Professor escaped censorship

Climate change is tricky. There’s a disconnect between what the science says and the narrative in the mainstream media. One professor found that the only way to be able to discuss this topic freely was to leave academia.

This blog comes from Dr Matthew Wielicki who as a child escaped communist Poland and as an adult escaped a restrictive university.

The dream

Dr Wielicki is a former faculty member in the department of geological sciences at the university of Alabama. He has a doctorate in geology and earth science and is the author of Irrational Fear Substack.

Dr Wielicki was born in southern Poland at a time when Poland was under the sphere of the influence of the Soviet Union and a communist government. And his parents made the decision to immigrate to Chicago. And then eventually he grew up in Fresno California where they received political asylum and eventually citizenship.

Dr Wielicki grew up on a college campus, California State University, Fresno. His father was a faculty member there at the school of business and his mother was in information technology and staff. He would ride his scooter around campus after school every day. It was something that he fell in love with. It was a place where there were these warriors that battled in the playing field of ideas and then they would go and have dinner together and they would chat and be friendly. It was just this beautiful place of intellectual discussion. So when he was about 10-12 years of age, he decided that he was going to be an academic.

Dr Wielicki was always intrigued by science. His original degree was in biochemistry and cellular biology. He was a geo-chronologist. He received his PhD in geochemistry from the department of earth, planetary sciences at UCLA. And then he was offered a 10-year track position at the department of geological sciences at the University of Alabama. Taking that faculty position in Alabama was his dream and so he was absolutely excited. He was a little nervous moving his family from California to Alabama. That’s a pretty big move. But it was definitely something that he wanted to do.

The reality

But he noticed that the campus that he grew up on and the one that he and his father would talk about was different. College campuses have always been meritocracies. They have GPAs, and give grades, but there was a shift from performance and ability to immutable characteristics, meaning what you look like or your background or your race. And those are things that students don’t have any control over. And so there was this disconnect from what he remembered where it was this competition of ideas and everybody was on an equal playing field. If your idea was better than your competitor’s idea, then your idea would win. But now it seemed that the ideas didn’t matter as much as characteristics of the students to appease funding agencies or whatever it was. They got rid of the Graduate requirement exam (GRE). So in the name of equity they removed an entrance exam and so he was now left with trying to understand a student’s life story from an essay without having any standardized metric to compare them to. He would bring this up in faculty meetings and it was clear that they were ticking a box.

Censorship and coercion

There were certain things that they couldn’t discuss in academia. In earth sciences if you speak about climate change, that is one of these taboo subjects. Climate change is tricky. There’s a disconnect between the science and the narrative in the mainstream media and what activist scientists have been pushing. The narrative in the media is doing so much damage to mental health. Climate anxiety is probably the number one anxiety issue for the college students that he talks to (Appendix A). And the science does not support that fear. He thinks that that fear is irrational.

There are multiple sides to the climate issue. It isn’t a one-sided argument. It’s best to assess all the information and allow yourself to change your mind. It’s remarkable that there is a whole spectrum for genders, but climate is binary – the earth is either on fire or climate change doesn’t exist. There is a whole spectrum in the middle that is lost! You can have so many genders, but you can’t have different opinions on climate!

Climate is a very convenient way for governments and institutions to get involved in nearly every aspect of a citizen’s life. And it you are basing your life decisions, like whether or not to have children, whether or not to raise a family, whether or not to make sacrifices today such that maybe in a decade or so you’re going to be in a better position, if you think that the planet is going to end, you don’t make those sacrifices. Dr Wielicki definitely loves the earth and humans have an influence on the climate and on their environment and we should minimize that. But the disconnect that our small policy changes today will have some dramatic impact on future temperatures or weather in general is untrue. But it you speak out against it you’re essentially a pariah (outcast) in this community (Appendix B).

Dr Wielicki gave a two-day lecture in his introductory geology class about climate realism. The students were amazingly refreshed to hear that the planet wasn’t going to end in 10-12 years. But faculty members were a little uncomfortable with it. If you speak out scientists disagree with your narrative, this isn’t an open discussion. This isn’t about finding the truth. This is about silencing those that disagree with you such that they can continue to push the narrative that there’re pushing.

Dr Wielicki started to publish a little bit more on social media and the moment that those stories gained any traction faculty members in the University of Alabama were making posts that he was committing violence. That he was putting their jobs and their safety in jeopardy because he was asking questions. So he decided to leave the university during the COVID-19 pandemic. It just wasn’t that dream job that he had been thinking about his entire life. It wasn’t this beautiful place of the exchange of ideas that he wanted it to be. He doesn’t think that he would have been able to stay if he chose to stay. He doubts that he would have been awarded tenue if he chose to stay because he had been so vocal.

The data are very clear. There is no metric that we can call the current state of the climate a crisis or an emergency or a breakdown. They’re trying to elicit fear. When people are afraid they are most vulnerable to changing their behaviors.

Growing up in a household that was very aware of some of the mistakes of a communist type of government – centralized planning, the removal of the free exchange of ideas – that makes him more vocal because he sees that we’re making the same mistakes that his parents always told him we should never go down this road. The lack of tolerance for ideas, the censorship. The idea that if you question certain aspects of the government or certain ideologies that no longer were you a good citizen. But if you haven’t lived it, you don’t know that these are mistakes.

Science is supposed to be about the discovery of the truth. And the most important aspect of that is the ability to discuss. Dr Wielicki wants young people to be hopeful for their future. We should realize that there’s going to be challenges. Climate will change but that shouldn’t be a reason to think that your future isn’t hopeful.

Appendix A: Fear

How we were teaching the state of the climate is having a negative impact on people’s mental health. They are being told that the planet is getting worse and worse whereas the data show that its actually improving. The human condition has never been better. Less people have malnutrition, less people die from famine than ever before. They have the exact opposite view. Less people die from natural disasters. Every weather event was catastrophized by the media and scientists. People are being robbed of any hope for the future. They’re being pounded all the time of images of floods and fires and destruction and told that the planet will end in 10-12 years.

But Dr Wielicki lets students come to their own conclusion. He doesn’t try to scare them.

Appendix B: Censorship and coercion

There are forbidden topics like climate that you can’t have open discussions about because of the fear of being labelled a climate denier. Many people can’t risk losing their jobs. So self-preservation is a big motive for not speaking up. So university staff and students were afraid to voice their opinions. They are afraid to challenge the consensus.

It’s driven by the IPCC, the WEF, and people like Al Gore. It’s to increase their power and their money at the expense of young people’s mental health. And that goes against scientific integrity. Because when all this stuff doesn’t happen they will look at scientists and say, “you guys lied to us”. And then they will ignore whatever the scientists say. If we lose scientific integrity because we want to change people’s behaviors because of the existential threat of climate we’re going to have a real problem when we face our next threat. We need to appreciate scientific integrity and have a free exchange of ideas.

They build a consensus by pushing out everyone who disagrees with them and ostracize them and claim that they are heretics and they are being paid by the fossil fuel industry so we can’t trust them anyway.

The immigrant community is one of the most vocal about this stuff because they’ve experienced this already. They know where this goes.

The alarmists claim “we know everything”. The idea that we understand this coupled non-linear chaotic system and we know exactly how it works and we’re going to predict the future accurately. Climate is unique because most of our science looks at the past and predictions can be tested against observations. But the climate model predictions are unfalsifiable because we can’t go to the future and test them. So it doesn’t fit into the scientific method. A prediction isn’t science because we can’t test it. In the scientific method a hypothesis has to be testable and falsifiable. So climate is this unique field where they have a crystal ball in some computer and they are going to accurately predict the future. And this is the focus rather than the empirical evidence like, we are not seeing an increase in extreme weather events. And we are seeing a rapid decrease in the number fatalities from extreme weather events. And we are not seeing mass migration of people because of climate change.

The amount of censorship and coercion of people who disagree is alarming. Climate alarmism has become a vehicle for reduced freedom, socialism and central planning and poverty (if we went back to caves, we would have less impact on the environment).

Dr Wielicki’s lectures really resonated with young people. He asked, why is it that they don’t want me to tell you what I am telling you? Do they think that you’re not smart enough to have both sides of this argument so that you can come to your own conclusion? Do you find that a little bit wary? Be most wary of the people who want to control information. His parents told him that the beauty of academia was the free exchange of ideas. This control of information is very scary and reminds him of why his parents left their homeland in communist Poland and moved to USA. It’s very sad to see that this is happening in the USA.

The ultimate aim is not to save the environment but to control the human population of the earth. If you can control the energy supply and the food supply, what else do you need? Climate alarmists see no limits in their minds in how they can tell you and force you to live your life. We had societies like that (for example, the Soviet Union) and people were miserable. Except those who get to tell everyone else how to live. They get to live the way that they want, but everyone else doesn’t. Climate alarmism is really about socialism/Marxism and not science. It is a very convenient tool because it’s everything, what you eat, where you live, where you work, what you consume. If you want to get involved in people’s lives I can see why it’s being exploited this way. It seems the solution to every problem is socialism/Marxism.

Appendix C: Irrational fear substack

An in-depth look at some of society’s most irrational fears, from climate change to politics and everything in between. By Dr Matthew Wielicki earth science professor-in-exile, climate and cultural realist, political orphan, pluralist, husband, father, friend, and optimist.

Recent topics discussed include:
– Hurricane hype busted: the inconvenient truths about hurricanes.
– Climate change, hurricanes, and the real costs of rebuilding in vulnerable areas.
– Prophets of doom: The green elite’s war on human progress.
– Science or speculation: The uncomfortable truth about climate proxies.
– Are agencies leveraging climate fear for taxpayer dollars?
– The myth of increasing disasters
– The statistical myth of ‘once in a 1000 year’ weather events
– When science gets political
– How journal endorsements threaten trust
– The risks of iron fertilization and geoengineering.
– Why grand geoengineering schemes may do more harm than good.
– The great adjustment debate: Is climate data really reliable?
– Unsettled science: Are we really measuring earth’s energy balance accurately?
– Complex systems, simple solutions, and the myth of climate fixes.
– AMOC’s collapse? Think again – the Florida current’s stability defies climate predictions.
– Plastic panic: The misguided war on modern civilization’s backbone.
– Are wildfires and CO2 really linked?

Acknowledgement

This blog comes from Dr Matthew Wielicki.

His website.

Posted, October 2024