Dr. Matthew Wielicki: I Refuse to Stay Silent about Climate Change | Stories of Us

Climate change is tricky. There's a disconnect between what the science says and what the narrative in the mainstream media is. My name is Matthew Wylecki and this is my story. I am a former faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. I have a doctorate in geology and earth science and I am the author of Irrational Fear Substack. I was born in southern Poland in a town called Wrocław at a time when Poland was under the sphere of the influence of the Soviet Union and a communist government and my parents made the decision to immigrate to Chicago like all good Polish people do. That's the Ellis Island for Polish people is Chicago and then eventually I grew up in Fresno, California where we received political asylum and eventually citizenship. I grew up on a college campus, Cal State University, Fresno. My father was a faculty member there at the School of Business. My mother was in information technology and staff. I would ride my scooter around campus after school every day. It was something that I fell in love with. It was a place where there was these warriors that battled in the playing field of ideas and then they would go and have dinner together and they would chat and be friendly and it was just this beautiful place of just intellectual discussion. So I pretty much decided I was going to be an academic when I was 10 or 12. I was always intrigued by science. My original degrees biochemistry and cellular biology. I was what was called a geochronologist. Geo being rock, chronology being kind of the age of. I received my PhD from the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences at UCLA and then I was offered a tenure-track position at the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. Taking that faculty position in Alabama was my dream and so I was absolutely excited. I was a little nervous moving our family from California to Alabama. That's a pretty big move but you know we were excited. It was definitely something I wanted to do but I noticed that the campus that I grew up on and the one that my father and I would talk about was different. College campuses have always been meritocracies. We have GPAs, we give grades and there was a shift from performance and ability to what I would say are immutable characteristics. Meaning what you look like or maybe your background or your race and those are things that students don't have any control over and so there was this disconnect from what I remembered where it was this this competition of ideas and everybody was on an equal playing field and it was if your idea was better than your competitor's idea then your ideas would win and now it seemed that the ideas didn't matter as much as characteristics of the students to appease funding agencies or whatever it was. One of the things they did was they got rid of the GRE. This is the graduate requirement exam so in the name of equity they removed an entrance exam and so I was now left with trying to understand someone's life story from an essay without having any standardized metric to compare them to so I would bring this up in faculty meetings and it was clear that they were checking a box. There were certain things that we couldn't discuss in academia. In earth sciences if you speak about climate change that is one of these taboo subjects and climate change is tricky. There's a disconnect between what the science says and what the narrative in the mainstream media is and what certain what I would call activist scientists have been kind of pushing. The narrative in the media is doing so much damage to mental health. Climate anxiety is probably the number one anxiety issue for the college students that I talk to and the science does not support that fear. I think that that fear is irrational. Climate is a very convenient way for governments and institutions to get involved in nearly every aspect of a citizen's life and if you are basing your life decisions like whether or not to have children, whether or not to raise a family, whether or not to make sacrifices today such that maybe in a decade or not you're going to be in a better position. If you think that the planet is going to end you don't make those sacrifices. I definitely love the earth and humans have an influence on the climate and on their environment and we should minimize that but the disconnect that our small policy changes today will have some dramatic impact on future temperatures or weather in general is untrue but if you speak out against it you're essentially a pariah in this community. I gave a two-day lecture in my introductory geology class about kind of climate realism is what I called it. The students were amazingly refreshed to hear that the planet wasn't going to end in 10 or 12 years but faculty members were a little uncomfortable with it. If you push out scientists that disagree with your narrative this isn't an open discussion, this isn't about finding the truth, this is about silencing those that disagree with you such that you can continue to push the narrative that you're pushing. I started to publish a little bit more on social media and the moment that those stories gained any traction faculty members in the University of Alabama were making posts that I was committing violence, that I was putting their jobs and their safety in jeopardy because I was asking questions so I decided to leave during COVID. It just wasn't that dream job that I had been thinking about my entire life. It wasn't this this beautiful place of the exchange of ideas that I wanted it to I don't think I would have been able to stay if I chose to stay. I doubt that I would have been awarded tenure if I chose to stay because I had been so vocal. The data is very clear there is no metric that we can call the current state of the climate a crisis or an emergency or a breakdown. They're trying to elicit fear when people are afraid they are most vulnerable to changing their behaviors. Growing up in a household that was very aware of some of the mistakes of a communist type of government centralized planning the removal of the free exchange of ideas that makes me more vocal because I see that we're making the same mistakes that my parents always told me we should never go down this road the lack of tolerance for ideas the what I call illiberalism the idea that if you question certain aspects of the government or certain ideologies that no longer were you a good citizen but if you haven't lived it you don't know that these are mistakes. Science is supposed to be about the discovery of the truth and the most important aspect of that is the ability to discuss. I want young people to be hopeful for their future. We should realize that there's going to be challenges. Climate will change but that shouldn't be a reason to think that your future isn't hopeful. Thank you for watching this video. To keep PragerU videos free consider making a tax-deductible donation.