West Point Fired Its Only Climate Scientist
About this episode
The episode discusses the firing of West Point's only climate scientist and its implications for national security and military education.
West Point just fired the only climate scientist on its faculty. Seventeen years of uniformly outstanding reviews, tenure, a grant to research weather systems for troop protection, and Dr. Adam Kalkstein still lost his job this spring after refusing an order to scrub human causes of climate change from his curriculum. Mike and Neal dig into the lawsuit, the meeting where a two-star general reportedly stormed out of the room, and what it says about where the service academies are headed. This one goes beyond a single professor. Mike and Neal unpack why climate change might be the single largest threat multiplier facing national security right now, driving crop failures, water scarcity, and the kind of mass migration that destabilizes governments from Syria to the Sahel. Neal draws on his own time landing in the Pacific and watching entire islands disappear underwater. Mike pulls from a paper he wrote on climate and national security years before this became a live political fight. The question underneath all of it: if young officers aren't allowed to learn the full picture, how are they supposed to make good decisions when the stakes are highest? From there the conversation turns…
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