Following my lecture last week at Cornell, one Cornell professor, a well-known climate activist, called for the firing of the director of the Cornell Atkinson Institute for Sustainability — an accomplished scientist himself — simply for hosting my visit. Gavin Schimdt, a NASA scientist and another well-known climate activist, took to social media to complain that I had cited the definition of “climate change” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — which he apparently rejects, taking aim at both me and the IPCC.1

The ever-present Michael E. Mann weighed in as well, whinging that my invitation to Cornell was “problematic,” explaining that, “there can be no balance between science and antiscience, between whether the Earth is round and whether it is flat.” Bizarrely, the student reporter covering the event contacted another activist climate scientist from Hong Kong to opine on my invitation. This is the fellow who had a total meltdown2 on stage following a lecture I gave in Australia earlier this year. He explained on social media of my Cornell talk, “Giving climate deniers a stage isn’t balance—it’s a disservice . . . We must be vigilant about who we platform.”

A deep irony here is that my talk included several examples of efforts to “cancel” me based on my peer-reviewed research and my support of the assessments of the IPCC — overall and on disaster costs and trends in extreme weather.

A 2017 article about the “science police” in climate science recounted some of these failed cancellation campaigns, against me and others. Cambridge University climate scientist Mike Hulme — also the subject of various cancellation campaigns — had the last word in that piece:

Is the purpose of science to find evidence that supports a particular advocacy campaign or a policy course or ideological position—to keep ‘on message’? Or is the point of science to investigate (imperfectly, but systematically) how the physical world works? If the latter, then wrinkles in science, conflicts and arguments, due skepticism of previously established findings—all these things are essential.

In response to popular request, below is a link to my slides from my talk. Below that is the video of the event. Please share around!

The next chance to freak out and try to cancel a university lecture of mine is this week at the University of Wyoming — Details below!