Roger Pielke Jr., a public-policy expert who had studied the intersection of politics and climate science, had been battling the prophets of doom for years. Those who insisted we were on the brink of civilizational collapse. Mass death. A biblical confrontation with ourselves that would out-Flood the Flood.

But it was his argument that the rising cost of natural disasters had no tie to greenhouse gases that cost him his career.

In February 2015, Congressman Raúl Grijalva announced an investigation into Pielke’s climate research, sending letters to several universities suggesting that faculty members, including Pielke, who taught at the University of Colorado, were secretly working for energy companies.

“Companies with a direct financial interest in climate and air quality standards,” Grijalva wrote to the universities, are behind “research that influences state and federal regulations and shapes public understanding of climate science.”

“Pretty much all the invitations to workshops and speaking engagements were canceled,” Pielke told me. “People were saying, ‘I’d love to support you, but I’m afraid they’ll come after me, too.’ ”

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It was upsetting but hardly shocking: Even though Pielke agreed global warming was a big problem, he was skeptical of the “catastrophizing” that has gripped the scientific establishment and the elites for the last decade.

“Our ability to live is what’s at stake,” former vice president Al Gore declared in his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth...