These days, the number of climate change deniers still active in academia is pretty tiny, and getting smaller. The University of Victoria in Canada decided not to renew Susan Crockford’s adjust professor title in May, and deniers are all of a sudden up in arms about it.
You may remember Crockford as the woman whose blog posts deniers rely on to argue that everything’s fine with polar bears, despite the rapid melting of sea ice upon which they rely to hunt and reproduce. A study back in 2017 used Crockford’s posts to explore the difference between how mainstream, consensus scientists talk about climate change, and how deniers do. While mainstream scientists refer to peer-reviewed studies to highlight the risks of a melting Arctic, deniers point to Crockford’s blog posts to say that polar bears are fine because their numbers are recovering.
While it’s true that polar bear populations have grown in recent decades, it’s mostly thanks to a mid-century hunting ban, and it seems likely that warming will undo this grow. But, of course, deniers insist that because populations are growing now, they’re safe forever.
Unsurprisingly, they’re a little upset that the University of Victoria decided not to renew Crockford’s position, which came with no salary, involved no teaching, and was mostly symbolic. However, the position did give Crockford access to the library and a sliver of credibility. The appearance that she was a serious enough academic to be endorsed by a real university is something she could use to try and get research grants, dovetailing with deniers’ parasitic need to boost their own credibility by attaching themselves to legitimate aspects of academia.
CFACT referred to the move as an “ideological purge,” and an op-ed in the Canadian Financial Post quoted Crockford calling it “an academic hanging without a trial.” Valerie Richardson opened her totally-not-biased coverage in the Washington Times with the lede “Nobody has done more to sink the claim that climate change is endangering polar bears than zoologist Susan Crockford — and she may have paid for it with her job.”
But an unpaid, non-teaching adjunct position is hardly a job. While it is true that nobody has done more to attack the claim that polar bears need cold, Crockford sure hasn’t sunk it.
Deniers will of course try and spin this into a free speech on campus issue, even though it obviously isn’t. Crockford wasn’t being paid by the university and is still perfectly free to continue doing her blog-level polar bear population science.
But she’ll have to soldier on without her U-Vic affiliation, which is a major loss to her effort to seed denial propaganda, and the real reason for all the commotion in climate denial land. For all their bluster about how liberal colleges are the bane of human existence, deniers are desperate for the credibility that comes with a university affiliation.
All this decision does, then, is prevent Crockford from using the University’s respectability and legitimacy for her own benefit. And given that her polar bear “research” is all blog-level, and nothing that can pass peer-review, without the University’s credibility, she’s left with none of her own.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: