West Point Climate Science Professor Sh*tcanned For Teaching Climate Science

Quick, somebody let Bari Weiss’s Free Press know!

George Washington statue at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York. Photo by Dave Lowe on Unsplash

A civilian professor is suing the US Military Academy at West Point after he was fired for insisting the Earth is not the center of the universe, but merely one of several planets orbiting the sun.

Oh, hold on, that was a different weirdo. We’re instead talking about Dr. Adam Kalkstein, who taught geography and atmospheric science at West Point for 17 years with excellent performance assessments, but was ordered last year to censor his curriculum on climate change by removing any mention of how human activity drives it. The change was in response to President Donald Trump’s attempts to eradicate climate science from all federal policy and institutions — and states too! — by executive order.

Trump considers climate science nothing more than “woke, weaponized and wasteful” ideology that must be discarded because government should never be ideological, mercy no. But it’s not a belief system, it’s a proven fact: Climate change is driven by burning vast amounts of fossil fuels, increasing the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere.

It’s pretty basic, straightforward science, but it’s been obfuscated for decades by the fossil fuel industry and its friends in Congress, because the only way to slow and stop climate change is for nations to transition to renewable energy in every sector possible. Ideally 30 years ago, but right now will have to do.

Big Oil doesn’t want to lose trillions of dollars, so the science must be wrong, and if the warming planet leads to extreme changes to the weather and climate and massive death tolls among people in inconvenient places, that’s the cost of doing business. No Exxon executives were hiking in the Himalayas this week.

Ahem.

In September 2025, West Point told Kalkstein, the only professor teaching climate science at the academy, that he should keep teaching about climate change, but that he’d have to cut out the why, was all.

He pushed back, he was fired, and that’s why he’s suing in federal court, requesting a jury trial, and seeking a permanent injunction against West Point’s violating the First Amendment by putting “baseless” restrictions on course content. The suit also calls for Kalkstein to be reinstated to his tenured position, plus monetary damages.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in the Southern District of New York, specifies that the military academy’s prohibition on teaching the human role in climate change, if followed, would coerce Kalkstein to “omit a massive, fundamental, essential component of the court and to defy science.”

In any sane world he’d easily win. But in any sane world, he never would have needed to sue.

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According to the lawsuit, Kalkstein raised his objections to the order to censor his classes in a November 2025 faculty meeting with Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, who at the time was dean of West Point. Kalkstein told the dean he’d tried to comply with the ban but couldn’t do it and still uphold the military academy’s values.

Kalkstein argued that without the basic, well-established fact that human activity causes climate change, “It’s not a college-level course. It’s not even a high school course. Not because it isn’t rigorous; it is. But because we’re leaving out essential information.”

He told Reeves that if he followed the directive, cadets wouldn’t be learning science at all, explaining, “We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution.”

Gen. Reeves wasn’t impressed by the insubordinate civilian prof, and told him that as commander in chief of the military, Trump had the authority to determine what’s taught at West Point. (We are not a JAG lawyer, but we suspect that power is not absolute.) The lawsuit said the meeting ended with the dean/general storming out of the room.

In May 2025, months before that climactic meeting, Kalkstein learned that his job was going to be axed as part of a “reduction in force” (he suspected it was because he taught climate science). But academy administrators had an offer for him: If he’d agree to give up tenure (and the substantial severance package he’d get if he were laid off), he could take a teaching position at West Point’s new “Center for the Humanities” — but as a “term employee” being paid out of grant money he’d already been awarded.

That deal to keep his job made it far easier for West Point to shitcan Kalkstein six months after the meeting, at the end of the spring semester. He was informed that his contract wouldn’t be renewed due to his “poor character and temperament” in the meeting. See, not an academic freedom thing at all, he was just a hothead and probably a wild-eyed green new scam advocate who wants us all to live in caves.

Or not, because as Kalkstein’s attorney Michael Sussman told the New York Times (gift link), the professor is a “conservative Republican who believes the military needs to be taught the true causes of climate change when it comes to national security.” Kalkstein emphasized that in a letter he tried to send up the chain of command to Defense Secretary Drinky Drunky Pete, the Drunk, but which Sussman says never made it off the West Point campus.

Kalkstein argued in the letter that Joe Biden had “politicized” climate change, “making it difficult to separate fact from fiction,” which is a load of codswallop straight from the climate denial playbook, but maybe Kalkstein can be forgiven a clumsy rhetorical attempt to establish common ground with his intended reader, who wouldn’t know science if it smacked him in the face with a cold wet chunk of a partly melted glacier.

Even so, Kalkstein continued, the “Department of War” (barf) can’t afford to “lose sight that human-induced climate change still has a very real, very measurable and very important impact on national security.” For a very real example that might appeal to a SecDef whose boss wants to own Greenland, Kalkstein asked, “How can our country compete with the Russians in the Arctic if we ignore what’s causing the present-day melting?”

We suspect that Hegseth would simply insist that the why isn’t important to the high-testosterone warfighters whose lethality must be unleashed. Just get the weather report, give the troops waterproof mukluks and vehicles that can go RRRRRR! through melted permafrost, and point them at the enemy. Let the wimpy hacky-sack-playing civilians chatter to each other about why the permafrost is melting, as long as they aren’t getting any federal funding.

As the Times notes, Pete Hegseth has been on a crusade to purify the national military academies and war colleges by forcing out most of the roughly 20 percent of civilians who make up their faculties. A draft Pentagon memo obtained by CBS News discussed plans to eliminate tenure for civilian profs and remake the academies’ curricula to emphasize killing the enemy, destroying the enemy, delivering lethality to the enemy, and shaving. Lethally.

The memo insisted — a bit whinily for a big lethal warfighting memo —that “Tenure is a construct designed to protect academic freedom within universities. In practice, it more often leads to stagnation, complacency, and inflexibility” and even worse, might lure our manly lethal warfighters away from focusing on killing, by learning the soft womanly “research priorities of the tenured academics.”

The draft memo also called for the elimination of all courses found to be “non-essential” or “ideologically driven,” although it didn’t bother offering any criteria for making that determination. You know, sissy stuff that might distract from a steely-eyed (and lethal) focus on “tactical, operational, and strategic combat leadership.” No more wasting time on subjects like human rights law, sociology, or understanding why the Arctic is getting so soggy these days.

The Times also notes that in his 2024 book-shaped object The War on Warriors, Hegseth bitched that allowing civilians to teach at the service academies had supposedly made them “Marxist-adjacent” and weak by sapping their purity of essence.

The TV studio-hardened Fox News weekend host explained that the academies all went to hell because “Civilian professors were welcomed on campus for reasons of ‘diversity’ as well as expediency. And with them came the predictable, radical left-wing educational philosophies” that made the military lose its way, and its erection.

You can see why Hegseth wouldn’t want crazy radicals like Dr. Kalkstein polluting future officers’ minds with woke nonsense about CO2 molecules trapping heat in the atmosphere when they should instead be thinking about how to blow shit up. After all, when did science ever win a war?

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Army Has Basically No Leadership Now, Thanks Pete Hegseth!

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[NYT (gift link) / Stars and Stripes / CBS News / Columbia Climate School / Merchants of Doubt (Wonkette-gets-a-cut link to required reading)]

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