Dear ESE colleagues,

As we wrap up our Center for the Environment (C4E) Building Sustainable communities (BSC) group’s work for Fall 2021, we want to send you all a formal thank-you for your support to the BSC Open Letter Regarding the Upcoming Presidential Lecture on October 19, 2021. As discussed in the BSC monthly business meeting, we want to share the final Open Letter with over 300 signatories (please see attached) with everyone who participated in this important effort. We set out to address the following two objectives through this Open Letter and I think we have done well to address both:

• For faculty, staff, students, and community members who were concerned and disappointed that Purdue was bringing this speaker, we wanted to let them know that they are not alone and that we understand and share their concerns and will continue to work hard to produce and communicate real climate science.
• For faculty, staff, students, and community members who were concerned about climate change but had not had the opportunity to follow climate science on campus and more broadly, we wanted to let them know that this speaker does not represent the current state of knowledge in climate science and many of the speaker’s claims made in the past were misleading and harmful.

A few media pieces and public postings were generated on this issue and related to our effort. I compiled these pieces below for our record to the extent I could. This list may not be exhaustive, but it demonstrates campus and community interests in real climate science and related efforts at Purdue.

• The Exponent's piece titled " Steve Koonin speaks with Daniels in Presidential Lecture Series" published on Oct. 18, 2021: https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_5e2c35ee-3155-11ec-96b8-030c74d3b792.html
• The Exponent's piece titled "Letter to the Editor: Climate change speaker refuted multiple times" published on Sept. 24, 2021: https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_cff6f7c5-0082-5e5e-b3ed-43774b77821c.html
• The Executive Committee of the Purdue Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) endorsed our open letter on Oct. 25, 2021. This endorsement was posted on AAUP website at: http://aauppurdue.org/2021/10/aaup-sides-with-faculty-experts-against-disinformation-about-climate-change/
• WBAA's piece titled "Purdue University brings climate skeptic to campus as part of speaker series" published on Oct. 18, 2021: https://www.wbaa.org/post/purdue-university-brings-climate-skeptic-campus-part-speaker-series#stream/0
• WFYI's piece titled "Purdue University brings climate skeptic to campus as part of speaker series" published on Oct. 19, 2021:  https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/purdue-university-brings-climate-skeptic-to-campus
• Dave Bangert’s piece titled “An ‘Unsettled’ Q&A: Why Mitch Daniels loves this author coming to Purdue; climate scientists … not so much” published on Oct. 18, 2021: https://davebangert.substack.com/p/an-unsettled-q-and-a-why-mitch-daniels

I apologize for not sharing the final Open Letter and these links sooner, but I hope it’s still better late than never :) I want to make sure that you all know what your support and participation has enabled C4E BSC to achieve. 

Hope your end of semester is going smoothly.

Zhao

Zhao Ma, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

Professor | University Faculty Scholar

Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, College of Agriculture, Purdue University

195 Marsteller Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2033, USA

+1-765-494-1790; zhaoma@purdue.edu

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