Recent posting at WUWT?
Gordon J. Fulks:
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.
But the reason seems clear. Drapela is a climate skeptic.
Says commenter number one:
Green is the new McCarthy.
Except that I bet that more people have been fired by American universities for being climate skeptics than were ever fired for being Communists.
I favour a world in which people can be fired for any stupid reason at all, provided there is no contract saying otherwise. Employee beware. But this case does shine a bright light on what a huge industry-stroke-secular-religion Climate Catastrophism has become. The idea that the big money is all on the side of climate skepticism is ludicrous.
Who pays for Oregon State University? Do they know what they are paying for? Do they like it? Might they be persuaded to stop paying? Maybe if questions of that sort were asked loudly enough, and if they started to be answered, Drapela might get his job back.
I’d find that hard to believe but if true, surely there would be outrage on grounds of academic freedom? I believe in the states there even biology professors who don’t believe in evolution.
At least an email campaign should be started by academics. Pretty much every engineer I know in academia (and out of it) is at least slightly skeptical. Anyone who works with modelling much simpler systems that the entire planet, say just the interaction of single wavelength radiation with dust particles (a lidar for example) is very skeptical.
Anybody who works with models should be skeptical because, to borrow from Chemical Engineering, they need to match plant data.
Purely theoretical models lie and should always be validated before put into general use to make predictions about future behavior.
I wonder if there is more to this than meets the eye… but if not it is a wonderful propaganda gift to ‘our side’.
When you’ve got Truth, freedom can only let in Error.
I expect this sort of thing from our state rivals, the U of O Ducks (pronounced with an F in place of the D), but this story hurts. My fellow Beavers will hear about this.
Didn’t expect to get my local news from Samizdata, either. Props.
Looking at his presentation it references a lot of globalist/NWO type conspiracy stuff a la Alex Jones. Perhaps that is why?
I also am not quite sure what sort of job “senior instructor” is. It sounds like a purely teaching position rather than a tenured academic position, so it may be treated as a regular employment-at-will job without any academic freedom protections.
So what? If he was fired because he did not drinketh from the bountiful cup of AGW, that is the story, not his terms of employment.
What Mose said – I’d expect the hippies in Eugene (U of O) to pull a stunt like that, but OSU is the college where people go to learn forestry or the like.
Corvallis is a more sensible place.
(That said, the funding for their Climate Change center might be a reason to fire him, as the presentation suggests…
Also, mdc’s theory makes more sense to me.
Bringing up Goebbels – as he does fairly early – is a cheap shot. The rest of his presentation hit far too many Loony-Anti-Globalist keywords for me to take him seriously as a non-kook, even though I agree with him on the scientific aspect.
When people bring up the Club of Rome to scare people with One World Government Population Control Gonna Kill Us All stuff, I start writing them off.)
How can anyone be a climate skeptic? Climate is all around us! (As Mark Twain is supposed to have said when asked if he believed in infant baptism, “Believe in it? Why, I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”)
That sort of thing is not new at Oregon State(Link)
Oregon leans left politically, as California folks have fled their to get affordable houses, and has a green streak. The Republicans that get elected tend to be rather moderate, so there’s little chance they’ll get backlash on the state level unless it can be cast as an academic freedom issue rather than a green-versus-skeptic issue.
“Thus, Democrat activist David Hamby and militant feminist and chairman of the nuclear engineering department Kathryn Higley”
I’ve got to admit I laughed at this description.
A militant feminist in charge of a nuclear engineering department is no laughing matter, mdc!
I laughed to Alisa.
Thus (I suppose) confirming the femmist view that men are so dark that we are amused by the prospect of death and destruction.
Of course we are not far from the point where even science departments are appointed on the basis of politicical/cultural ideology.
The idea of the “scientific method” is already dying in academia.
Back in 1986 (in Harvard) there was an attack on Elizabeth Warren (AKO the Indian Princess “Dances With Lies”) for not allowng anyone to see the raw data on which her “scientific” work was based.
But Elizabeth Warren was not undermined – her position (as both female, “native American”, and MOST IMPORTANTLY a hard left scumbag) meant that she could as she liked.
There are many other stories of great “scientific” frauds that are dominating Western culture to this day, in Jack Cashill’s book “Hoodwinked”.
Mostly in the “social sciences” – so the natural sciences must work hard to join in the general cultural collapse.
To be fair to Elizabeth Warren – there actually is a Indian link in her forefathers.
Some of her forefathers helped force the Ch… on the “Trail of Tears”.
That is a link – just not quite the link the lady implies.