Tag Archives: University of Victoria

The Hounding of Roger Pielke Jr amid the demise of academic freedom in climate change

Posted on November 11, 2021 | Comments Off on The Hounding of Roger Pielke Jr amid the demise of academic freedom in climate change

Academic freedom is squashed when scholars challenge any of the principle tenets of climate change and one of the most egregious examples of this has been the hounding of Roger Pielke Jr., explained in detail in a briefing paper published today.

If this is what climate change activists and their supporters in academia will do to a senior professor like Roger Pielke Jr., who really only disagrees with them on a single point, it’s no wonder that adjunct professors like myself have been virtually powerless in defending ourselves when the university mob mobilizes to attack with earnest (Laframboise 2019).

Here’s the executive summary, by civil liberties journalist Donna Laframboise:

Climate change, we’re told, threatens the ‘viability of our societies‘. In August 2021, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres declared the alarm bells ‘deafening‘. If this is even remotely the case, humanity is in urgent need of clear thinking.

But the climate movement rejects clear thinking. It has little interest in sorting facts from fiction, in ensuring its efforts are based on evidence rather than dogma. The hostility and venom directed at Roger Pielke Jr, a natural disasters expert who wholeheartedly supports decarbonisation of the global economy, demonstrates this beyond doubt.

Stray but a little from the dominant climate narrative, and activists will fantasise about your violent death. They will dismiss your peer-reviewed publications as marginal, accuse you of spreading disinformation, and successfully campaign to get you fired from part-time jobs. They will publish false allegations about you on the White House website, target journalists who quote you in news stories, and subject you to punitive, intrusive, and extensive financial investigation.

In recent years, Roger Pielke Jr has further discovered that academic freedom is an empty slogan at the University of Colorado (Boulder), his primary employer. Rather than defending its most senior environmental studies professor, his own department is now determinedly harassing and humiliating him.

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Unanswered questions on my expulsion from UVic and its Speakers Bureau

Posted on October 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Unanswered questions on my expulsion from UVic and its Speakers Bureau

Last week I wrote about my loss of adjunct professor status at the University of Victoria (UVic), preceded by my expulsion from its volunteer Speakers Bureau. It provided background to an op-ed that appeared in the National Post on Wednesday (16 October) by journalist Donna Laframboise exposing this travesty of academic freedom. See also an article in the Washington Times that came out yesterday and note that the GWPF has issued a press release condemning the suppression of academic freedom at UVic and has released a briefing paper called The Defenestration of Dr. Crockford: Silencing Dissent at the University of Victoria.
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Polar_bear_resting_but_alert_original USFWS

Today I’m in London preparing to give another lecture about the Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened. Donna has published more detail on the questions she asked UVic but which they refused to answer after nearly three weeks. It’s critical to understand that the university is determined to keep any and all details about these events secret.

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UVic bows to outside pressure and rescinds my adjunct professor status

Posted on October 16, 2019 | Comments Off on UVic bows to outside pressure and rescinds my adjunct professor status

As you may have heard, this summer I lost my status as Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada (UVic), a position I had held for 15 years. This action followed my expulsion from the roster of the university’s volunteer Speakers Bureau in May 2017. However, until April 2017 the university and the Anthropology department proudly promoted my work, including my critical polar bear commentary, which suggests someone with influence (and perhaps political clout) intervened to silence my scientific criticism.

Crockford skull

Journalist Donna LaFramboise has exposed this travesty in the National Post (16 October 2019), which you can read here. I have provided more background below and Donna’s blog post is here.

UPDATE 21 October 2019: See my follow-up post for more background and a critical post from Donna Laframboise on the questions UVic refused to answer. The Washington Times published an article yesterday and GWPF has issued a press release condemning the suppression of academic freedom at UVic and the release of a briefing paper called The Defenestration of Dr. Crockford: Silencing Dissent at the University of Victoria.

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Stirling and Derocher’s sea ice trick – omitting facts to make polar bears appear endangered

Posted on March 6, 2013 | Comments Off on Stirling and Derocher’s sea ice trick – omitting facts to make polar bears appear endangered

Polar bear biologists Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher continue to insist that western Hudson Bay (WHB) polar bears are already showing negative effects of reduced sea ice due to global warming. In their 2012 summary paper (Stirling and Derocher 2012), they updated someone else’s graph of global sea ice (to 2011) but used a graph for Hudson Bay (HB) ice breakup dates that ended in 2007. However, we know from other evidence that at least one of those years (2009) would have required extending the scale of the breakup date graph upwards and flattened the slope of the trend line. Updating the HB breakup date graph would not have supported Stirling and Derocher’s premise that polar bears in WHB are starving due to increasingly earlier sea ice breakup, so they simply left the data out (see Fig. 1).

In other fields, this is called fraud.

Is it fraud here? You decide.

I’ve expressed my outrage about this before (here and here), because we know from news reports that in 2009, breakup of Hudson Bay sea ice was unusually late: the Port of Churchill (in WHB) did not open for ship traffic until Aug. 12, a full three weeks later than average (July 21) – and the latest opening of the Port since records began in 1974.

I try not to keep thinking of Stirling and Derocher’s unscientific behaviour but was reminded of it again on Monday (March 4) when I attended a lecture at the University of Victoria given by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. To my disbelief, Mann tried to argue that global temperatures predicted by NASA scientist James Hansen in 1988 have “closely resembled” actual temperatures since then – by presenting a graph of actual temperatures (observations) that ended in 2005, despite the fact that recent temperatures have not risen at the rate depicted in his graph (see previous post, #8). He did say, as an aside, that “you could argue that if the data were extended out to the present, the line might more closely resemble scenario C [a flat line]” but then continued with his story that observations were matching the ever-rising-temperatures of Hansen’s scenario B (see Figure 2 below).

For both parties – Stirling/Derocher and Mann – the recent data points left off their graphs did not fit their narrative: sea ice in Hudson Bay is not on a steady, precipitous decline and global temperatures have not continued to rise as predicted by Hansen in 1988. The graphs look like science, but they are not.

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