My latest story in The Chronicle of Higher Education is on a disturbing development in Australia, where climate scientists have been subjected to threats of violence and death against themselves and their families. Authorities there consider the threats viable enough to have relocated some researchers to secure buildings and cutting them off from unmediated contact with the public, students, and the press.Fortunately the environment here in the U.S. has yet to turn so authoritarian and hostile to inconvenient data, as the article describes. The piece - which posted Friday - is online, but if you don't subscribe to the Chronicle, you'll be prompted to do so. [Update: 6/21/2011: It's now freely available.]
I've been a foreign correspondent of the Chronicle for twenty-one years now. My last piece for the paper was on alleged discrimination in Canada against graduates of that country's own doctoral programs.
The last time a climate scientist was apparently killed for his beliefs may have been the 1985 dissapearance of Vladimir Alexandrov, in Madrid, where he was trundled into a Soviet embassy van after showing insufficient scientific enthusiasm for computer models of 'nuclear winter ' at a 'nuclear freeze' rally in Cordoba.
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