-use. I think it’s a bad idea to begin with.

But this is why regulation and transparency are absolutely necessary. And, you know, part of the problem is that some of the most forceful, strong advocates for geoengineering experiments are those researchers who would be conducting geoengineering experiments.

There’s not a lot of people who have expertise in this field who are not those who are actively involved in potentially doing this work. I see a lot of parallels with gain-of-function research in biology, basically doing virology research to make viruses more potent in some respect and then seeing what the effects are. And there too, I think that there should be pretty strong regulations on what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.

Another area of parallel, and this is kind of more of a science policy issue, is that the scientific publication process is breaks down on some of these highly contested issues. I see a lot of that in climate research and I publish a lot on scientific integrity.

I’ve also written extensively on “proximal origins” and the sort of violations of both the formal rules of academic publication, but also the norms associated with publication.

Bryce Nickels — Roger, I did want to interject. So one is, if people aren’t familiar with it, so the “proximal origins” refers to a paper that came out in March of 2020 called The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, which was, I mean, Roger and I both agree, was a fraudulent paper that was designed to mislead the public on the origin of COVID.

And you, in fact, were were scheduled to testify at a hearing that involved. Well, they invited three journal editors, Richard Horton. And I forget, though, I think what’s the woman who’s the head of Nature [Magdalena Skipper] and Holden Thorp and Holden Thorp was the only one that appeared.

And you were although you were scheduled to testify, they canceled on you at the last minute. Right?

Roger Pielke Jr. — I think they wanted me to be there as kind of a researcher who studies science policy who wasn’t the head of a journal because they had three journals. And once the two, The Lancet and Nature, canceled their participation, then they didn’t want it to be mano a mano with Thorp.

So they said, you can prepare your testimony and submit it, and we’ll just talk to Thorp.

So it’s their dime. But my testimony was published. It’s in the record. I published it also. And in that testimony, I go through some of the issues associated with decisions made about publishing papers that I think were intended to manage a narrative about COVID origins.

This is a science policy question. It’s not a question of the substance of the paper. For instance, when you have the head of the Wellcome Trust participating in preparing the paper and orchestrating its publication, but doesn’t show up as a co-author, it raises some questions about whether we engaged in PR here, or is this a research effort?

Bryce Nickels — So you’re referring to the fact that for the Proximal Origin paper, Jeremy Farrar, who at the time was the head of the Wellcome Trust, was involved in, you can see there’s a record, very clearly he was involved in this paper, even edited the paper, and does not show up as an author.

And in fact, in communications between the authors, it says, We can’t have them on air because it’ll look bad, basically. That’s in clear violation of the journal’s policies on authorship. And yet they do nothing. And so what you’re saying, you see similar dynamics in the climate science is what you’re saying, like in terms of the way the journals manage publications that we saw, at least with COVID origins.

Roger Pielke Jr. — I’ll give you an example, and this involves some of my research. There’s a fake data set on the economic losses associated with hurricanes that’s kind of worked its way into the peer-reviewed literature.

The fake data set is based on an actual real peer-reviewed data set that I and my colleagues put together that someone modified and put it online. And some researchers found it online and said, “Here’s an Excel file. Let’s do research with it!”

I had been in touch with multiple journal editors to notify them.

“Hey, you published a few papers that are pretty visible. They’re cited by the IPCC and they are using a fake data set.”

Partly, I think, because the the resulting research conforms to a particular narrative that journals have refused to do anything about it. One journal invited me to write a response, and I documented it and responded.

But in this case, just like Proximal Origins, if these instances are not the basis for retraction of published research, then really nothing is, and anything goes.

Bryce Nickels — I think we don’t need journals. I’ve been very public about saying we don’t need journals. Do you agree with that, or do you have a different, more nuanced view?

Roger Pielke Jr. — I’m not willing to go that far. I do think like universities, journals should work and they should work better. There has been this proliferation of journals such that wherever something is published — trust but verify.

When I get a research study, it’s a lot of work to go in and say, all right, is this something that looks solid?

A lot of the work I’ve done over the last decade has involved the misuse of climate scenarios, which is its own podcast show. And you really have to be an expert in the field to be able to see that misuse. And if you just blindly trust what’s being produced, the scientific literature will be distorted, public discussion will be corrupted, and policymakers are going to get a very misleading view as to reality.

I do think some form of quality control is needed. The journals historically have existed to provide that. That has broken down. And if we don’t have journals, you know, we’ll need “schmurnals” or just something that’s similar and pays the same function.

Bryce Nickels — We have preprint servers already. So we have places where people can post results and then those can provide forums for, you know, review or, you know, debate. I don’t know. That’s my sort of reason why we don’t need the journals as a way of like giving this artificial gold stamp or, you know, a gold star of approval.

Roger Pielke Jr. — I think most people even in the scientific community don’t realize how cursory peer review is and also how easily peer review is corrupted by an editor picking you know friendly or unfriendly reviewers.

I can point to many instances i think preprint servers are absolutely fantastic.

AlsoI do a lot of analyses that I publish on my Substack. I get more peer review publishing initial analyses on Substack than I ever got on any published peer review paper. By the time I decide to put my analyses together to submit to a journal, it has already gone through a much more rigorous peer review than I’m going to get from the three or four reviewers the journal puts on it.

This has been called, in science technology studies, the notion of “extended peer review.” The idea that putting claims out for public scrutiny by experts and whoever wants to comment is a much more robust way of ensuring reliable knowledge than simply relying on journals.

Bryce Nickels — That’s interesting to learn that. I mean, it makes sense to me that when you have a subset like yours and you’re putting out original, you know, research, original ideas, that you would get a lot of feedback. And that is a much better way of doing it than the current journal system, which is way more transparent.

And it’s, you know, all the public can... join into those, or at least perhaps just the paid subscribers, right? Is it just paid subscribers that can comment?

Roger Pielke Jr. — So in my Substack, it’s only paid subscribers who can comment.

Bryce Nickels

So there’s a little gatekeeping, Roger, a little gatekeeping. Maybe every Tuesday we can let in the free... No, I’m just kidding. I think it’s worth, by the way, even though I don’t look, I’m just cheap. I’m just cheap. So I have not subscribed, but others should definitely.

But I want to go back to your testimony before I let you go. I wanted to ask you, did you did you talk to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about like some of the things that she said that that you that are incorrect? Or is that I don’t know. Where do things stand? Like, I mean, I do think it’s a problem if we have lawmakers that are, you know, and I don’t necessarily think it’s. I mean, it could be deliberate. It could not be. A lot of times it’s just misunderstanding things because it’s really hard to understand certain aspects of the, you know, science.

And also it’s very easy to believe certain things based on, you know, the track record of, you know, government secrecy and whatnot. Did you get anywhere trying to convince her that chemtrails aren’t, you know, her, at least some of the things she said about them are not correct?

Roger Pielke Jr. — This is the only time I met Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). I would say, politically, our Venn diagram probably doesn’t have a big overlap.

I met her before the hearing and interacted with her during the hearing. A lot of the things she said about weather modification and geoengineering were eminently sensible and reasonable.

But if you take a look at her opening statement and her closing statement, there’s a lot of things in there that I would say were pretty unreasonable. I do think in 2025 politics, you have elected officials who are entire whole persons with nuanced views and, then there’s also the TV version of these politicians. I can tell you there were multiple members of that committee who showed up, and they have their five minutes, who entirely were speaking to the cameras. They weren’t there to talk to the witnesses or learn about geoengineering.

At the same time, there were other members who looked me in the eye and asked me substantive questions. So so I do think a lot of the politics of 2025 is performative in the nature of our politics. This is another podcast, but but the nature of our politics rewards the extremes on the right and the left.

MAGA versus the progressives is the political battle. But in reality, most everybody in this country is, you know, center right, center life, or some sort of centrist. They’re not at the extremes. That’s a more fundamental problem.

But I do hope that she listened to me and the other witnesses, because I think overall the prepared testimony for that hearing was pretty good.

Bryce Nickels — I actually think Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) quite effective at platforming specific issues. So whether her style is one that sort of rubs certain people the wrong way, like sometimes she brings the room. I mean, in particular at the Fauci, at Anthony Fauci’s hearing, When she spoke, all the cameras started going off. She commanded that room, and she spoke about the Beaglegate controversy that Fauci was involved in. And that really, even people that weren’t fans of her, I think, you know, really appreciated that she was one of the few at that hearing that took him to task.

Roger Pielke Jr. — Let me just say that she is politically enormously effective. Donald Trump politically is enormously effective.

But I’m a policy nerd. I would like to see much more policy content associated with political effectiveness. And to the degree that politics and policy gets separated, which I think they are in large degree on the right and the left right now, it’s hard to get good policy out of that.

Bryce Nichols — Would you ever run for office, Roger? What about that?

Roger Pielke Jr. — So I was the student body president of my high school, senior year. . .

Bryce Nichols — Breaking news. We didn’t know this. . .

Roger Pielke Jr. — . . . and that I decided was my last political campaign.

Bryce Nickels — One thing I do want to know is what comes out of these hearings? So what do you expect will come out of this hearing? Is this just to make, you know, get a little bit of a news cycle, or will there be anything substantive that comes out of this recent hearing?

Roger Pielke Jr. — One of the things, and I would recommend this to all my peers, is to not think about participation in a hearing as a chance to have impact. or measurable outcomes. Part of it is you are participating in the democratic process where counterclaims are aired out in public and elected officials get to challenge those claims.

In all the hearings I’ve participated in, the vast majority, I would say, after the stone dropped in the pond and the ripples went away, who knows what effect it had. Some of them, however, like the one I participated in in 2013, where I testified, I gave the same testimony before the House and the Senate. It had enormous impact, and not just among members of the committee, but publicly.

It also led to some of the issues in my career — and this is another warning I have to my peers. If you want to participate in the political process, guess what?

Politics ain’t beanbag, and you’re going to become a political object yourself. That’s the price you pay for having some degree of influence. So for me, the fact that members of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have at different times seen my views as valuable gives me a platform to talk to my peers, to talk to the public, to talk to the media in a way that I think is, you know, it goes along with being a public intellectual in modern America is you’re part of a big, messy conversation. And if you’re fortunate enough, people at least hear you out.

Bryce Nickels — One more question about the hearing and about science policy related to it as it the one parallel that we neglected to discuss as it relates to gain a function virology and climate modification is the fact that a scientist doing an experiment in one nation can have impacts on populations living in other nations um which isn’t that a violation of some doesn’t that seem to violate a lot of sort of tenets just nations like governance of nations or something. How do you see, like, are there other nations that are, that are modifying the climate right now? Is there evidence for that?

And, and if so, what can, you know, the United States do about that?

Roger Pielke Jr. — there’s precedent here. There are international agreements and prohibitions on nuclear weapons research, for example, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. This is one reason why I and colleagues have called for a geoengineering non-use agreement.

One of the recommendations I made at the hearing is that we need to ensure that we have monitoring systems, specifically satellite systems, that have the ability to detect if a private company or another nation is tinkering with the atmosphere or the Earth system in some way, ideally under such a treaty to ensure compliance with it.

There is no doubt that a billionaire or the Chinese government or some other actor could decide they want to tinker with the earth system.

I see it very much like gain-of-function research. There’s nothing to stop some country from working in a low-level biosafety environment. lab to do dangerous experiments. The technology exists.

That is something that arguably we’ve already seen could affect everybody on the planet. And so this is probably one of the most compelling areas for international agreements to regulate scientific research that has potential for widespread harm.

We already do it with nuclear weapons, so we should do it in other areas that could be just as dangerous.

Bryce Nickels — How scared should the public be about this issue? Like, how concerned should we be about ourselves or other nations doing weather modifications experiments that cause harm?

Roger Pielke Jr. — So on weather modification, specifically trying to enhance precipitation, I don’t think there’s too much concern people should have because we don’t even know how effective it is. I think we should be concerned that we’re spending money doing it and we don’t know if it works.

Geoengineering, I think there should be some low-level concern. I don’t think there’s a lot of appetite that I see right now around the world to modify the climate. All the talk about the notion of climate as an existential threat and that we need to act immediately to turn down the temperature — Countries aren’t acting like that in the real world.

I am far more concerned about your field and dangerous virology research. I do think it’s highly likely that COVID emerged from a research-related incident. It’s not the first we’ve seen.

Think about it like this — COVID, if you look at some of the economic estimates of the impact of COVID globally on the economy, pick your favorite number, but it’s measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. c

Changes to climate over many, many decades, taking the most scary worst case scenarios, are in the tens of trillions of dollars. So a global pandemic could, in a very short period of time, kill more people than climate change over the next hundred years, even in the worst scenarios, and have economic consequences far more devastating.

Whatever any of us thinks the probability of an event is, the consequences related to a pandemic are just so much greater, which is why I have much greater concerns because, you know, one slip up and it could be an extremely big deal.

Bryce Nickels — Well, I appreciate you saying that, I guess. And obviously it’s been something that I’ve the last several years been heavily involved in. And I’m hoping with the recent You know, statements made by President Trump in front of the United Nations where he said that the United States would would, you know, want to have other nations join us in, you know, stopping bioweapons research that and the executive order that he signed in in May that that were present. finally making some progress, real meaningful progress on this front.

All right. Final question. And it’s about a hearing that you didn’t participate in, but I believe you attended, which was about the hearing for Anthony Fauci’s former special advisor, David Morens, which took place in May of 2024. If I recall, you were labeled that as the most ridiculous or absurd or comical hearing that you’ve ever attended.

Is that correct?

Roger Pielke Jr. — I said something like that. I don’t think I said comical. I said it as one of the most remarkable hearings.

I had testified on the Senate side that same day, so I was able to walk over and sit there right behind him in person and watch it, since I follow this issue pretty closely.

This is one, I mean, you know the story well, but this is one where Mr. Morens was confronted with his own emails, you know, talking about evading Freedom of Information Act requests — and I don’t remember the exact words — but that Anthony Fauci had a secret channel and then having the members of Congress — and kudos to the members and their staff for being so well prepared — just contradicted what he said in such a way that that I could not believe that he was not better prepared to answer questions.

Whether it was through Freedom of Information Act or congressional investigations information that had come out that were pretty bad for him. And so as witnesses, you have to know the field of play. And it seemed to me like he was thoroughly unprepared.

I’m not sure where the status of the congressional investigations are — They do seem like they’ve slowed down since the last Congress. But there’s a lot that U.S. government officials and people who oversaw research and research funding still have to answer for. And that hearing was one.

Part of what was remarkable about that is that when that investigation started, origins of COVID-related issues, it was very partisan. You could tell from the statements at the very beginning that Republicans and Democrats weren’t very close.

At that hearing, my interpretation was that if you look at the questions and statements being made by the members, you couldn’t tell who was a Republican, who was a Democrat.

The members were kind of knocked off their partisan positions by the fact that the evidence was so overwhelming that whatever the pandemic origins were, there were some shenanigans going on in the U.S. government.

And the witness, Mr. Morens, kudos to him — He brought Democrats and Republicans together in a way that not a lot of witnesses can.

Bryce Nickels — Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Yeah, I remember you’re, Your comments at the time, as you say, I guess it was remarkable. Yeah.

Thanks a lot, Roger, for joining me today. And good luck with, you know, continuing to grow your Substack.

And maybe we’ll see you back in academia at some point or, I know you said you don’t want to, but I do see a potential political future for you, if you’d like that.

You can do a lot of things. I appreciate you joining me.

And until next time, this has been Science from the Fringe.

Thank you.

Wow! If you made it through this post, thanks! Please click that “❤️ Like.” More likes mean that THB rises in the Substack algorithm and gets in front of more readers.

Comments welcomed! Comments on this post are open to everyone.

Here at THB we model how to have constructive discourse with and about those who we might disagree. Normal moderation standards are applied to this post as well. No comments of a personal nature and no insults. Let’s stick to evidence and argument, and agree to disagree when necessary. Thanks!

THB is among those few places online where people of goodwill can meet to discuss, debate, and disagree on politically contentious topics involving contested science. If you value THB as a forum please consider subscribing or upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers make THB go and also have access to THB Pro, with PDFs of some of my books, THB Insider, Five Figures, and paywalled THB posts. Thank you!