As you read the following, please ask yourself why, if this "scientific theory" is so scientific and so well confirmed, all we ever get from its proponents are ratbag acts like the following. Why can't they win by simply convincing us with the weight of evidence? Instead it is pulling down the integrity of the once-respected institutions of society. like universities and governments.
The story is in this email from Gordon Fulks:
Hello Everyone,
In theory at least Oregon State University (OSU) seems to be a bastion of academic freedom, diversity, and tolerance. A wide range of ideas are openly discussed. The most viable rise to the top and the least viable fade away. But it is all a fairy tale, because OSU operates under a politically correct regimen that dictates what is acceptable to say and what is not. Transgressors who dare to be different are eventually weeded out so that the campus maintains its ideological purity.
OSU is not yet as swift or efficient as the Soviet system when Joseph Stalin was trying to quash dissent among biologists who refused to go along with Trofim Lysenko. If warnings to compromise their integrity were not followed, Stalin simply had biologists shot. That quickly thinned the ranks of all biologists and persuaded the remaining ones to comply with Stalin’s wishes. Of course, it also destroyed Soviet biology, because Lysenko was pedaling nonsense. And Russian biology has never recovered.
We learned over the weekend that chemist Nickolas Drapela, PhD has been summarily fired from his position as a “Senior Instructor” in the Department of Chemistry. The department chairman Richard Carter told him that he was fired but would not provide any reason. Subsequent attempts to extract a reason from the OSU administration have been stonewalled. Drapela appears to have been highly competent and well-liked by his students. Some have even taken up the fight to have him reinstated.
What could possibly have provoked the OSU administration to take precipitous action against one of their academics who has been on their staff for ten years, just bought a house in Corvallis, and has four young children (one with severe medical problems)? Dr. Drapela is an outspoken critic of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, the official religion of the State of Oregon, the Oregon Democratic Party, and Governor John Kitzhaber.
Five years ago, Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor went around quietly saying that he was not a believer. Then Governor Ted Kulongoski and many faculty at OSU including Dr. Jane Lubchenco made life impossible for Taylor, and he retired. (Lubchenco is now head of NOAA in the Obama administration.) Under those currently in charge, OSU climate research has grown to be a huge business, reportedly $90 million per year with no real deliverables beyond solid academic support for climate hysteria. A small army of researchers ponder the effects of Global Warming on all sorts of things from tube worms living along the Oregon Coast to butterflies inland. When the climate refuses to warm (as it has for the last twenty years), they just study ‘warming in reverse!’ Most of us call that “cooling,” but they are very careful not to upset their Obama administration contract monitors with politically incorrect terminology.
Skeptics of Global Warming who oppose the OSU approach and oppose the politicians who make it all possible but do not work for OSU also find themselves attacked. Dr. Art Robinson who is running against Peter DeFazio for an Oregon Congressional seat found three of his children under attack at OSU. All were attempting to obtain advanced degrees in the Nuclear Engineering Department and were threatened with dismissal. Because Robinson fought back, we understand that the OSU administration backed down.
As to the latest victim of political correctness at OSU, Dr. Nickolas Drapela gives us an excellent synopsis of what is going on:
“The fact of the matter is that it is now two weeks since I was fired and no one has had the cajones or the common courtesy to even tell me why. I have spoken with the Dept. Chair (Rich Carter) who fired me, and he refused to tell me why. I spoke to the Dean of Science (Vince Remcho) and he couldn’t tell me why. I spoke to HR who set up a meeting with me, then cancelled it an hour before. Then I went to the Vice President of Academic Affairs (Becky Warner) and she sent me back to Rich Carter, the chemistry chair.
It’s just a sad, sad state of affairs that an institution like OSU would fire a good employee for (ostensibly) no reason and then run around and hide from the person they fired. I had stellar teaching evaluations, I won College of Science awards for teaching, and published textbooks. My class sections were always full and I was well-liked by students (see ratemyprofessors.com). I was doing my job very well. But I guess I didn’t march in step with their philosophies.
There were quite a few student protests over this at OSU (Barometer, Facebook, etc.) but to no avail.
I was given no severance and had no warning this was about to happen. In fact, I was lured into the chair’s office under the guise of a fallacious story before being fired.
As you know, I was probably the most visibly-outspoken critic of the Global Warming doctrine at OSU. I gave several public talks on the topic and did research in the area which I regularly posted on the web. I was also on a few talk radio shows in the area. I think they finally just said, we can’t have this.
Can it be that a university whose motto is “Open minds. Open doors” cannot abide even one faculty member who disagrees with their dogma? I suppose I am too naive, but I’m still reeling from it. Unbelievable.
I should say that they regularly read all my email communications, which is why I am writing from this private email address. That has been going on for quite some time now.
As far as my options at this point, like I said I haven’t even really grasped what has just happened. I don’t know what I’m going to do, or what options I have yet. I’m sure OSU wants their story to be tight and perfectly identical among all administration before coming out with an official reason why I was fired, hence the long wait and refusal to speak to me.
I truly thank you for your concern, and I hope there is some recourse, even just for the sake of exposing what is happening at OSU.”
In a separate e-mail Drapela went on to say:
“Thanks so much for your support and your concern. That’s really nice. My students were all really upset about it. They started an email writing campaign to have me re-hired but I guess no one cares what they think.
I find that the people who want to keep things secret all the time are usually the people that have something to hide. It is certainly ok by me for you to disseminate this story. But I’m sure OSU would be horrified.
I’m not sure how I will support my family at this point. We just bought a house in Corvallis. I have four kids, one of whom has a rare, blood disorder and requires regular trips to Doernbecher’s Children’s Hospital for treatment. Now we will be without health insurance.”
We can only speculate as to how the decision to fire Drapela was made. Unlike the decision to force Taylor out (which came from the governor’s office), this decision was likely internal to OSU with the implicit backing of Governor Kitzhaber and NOAA administrator Lubchenco. I would suspect that Dr. Phil Mote (Director of their Climate Change Research Institute) had a hand in the decision, because he has previously been highly intolerant of those who oppose his ideas and could potentially threaten his business empire.
Please join with me in supporting Nick Drapela. Please join with me in supporting objective science, as well as academic freedom, diversity, and tolerance. The issues here go far beyond just Global Warming and strike at the very heart of who we are as scientists and Americans.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics) Corbett, Oregon USA
P.S. Please circulate this e-mail far and wide. The world needs to know what is going on here.
(Original source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/11/climate-skeptic-instructor-fired-f...)
Re: The Ugly Underbelly of Global Warming Hysteria on ...
This shameful development in academia over climate hysteria is best explained by the godfather of global warming, James Lovelock:
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/06/22/green-drivel
Re: The Ugly Underbelly of Global Warming Hysteria on ...
Thanks for that Patrick, it is a thought-provoking article.
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Hi Jonathon.The arguments are very very thin and wiothut any real evidence to support them. The reasons are financial and therefore political. That and laziness.Some governments don't want to admit to it, or at least don't want to take responsibility. Mainly because most economies are built upon the trading of the Fossil Fuels etc. And if they admit to it they have to stop trading in Fuels and move to green technologies which are expensive to set up and can cause political tensions with people they purchase e.g. oil from.Many PEOPLE don't want to believe in it because:a) it's actually quite a scary idea (that the actions of people could be endangering not just other plants and animals but our very own futures);b) it means people have to stop being lazy; andc) they have to change their lifestyles. For most this seems too difficult and so they would choose to disbelieve. For some it's simply hard to change long-held ideas. And even those who DO believe will often do nothing about it because they say it's not my responsibility', why should I care', or I'll die before it gets too bad'.The biggest problem currently is the media (with the exception of the BBC who are criticised for being too supporting of current climate change being a human cause). Many stories on Climate Change will try to sow the seeds of doubt. It was strange to see (as I just watched An Inconvenient Truth on Fox Movies as it's Earth Day) Al Gore demonstrate that in 2005(?) there were over 900 scientific studies published in journals on Climate Change where there was no doubt at all that human impact is leading to the current round of Global Warming, and yet of all the Media stories published in the same year on that topic, over 50% of them tried to cast doubt on the science. When all Scientific studies HAVE to be peer-reviewed (examined by other scientists) and all of them were found to show the same thing, it's interesting the media wasn't publishing info in the same way.People that talk about mass-conspiracies are fools as there are literally tens of thousands of scientists investigating some aspect of climate change and they almost all will say the same thing.As Trevor demonstrated, the arguments are childish, illogical, insubstantiated, and wiothut any scientific evidence to support them.You have to make your own mind up where you stand on issues but please always bear this in mind: Do your own research, but research the SCIENCE using science journals and magazines and avoid the conspiracy theory sites as they will never provide the whole story only results that support their biased views. Remember, a scientist as a person may be biased and try to be misleading in his reports, but scientists as a group are unbiased and are simply looking for the truth and for a report to be published other scientists have to review it and decide if it's a good study and carried out honestly.
Re: Sakchai's comment
Hello Sakchai, let me start my reply to you by greying out everything in your long comment that is merely unsubstantiated assertions - such things count for nothing. If you want to convince rational people of something, you need to provide evidence. What remains I have split into paragraphs and numbered. Here goes:
Now let's analyse what remains. But first I inform/remind you (depending on how much you have taken the trouble to read on this site) that I am easily convinced of anything that happens to be true: all you have to do is provide the evidence. And in that regard, all the remaining points in your article that I have labelled A to E contain no evidence whatsoever. None. Let's move on:
A: Surely you jest? EVERY major government in the western world is firmly behind the climate change hoax, except maybe Canada. Every one. Easy to confirm. And the economies are not based on trading fossil fuels but on using fossil fuels. The energy that powers all our lives including yours comes almost entirely from fossil fuels. The energy that will lift African and other third world societies out of poverty and subsistence living will come mostly from fossil fuels. There are alternatives, but they don't include bird and bat killing, health wrecking useless windpower.
B: This is baseless assertion but since you backed it up with your own conjectures I didn't grey it out. My experience is the precise opposite. People love an oncoming catastrophe. YOU love the thought of an oncoming catastrophe that courageous you, fighting galliantly against lifting Africans out of poverty, can help avoid. Primitive tribes used to sacrifice to the sun god to make the sun rise each morning. And some fool undoubtedly said against those who wanted to stop the killing: "People don't want to believe that the sun might not come up tomorrow; it's actually quite a scary idea and they would have to stop being lazy and go out and conquer the neighbouring tribe to get more sacrifices." And so on. In short, you tell a neat story, but evidence? Give me evidence.
C: This is both wrong (Al Gore's movie is a dishonest fiction - proven in a UK court) and antiscientific: science is about evidence, not how many people agree with you. In any case, 30,000 scientists signed a petition to say they disagreed. Now let's see you get 30,000 signatures.
D: Oh don't be such a twerp. You obviously know zip about science if you can say that. Go to co2science.org and look up literally thousands of peer-reviewed papers that disagree with your nonsense.
E: Same as for D, but also, are you aware that the climategate emails reveal massive fraud of the peer review process? And peer review isn't the holy grail you seem to imagine. Newton didn't get his theories of mechanics and gravitation peer reviewed. Even 20th century Einstein didn't! The uselessness of peer review in climate science is currently sparking a massive reworking of the peer review process in any case. Can you publish your ideas on an open website such as wattsupwiththat.com and survive the uncensored comments? Everyone is welcome to comment. If the skeptics are so wrong, why can't you or any of your scaremongering colleagues post any credible rebuttals?
The world contains two kinds of people - those who think for themselves and those who tell us to trust the experts. There doesn't seem to be a word for the former group - must be very rare. But there's a word for the latter: idiots.
To finish: Here's my starting point: CO2 is plant food. Industrial emissions have greened the planet by 6%, feeding about 300 million humans and countless wildlife. That's just a fact. Plants grow 30% or more more for a doubling of CO2. That's a simple fact, visit co2science to get it proved to you about 1,000 peer-reviewed times. So what do you have that is SO important you want me to starve those 300 million people and kill all that wildlife by reversing the CO2 increase? You have flawed computer models that, in the words of physics genius Freeman Dyson, "don't even begin to describe the real world."
Re: The Ugly Underbelly of Global Warming Hysteria on ...
I find it both amusing and predictable that those who cling to climate change hysteria seem to be those who, were there no claim of a coming climate catastrophe, would likely dream of a world in which the proposed "solutions" to climate change would be instituted anyway. Things like higher taxation of the rich economies, a more omnipotent world government, a return by mankind to more humble agrarian & unambitious virtue. I have often told people that if the solution to global warming were lower taxes, decentralized government, increased personal liberty and an unleashing of the entrepreneurial spirit throughout the world, then the climate change theory would have been universally denounced and discredited long ago. That the "crisis" can only be solved by further oppression of the ambitious or affluent should be a clue.
I view Al Gore as a modern day Christopher Columbus during his exile to Hispaniola, where the natives grew weary and annoyed at his continual interference in their customs, and so planned to just kill him. When he got wind of his disfavored status and impending fate, he read his almanac, discovered a coming lunar eclipse and loudly pronounced that his moon god was angry at the natives' treatment of him, and that four nights hence, the moon would turn red in the sky. When it happened, he promised a return of the moon when he and his men were afforded all the luxuries and offerings they demanded, which of course were granted. Mr. Gore has been trying this for 20+ years, and he is annoyed that the natives have not yet enriched him according to his prophecy.
Re: The Ugly Underbelly of Global Warming Hysteria on ...
Tragic but true I fear - the real goal of these people is world poverty and hard, grinding, joyless lives.
For everyone except themselves of course.