It’s tricky being a state climatologist these days, says David Stooksbury, who was Georgia’s until last year. People in the job—which focuses on local forecasts, not global change—seem to run afoul of governors, both liberal and conservative, and find themselves abruptly booted out of office.
“The state never even contacted me,” says Mr. Stooksbury, who is an associate professor of atmospheric science in the University of Georgia’s new College of Engineering, a job he held concurrent with his state responsibilities. “I got an e-mail from a friend last September saying he’d heard I was being let go. And I still really don’t know why.” In a politically conservative state, he suspects, he may have pushed too hard for water conservation and alternative energy.
George Taylor is much clearer on why he lost his job. His title at Oregon State University was state climatologist in 2007 when, he recalls, “the governor said, in essence, ‘He’s not my state climatologist’ and told the university to stop me from using that title, which I did.”
The reason for the move was no secret: Mr. Taylor doesn’t believe people are making the planet warmer and repeatedly said so while the Democratic governor was trying to reduce fossil-fuel use in the state. “Academic freedom being what it is, it wasn’t possible for him to fire me,” Mr. Taylor says. Nonetheless, he retired the following year, fed up with the situation.
The two researchers’ positions on climate change couldn’t be more different. “I think we are on firm ground saying we will have warming globally,” says Mr. Stooksbury. “Sure, there are uncertainties, but are you willing to bet the future on them?” (In his state work, he emphasizes, he confined his statements to topics like droughts and the need to watch water consumption.)
Mr. Taylor, in contrast, sees natural cycles of warming and cooling. He thinks that the effects of carbon dioxide “are overstated by a lot of people. The first time I said this, in a talk at OSU in 1996, I was greeted by a great deal of anger. That day I became a pariah.” But he hasn’t changed his mind.
He now runs a consulting firm, Applied Climate Services, that does flood assessments for local water districts. There is a new, state-supported climate-research institute service at Oregon State headed by Philip W. Mote, a snow expert who worked on a 2007 report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that said human activity was the likely cause of global warming. He does not have the official title of state climatologist.
In Georgia, the state climatologist is now an employee of the state’s Environmental Protection Division. “That’s the saddest part,” says Mr. Stooksbury, who continues to study climate. “The position had been in the university to keep it out of politics. Now it is a political appointment.”
