NPR is reporting that David LeGates, the University of Delaware geology geography professor who has made a career of denying that human activity has affected global climate, has been appointed to a top position at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by the Trump administration.
Excerpts from the From the NPR story (emphasis mine):
Legates has a long history of using his position as an academic scientist to publicly cast doubt on climate science. … In 2007, Legates was one of the authors of a paper that questioned previous findings about the role of climate change in destroying the habitat of polar bears. That research was partially funded by grants from Koch Industries, the lobbying group the American Petroleum Institute and ExxonMobil, according to InsideClimate News.
Legates also appeared in a video pushing the discredited theory that the sun is the cause of global warming. In testimony before the U.S. Senate in 2014, Legates argued that a climate science report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change erroneously stated that humans are causing global warming.
“He’s not just in left field, he’s not even near the ballpark,” says Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine biology at Oregon State University and head of NOAA under President Obama.
I highlighted that partial sentence above because I want everyone to see what their tax dollars are paying for. As the NPR story notes, LeGates’ job at UD lends authority to ideas that otherwise might fail to gain acceptance.
LeGates is hardly the only right-wing academic with fringe ideas who gained tenure at UD. The university still lists Linda Gottfredson, the education psychologist who took grant money from the eugenics-supporting Pioneer Fund and basically agrees with Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve,” as a professor emeritus. In that case the university actually fought accepting the grant and lost, but you have to wonder how and why academics interested in such right-wing-fringe areas of research came to be hired in the first place.