Billionaire Tom Steyer used his money to attack a lone climate researcher.
Roger Pielke Jr.'s research on climate and disaster policy wins awards and is cited by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"My views are entirely mainstream," says Pielke. "My work is cited by all three working groups of the IPCC. There's nothing contrarian."
Both Steyer and Pielke agree that "greenhouse gases warm the climate," but Pielke's sin was saying, "it's not the apocalypse."
Because of that, "the Center for American Progress decided to make me a target," he says.
The center is a lefty group that pushes climate hysteria, running articles claiming, "Climate change is fueling more deadly and destructive floods," "Extreme weather is only intensifying," etc.
Anyone who disagrees is labeled a "climate denier."
Steyer, now running for governor of California, gave the center enough money to run hit piece after hit piece that describes Pielke's work as "fantastical falsehoods," and calls him a "disinformer" who "ignores the data on climate science."
Pielke didn't know who funded the smears until WikiLeaks revealed an email to Steyer from ThinkProgress's editor: "Thanks for your support of this work ... it's fair to say, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change."
Think about that.
"Progressive" activists are proud to stop a researcher from writing about what he knows.
Pielke describes his persecution in my new video.
It began after Al Gore's Oscar-winning movie in which Gore claimed that temperature increases create stronger storms.
Pielke had the nerve to disagree.
"Doesn't warmer water create bigger storms?" I ask him.
"All else equal, yes, it does. But the atmosphere is a complicated place. You have things like windshear, which knocks over storms. ... We haven't observed changes in the frequency or intensity beyond natural variability."
Pielke's research acknowledged that there were "increasing impacts of extreme weather, mostly economic costs and loss of life," but said the impacts were not caused by bigger storms but by "what we build, where we build, how much wealth we have in harm's way."
"When the climate advocacy movement shifted to extreme weather, I was on the 'wrong' side," he adds. "I had a choice to make. Was I going to call things like I see them, or was I going to succumb to pressure to say things that maybe I didn't believe?"
Pielke called it as he saw it, and paid a price.
"There was an enormous effort to try to silence people who had a voice," says Pielke.
Testifying before Congress, Pielke said, "It is misleading ... to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or drought have increased."
That information is also in the findings of the IPCC.
But the Obama White House put out a 3,000-word memo attacking him: "Dr. Pielke's statements ... are seriously misleading ... not representative of mainstream views."
"It was the sort of thing your crazy uncle might put on Facebook," laughs Pielke. "I'm the only academic or researcher that any president, including Donald Trump, has ever singled out."
The University of Colorado, where Pielke worked for 24 years, caved in to the pressure. They closed Pielke's research center, canceled his classes and moved his office into a closet.
"What I went through was not what a university is supposed to be for," says Pielke.
The state-funded school, after dumping Pielke's actual scientific research, now calls "climate change and sustainability ... the central focus of our campus-wide initiatives" and hosts silly things like "climate summits" with panels on "youth climate advocacy."
It's so dumb. And so wrong.
Fortunately, Pielke found another job. Now he researches climate at the American Enterprise Institute, one of many think tanks that does research universities once did.
As I write, betting sites have Steyer in second place in California's governor's race.
Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of "Government Gone Wild: Exposing the Truth Behind the Headlines."
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