Dr. Pielke, I only hope that when you leave the University of Colorado, you will continue to produce and publish your views -- especially on climate change and the gap between what the science says and the distorted narratives that too often misinform the public.
As a high school teacher who volunteers to write portions of the science curriculum, I’ve observed an interesting dynamic when addressing climate change. Some of my more progressive coworkers seem to gravitate toward doomsday narratives or anti-human perspectives, often framing the issue in a way that leaves little room for alternative approaches. What’s even more challenging is that some are unwilling to discuss their views openly or consider opposing evidence, which limits the opportunity for meaningful dialogue.
In contrast, I strive to present a balanced approach that focuses on mitigation, technological advancements, and pro-human stories. I believe this perspective is vital for inspiring students to think critically and creatively. By highlighting humanity's capacity for innovation and resilience, we can foster hope and empower students to see themselves as part of the solution.
Acknowledging the challenges we face is important, but it’s equally crucial to demonstrate that we have the tools, ingenuity, and collaborative spirit to overcome them. This approach not only broadens the discussion but also equips students to engage constructively with environmental issues, preparing them to take meaningful action for a sustainable and optimistic future.
First of all, I like this series (as I did your 'explainer' on the natural occurance of various weather phenomenon. Second, there are a coule of questions I have that I would still love to see you address. One is the assumptions behind the IPCC (and apparently your) conclusion that temperatures have risen, some say 'dangerously.' Temperature is not climate. I continue to maintain (even though saying it gets me blank startes) that climate is a human construct, simply a way of characterizing past weather into something more manageable and that, the hope is, one can forecast from (as if!!!). So, to conclude it is warmer than some other time -- to create this human construct -- one has to make assumptions: which weather (here, temperature), over what period, over what area, using what data for both periods/areas. The source of the data matters a lot to me; in that vein, I'd love to hear your thoughts on urban heat islands and the extent to which temperature gathering equipment is now within urban areas affects conclusion about 'climate' temperature. Then, is the data simply averaged or treated somewhow more abstractly? Is the 'climate' the mean, median, or mode of the data, or something else? What is the calculation, in other words?
Another lingering question I have concerns the 'right' level of CO2 and what assumptions underlie the 'right' level. Are we trying to optimize food production, or support population, or support economies, or what? When did the earth have a 'right' level of CO2 and why was it 'right'? Obviously, this question becomes of high importance if there are to be efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere; even if not, it is something worth studying, it seems to me. I understand that, since measurement of CO2 became possible in Hawaii, it has 'risen' a lot. But, how much is too much?
Finally, I am just finishing Vaclav Smil's book on How The World Really Works and find most of it well researched, as one would expect. He is amazing. That said, his chapter on globab warming, or climate change as some insist on calling it, seemed not nearly as well supported. He made the claim about rising temperature, without any mention of sources or assumptions, that caused me to remember asking you about it a while back. I am curious what you think about the history of the CO2 connection to temperature that he presents as well. Is this connection as 'old' as he asserts and who is testing/has tested that theory and how has it been tested since, as I understand science (mostly from you), is is constant testing of theories, all of which remain theories for as long as it might take to find one or more instances in which the theories don't hold. Thanks for listening to all this! And for taking on the topics you do.
"However, on campus and in academia I have been characterized by some climate activist peers as being on the right, and thus unwelcome in the climate research community."
This sums up the whole problem with academic research. There is an acceptable pattern of ideas on most subjects, and anyone holding ideas outside this pattern (and usually to the right of it) is regarded as a heretic to be silenced. Consequently research is stultified, is actively discouraged from exploring new ideas. To find a historical parallel you may have to go back to Galileo. Oh well, at least they don't burn you alive today for having heretical ideas - at least not yet.
I live in a California college community. The parking lot is filled full of new Teslas. There is a neighborhood of older larger homes on large tree-covered lots... the most expensive residential real estate in town... the residents are university administrators and faculty. Meanwhile the undergraduate students are taught by graduate students... the professors are generally MIA.
I dream of a renewed economy where industry, manufacturing and real product production dominate again instead of too many fake laptop jobs... and the kids reject traditional over-priced academia in its present form for trade and industrial education.
I don't think you can dismiss a good liberal arts education, although this is hard to find in our hyper progressive institutions. The work that Jordan Peterson is doing with Peterson Academy will be interesting.
Yes, the trades were eliminated from High Schools, kids were told they can and all should go to college, drop out rates climbed and the rest is history. I personally blame the US Govt for getting involved via govt loans. I'm sure the thinking was to make college equitable which means more loans for them. Such a toxic circle.
Roger: Comparing the average political views of professors with those of likely voters is misleading. Perhaps one should start by comparing the politics of the average professor with the average politics of PhDs. Unfortunately both groups were educated by universities that existed 10-40 years ago.
Haidt claims that universities have been taken over by social justice warriors who pursue societal change, not "Truth" or new knowledge.
I'm not sure the problems you or Haidt note are new. A friend who began teaching science in a small liberal arts college in the early 1980's complained a faculty survey had shown that the faculty contained most Communists than registered Republicans. Such anecdotes aren't reliable knowledge unfortunately.
The very title and premise of that HigherEd article you linked to towards the end about HigherEd not being ready for authoritarianism, sets up an adversarial role between academic institutions and the Trump administration with a whole lot of hand waving and battle talk where none need exist. Just the use of the term “authoritarianism” here sets up a thesis that lacks the self-reflection that in effect there has been already been authoritarianism but because it supported the views of the progressive left that these folks feel aligned with, they were not able to see this as authoritarianism, but rather the views that this is as things should be. It’s almost like the notion that viewing everything happening at universities through the political left v. right prism is the only way things can be. This framing of course was taught to many during the Bush, jr. years of “either you’re with us or against us”, which now carries through all matter of daily civic life. Never mind that to Mann everything is war. As someone who considers himself very much a political centrist, much more interested in figuring out ways to make life better regardless of whose idea or which political party comes up with it, the progressive left sounds veritably insane. Just had a friend share that 2 yrs ago his first daughter applied to his Alma mater university back east. When she did the campus tour, the tour guide introduced “themselves” with their pronouns. 10 mins into the tour, the guide started sharing all the bad things about being at that university including some that weren’t actually bad from a “normal” person perspective ;). Two years later, his second daughter also applied and went on the tour. Not only did both walk out of the tour 15 mins into it, but both withdrew their applications. The younger applied to a California university where the application enabled her to pick her gender from a list of 7 or 8, most of which she never heard of. These are not the experiences we want to see for our kids, but given his daughters’ reactions to these experiences, I’m heartened to see that the next generation ain’t having none of it. They seem to have a much more firm head on their shoulders and will hopefully help move the pendulum back from its current extreme state.
Roger, may I suggest you take a long hard look at the college accreditation bodies and the corruption of purpose these now exhibit?
I am presently putting a daughter through college at a middle-ranked state university. Her field of study is nuclear medicine, highly technical, very demanding, totally focused on hands-on clinical work. All of the medical professionals are laser-focused on the diseases and their diagnostic tools to address them. Patient race is the last thing on anybody's mind. Yet she still had to take a required three-hour course on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. When I protested (since I was paying for it) the University front-office staff told me it was mandated by the accreditation agencies. The university, a 130-year-old land grant university, would lose its accreditation unless it kowtows to the DEI concept.
The politicization you describe will never cease unless these accreditation bodies are reformed and returned to their original purpose of promoting academic excellence instead of the latest progressive fad.
My heartbreaking experience related to teaching climate science at the Furman University Osher Lifelong Learning Institute starting around 12 years ago. Nothing that Furman University or the OLLInstitute did was problematic. They were great! It was my own learning experience and subsequent being banned from my Unitarian Universalist national church online climate website that was heartbreaking. My longed for community rejected me, and that has been one of the more painful episodes in my life.
How did I become a climate science instructor? Well, from the time I was 11, I was a weather wonk. For Christmas 1951, my longed-for and received present was the daily Department of Commerce (long before NOAA) daily weather maps. Over the years I read weather and climate books and took lots of science, literature, history, and philosophy, undergraduate and graduate courses. It was a dream come true to be able to teach about weather and climate in retirement, and I spent countless hours on that labor of love. I studied the hundreds of pages of the IPCC Assessments, and we read some of them as class assignments. I did my utmost to be an informed, fair, and trustworthy instructor. It was not enough.
Yes, the classes I taught over several years were highly rated by the students, and OLLI students are almost all very well educated, retired adults, many with more graduate degrees than I had. It was a wonderful learning experience, and a troubled one for me. I discovered that most of the students had already digested their media’s cultural and political analysis of global warming and climate change. Most were surprised and some were shocked that the science didn’t support the cultural climate wars that motivated their media. The science and data was enough to convince virtually all that something extra- scientific was happening in the culture where they read that climate problems were variously reported to be either existential and catastrophic or a fraud. Media reporting justified dividing the world into climate activists and climate deniers. The two sides, and their media and political allies, denigrated their opponents, and even called their views crimes against humanity.
It wasn’t long after that when I experienced the hatred and insults from a group in my progressive church. My first ever post to a Unitarian Universalist national climate website was a NOAA temperature graph that contradicted members' posts that warming was accelerating and would very soon cause famine, extinctions, and other catastrophes. When I posted that NOAA graph with a single sentence that global warming was real, but exaggerated, the moderator commented, “We have a climate denier in our midst.” A couple of posts later, after quoting IPCC information, I was banned from the group. I was upset and heartbroken. I had seemed to have found a found a loving community, and was rejected by it, stimulating my abandonment issues going all the way back to age 2 in 1942 when my mother died in a car crash and my father, after being allowed to attend the funeral, was off the WWII Pacific theater as a B24 bomber pilot for two years. Despite trying, I have never been able to feel a sense of community with the ones who rejected me, even though it was done at a national website and not at the local church where my views were more delicately rejected and mostly just ignored.
My point of view is different from yours. The country benefits from a variety of different viewpoints.
I am 74 years old, multimillionaire, did a full career as a computer researcher establishing new methods and standards for navigation worldwide and am enjoying a second career as a self-made landlord and property manager.
I did attend much better than average public schools. I tried out a couple of colleges but I found them, in the seventies, to not be worth what they cost, which just got worse and worse and worse as time went on. Besides, most of the students were more into narcissism and parties than higher education. I certainly do not have or need any college degrees.
I have thought for a long time that the USA would benefit greatly from fewer colleges and universities and fewer students and most of all from fewer faculty. Certainly the past 8 years are proof of that.
Yes, one purpose of R1 colleges is for parents to send their kids to a four-year vacation at the end of which they get a credential. That said, there are really outstanding educational opportunities for those interested in that option as well. CU Boulder has a fantastic school of engineering, for instance.
for sure. Engineering, law and pre-med. Other than that, college was always a dalliance for the rich. In my day the primary reason was to evade the draft. People forgot that part.
I really like the mention about an obsession to football and the associated money. It reminds me of the fall of the Roman empire. Too many oafs addicted to being spectators and exhibiting clinical signs of codependency to an athletic event 😅 It's just as concerning as the idiocracy that the progressives have created in higher education.
Dr. Pielke, I only hope that when you leave the University of Colorado, you will continue to produce and publish your views -- especially on climate change and the gap between what the science says and the distorted narratives that too often misinform the public.
Thanks Mark ... Here at THB it'll be business as usual!
As a high school teacher who volunteers to write portions of the science curriculum, I’ve observed an interesting dynamic when addressing climate change. Some of my more progressive coworkers seem to gravitate toward doomsday narratives or anti-human perspectives, often framing the issue in a way that leaves little room for alternative approaches. What’s even more challenging is that some are unwilling to discuss their views openly or consider opposing evidence, which limits the opportunity for meaningful dialogue.
In contrast, I strive to present a balanced approach that focuses on mitigation, technological advancements, and pro-human stories. I believe this perspective is vital for inspiring students to think critically and creatively. By highlighting humanity's capacity for innovation and resilience, we can foster hope and empower students to see themselves as part of the solution.
Acknowledging the challenges we face is important, but it’s equally crucial to demonstrate that we have the tools, ingenuity, and collaborative spirit to overcome them. This approach not only broadens the discussion but also equips students to engage constructively with environmental issues, preparing them to take meaningful action for a sustainable and optimistic future.
First of all, I like this series (as I did your 'explainer' on the natural occurance of various weather phenomenon. Second, there are a coule of questions I have that I would still love to see you address. One is the assumptions behind the IPCC (and apparently your) conclusion that temperatures have risen, some say 'dangerously.' Temperature is not climate. I continue to maintain (even though saying it gets me blank startes) that climate is a human construct, simply a way of characterizing past weather into something more manageable and that, the hope is, one can forecast from (as if!!!). So, to conclude it is warmer than some other time -- to create this human construct -- one has to make assumptions: which weather (here, temperature), over what period, over what area, using what data for both periods/areas. The source of the data matters a lot to me; in that vein, I'd love to hear your thoughts on urban heat islands and the extent to which temperature gathering equipment is now within urban areas affects conclusion about 'climate' temperature. Then, is the data simply averaged or treated somewhow more abstractly? Is the 'climate' the mean, median, or mode of the data, or something else? What is the calculation, in other words?
Another lingering question I have concerns the 'right' level of CO2 and what assumptions underlie the 'right' level. Are we trying to optimize food production, or support population, or support economies, or what? When did the earth have a 'right' level of CO2 and why was it 'right'? Obviously, this question becomes of high importance if there are to be efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere; even if not, it is something worth studying, it seems to me. I understand that, since measurement of CO2 became possible in Hawaii, it has 'risen' a lot. But, how much is too much?
Finally, I am just finishing Vaclav Smil's book on How The World Really Works and find most of it well researched, as one would expect. He is amazing. That said, his chapter on globab warming, or climate change as some insist on calling it, seemed not nearly as well supported. He made the claim about rising temperature, without any mention of sources or assumptions, that caused me to remember asking you about it a while back. I am curious what you think about the history of the CO2 connection to temperature that he presents as well. Is this connection as 'old' as he asserts and who is testing/has tested that theory and how has it been tested since, as I understand science (mostly from you), is is constant testing of theories, all of which remain theories for as long as it might take to find one or more instances in which the theories don't hold. Thanks for listening to all this! And for taking on the topics you do.
"However, on campus and in academia I have been characterized by some climate activist peers as being on the right, and thus unwelcome in the climate research community."
This sums up the whole problem with academic research. There is an acceptable pattern of ideas on most subjects, and anyone holding ideas outside this pattern (and usually to the right of it) is regarded as a heretic to be silenced. Consequently research is stultified, is actively discouraged from exploring new ideas. To find a historical parallel you may have to go back to Galileo. Oh well, at least they don't burn you alive today for having heretical ideas - at least not yet.
I live in a California college community. The parking lot is filled full of new Teslas. There is a neighborhood of older larger homes on large tree-covered lots... the most expensive residential real estate in town... the residents are university administrators and faculty. Meanwhile the undergraduate students are taught by graduate students... the professors are generally MIA.
I dream of a renewed economy where industry, manufacturing and real product production dominate again instead of too many fake laptop jobs... and the kids reject traditional over-priced academia in its present form for trade and industrial education.
Thanks Professor Pielke. Looking forward to more in the series. Congratulations on starting your new chapter :)
I don't think you can dismiss a good liberal arts education, although this is hard to find in our hyper progressive institutions. The work that Jordan Peterson is doing with Peterson Academy will be interesting.
University of Austin too.
Yes, the trades were eliminated from High Schools, kids were told they can and all should go to college, drop out rates climbed and the rest is history. I personally blame the US Govt for getting involved via govt loans. I'm sure the thinking was to make college equitable which means more loans for them. Such a toxic circle.
Exhibit A?
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1861269865417339156
Roger: Comparing the average political views of professors with those of likely voters is misleading. Perhaps one should start by comparing the politics of the average professor with the average politics of PhDs. Unfortunately both groups were educated by universities that existed 10-40 years ago.
Haidt claims that universities have been taken over by social justice warriors who pursue societal change, not "Truth" or new knowledge.
I'm not sure the problems you or Haidt note are new. A friend who began teaching science in a small liberal arts college in the early 1980's complained a faculty survey had shown that the faculty contained most Communists than registered Republicans. Such anecdotes aren't reliable knowledge unfortunately.
The very title and premise of that HigherEd article you linked to towards the end about HigherEd not being ready for authoritarianism, sets up an adversarial role between academic institutions and the Trump administration with a whole lot of hand waving and battle talk where none need exist. Just the use of the term “authoritarianism” here sets up a thesis that lacks the self-reflection that in effect there has been already been authoritarianism but because it supported the views of the progressive left that these folks feel aligned with, they were not able to see this as authoritarianism, but rather the views that this is as things should be. It’s almost like the notion that viewing everything happening at universities through the political left v. right prism is the only way things can be. This framing of course was taught to many during the Bush, jr. years of “either you’re with us or against us”, which now carries through all matter of daily civic life. Never mind that to Mann everything is war. As someone who considers himself very much a political centrist, much more interested in figuring out ways to make life better regardless of whose idea or which political party comes up with it, the progressive left sounds veritably insane. Just had a friend share that 2 yrs ago his first daughter applied to his Alma mater university back east. When she did the campus tour, the tour guide introduced “themselves” with their pronouns. 10 mins into the tour, the guide started sharing all the bad things about being at that university including some that weren’t actually bad from a “normal” person perspective ;). Two years later, his second daughter also applied and went on the tour. Not only did both walk out of the tour 15 mins into it, but both withdrew their applications. The younger applied to a California university where the application enabled her to pick her gender from a list of 7 or 8, most of which she never heard of. These are not the experiences we want to see for our kids, but given his daughters’ reactions to these experiences, I’m heartened to see that the next generation ain’t having none of it. They seem to have a much more firm head on their shoulders and will hopefully help move the pendulum back from its current extreme state.
Roger, may I suggest you take a long hard look at the college accreditation bodies and the corruption of purpose these now exhibit?
I am presently putting a daughter through college at a middle-ranked state university. Her field of study is nuclear medicine, highly technical, very demanding, totally focused on hands-on clinical work. All of the medical professionals are laser-focused on the diseases and their diagnostic tools to address them. Patient race is the last thing on anybody's mind. Yet she still had to take a required three-hour course on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. When I protested (since I was paying for it) the University front-office staff told me it was mandated by the accreditation agencies. The university, a 130-year-old land grant university, would lose its accreditation unless it kowtows to the DEI concept.
The politicization you describe will never cease unless these accreditation bodies are reformed and returned to their original purpose of promoting academic excellence instead of the latest progressive fad.
My heartbreaking experience related to teaching climate science at the Furman University Osher Lifelong Learning Institute starting around 12 years ago. Nothing that Furman University or the OLLInstitute did was problematic. They were great! It was my own learning experience and subsequent being banned from my Unitarian Universalist national church online climate website that was heartbreaking. My longed for community rejected me, and that has been one of the more painful episodes in my life.
How did I become a climate science instructor? Well, from the time I was 11, I was a weather wonk. For Christmas 1951, my longed-for and received present was the daily Department of Commerce (long before NOAA) daily weather maps. Over the years I read weather and climate books and took lots of science, literature, history, and philosophy, undergraduate and graduate courses. It was a dream come true to be able to teach about weather and climate in retirement, and I spent countless hours on that labor of love. I studied the hundreds of pages of the IPCC Assessments, and we read some of them as class assignments. I did my utmost to be an informed, fair, and trustworthy instructor. It was not enough.
Yes, the classes I taught over several years were highly rated by the students, and OLLI students are almost all very well educated, retired adults, many with more graduate degrees than I had. It was a wonderful learning experience, and a troubled one for me. I discovered that most of the students had already digested their media’s cultural and political analysis of global warming and climate change. Most were surprised and some were shocked that the science didn’t support the cultural climate wars that motivated their media. The science and data was enough to convince virtually all that something extra- scientific was happening in the culture where they read that climate problems were variously reported to be either existential and catastrophic or a fraud. Media reporting justified dividing the world into climate activists and climate deniers. The two sides, and their media and political allies, denigrated their opponents, and even called their views crimes against humanity.
It wasn’t long after that when I experienced the hatred and insults from a group in my progressive church. My first ever post to a Unitarian Universalist national climate website was a NOAA temperature graph that contradicted members' posts that warming was accelerating and would very soon cause famine, extinctions, and other catastrophes. When I posted that NOAA graph with a single sentence that global warming was real, but exaggerated, the moderator commented, “We have a climate denier in our midst.” A couple of posts later, after quoting IPCC information, I was banned from the group. I was upset and heartbroken. I had seemed to have found a found a loving community, and was rejected by it, stimulating my abandonment issues going all the way back to age 2 in 1942 when my mother died in a car crash and my father, after being allowed to attend the funeral, was off the WWII Pacific theater as a B24 bomber pilot for two years. Despite trying, I have never been able to feel a sense of community with the ones who rejected me, even though it was done at a national website and not at the local church where my views were more delicately rejected and mostly just ignored.
My point of view is different from yours. The country benefits from a variety of different viewpoints.
I am 74 years old, multimillionaire, did a full career as a computer researcher establishing new methods and standards for navigation worldwide and am enjoying a second career as a self-made landlord and property manager.
I did attend much better than average public schools. I tried out a couple of colleges but I found them, in the seventies, to not be worth what they cost, which just got worse and worse and worse as time went on. Besides, most of the students were more into narcissism and parties than higher education. I certainly do not have or need any college degrees.
I have thought for a long time that the USA would benefit greatly from fewer colleges and universities and fewer students and most of all from fewer faculty. Certainly the past 8 years are proof of that.
Yes, one purpose of R1 colleges is for parents to send their kids to a four-year vacation at the end of which they get a credential. That said, there are really outstanding educational opportunities for those interested in that option as well. CU Boulder has a fantastic school of engineering, for instance.
for sure. Engineering, law and pre-med. Other than that, college was always a dalliance for the rich. In my day the primary reason was to evade the draft. People forgot that part.
Great stuff This has to be said.. we have a problem that will rot us out if we don't fix it.
I really like the mention about an obsession to football and the associated money. It reminds me of the fall of the Roman empire. Too many oafs addicted to being spectators and exhibiting clinical signs of codependency to an athletic event 😅 It's just as concerning as the idiocracy that the progressives have created in higher education.