Sarah Green to Michigan Tech Board of Trustees: Oppose illegal attacks on universities

[Editor's Note: As part of her efforts to connect at as many local meetings as she can, Sarah Green -- Michigan Technological University professor emerita, former chair of chemistry and founder of CRAG (Citizens Rally for Accountable Government) -- has spoken  twice, in February and in April of this year, during the public comment period at the Board of Trustees meeting for Michigan Technological University. Here is her April 25, 2025, speech to that Board of Trustees.]

By Sarah Green
April 25, 2025, Statement to the Michigan Technological University Board of Trustees
Published here with permission.

I am Sarah Green, professor emerita and former chair of chemistry. Although I am still involved in several research grants here, today I speak as a concerned and outraged citizen.

Graduation is always an exciting time as newly minted alumni are launched into the world. However, this year they are heading into a profoundly uncertain future.

Graduates who aspired to careers of public service have been discarded as expendable, being fired from agencies that protect our health, improve our environment, design our infrastructure, manage our financial system, and conduct fundamental research.

Future graduates are having opportunities yanked from under them as visas are revoked with no explanation or research grants are canceled.

But this threat is far greater than the loss of a few jobs or grants.

Our democratic institutions are under attack. Historians, political scientists, economists, journalists, and leaders from across the political spectrum are raising the alarm that we are seeing a rapid authoritarian take-over of our system of government.

This is an emergency. I feel like I’m watching coyote suspended in the air after running off the cliff.

We are seeing ruthless and unprincipled attacks on research institutions, the press, and universities, in short any place that encourages critical thinking.

The easy response to this chaos for board members like yourselves is to make a few concessions, then a few more. But that’s a dangerous slope; with each capitulation the bullies return to demand more.

The only way to stop bullies and mobsters is to band together and fight back.

As of this morning, 443 university presidents have signed a letter "speak[ing] with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education."*

President Koubek’s name was not on this letter.**

I urge the university to be fully transparent about government pressures, including the number of revoked visas, impacted grants and other impacts. 

I urge you to join and support efforts to oppose the illegal attacks on universities.

I’ll finish with a few words from journalist Adrienne LaFrance who interviewed numerous people who have lived under dictators and autocrats:

"Today, right now -- and I mean right this second -- you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost." (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic, 2025)

Inset photo: Sarah Green. (Photo courtesy Michigan Tech University and Sarah Green) 

Notes:

* The statement in the letter was developed in collaboration with university and college presidents and other educational leaders across the country, after national meetings convened by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

** For the record, Michigan Technological University President Koubek’s name still does not appear on the AACU letter, which today shows 565 sigatures.

Editor's addendum: If you wish to join Sarah Green's CRAG (Citizens Rally for Accountable Government) email group, go to https://app.keila.io/forms/nfrm_qkVPbe38

UPEC to host livestream March 3: What are COPs for? An inside view of the global UN Climate Conference

This poster announces COP 28, the next United Nations Climate Conference, to be held next November in Dubai. (Image courtesy Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition)

Everyone has an opinion (or several) on what happens at the annual United Nations Climate Conference -- known as the COP, or Conference of the Parties. (The "parties" in question are countries that have signed the UN Climate Change treaty.) COPs are the world’s biggest stage for climate change action -- or, all too often, inaction.

The Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition (UPEC) will host Sarah Green, Michigan Tech University professor of chemistry, for a presentation titled "What are COPs for? An inside view of the global UN Climate Conference" at 7 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. CT on Friday, March 3, via Zoom and Facebook Live.

Inset photo: Michigan Tech Professor Sarah Green. (File photo courtesy Michigan Tech University)

Michigan Tech Professor Sarah Green has participated in three recent COPs and led a Michigan Tech delegation to these meetings. She’ll bring perspectives from that experience and offer insights into the UN system. She’ll also tackle these questions: What are the criticisms of COPs and how can they be addressed? What can a COP accomplish and what are its limits? How do COP decisions get translated to actions? And how do national and local actions influence COPs?

Professor Sarah Green is interested in all aspects of environmental chemistry from molecular analytical methods to global climate change, including the science policy interface. Dr. Green has been a member of the Chemistry Department at Michigan Tech since 1994 and served as Department Chair from 2004 to 2013. She was awarded a Jefferson Science Fellowship to serve in the Bureau of East Asia-Pacific Affairs in the U.S. Department of State (2013-14). Dr. Green served as co-vice chair for the Scientific Advisory Panel on the Sixth Global Environmental Outlook, United Nations Environment Program. 

Join Livestream via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/upenvironment/live

Join Livestream via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86075269466?pwd=OFZCTk1ERHdJSEJOUlNWbW5UaTA3QT09#success

Meeting ID: 860 7526 9466 | Passcode: 2023 

The Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition’s Livestream Series keeps the public up-to-date with environmental issues facing the UP. The livestreams are co-hosted by Board President Horst Schmidt and Vice President Evan Zimmermann. This livestream and all archived past events are available at https://facebook.com/upenvironment/live. For more about UPEC, visit https://upenvironment.org.

Keweenaw Climate March and Sail to join global action on climate change Sept. 20

Poster for Sept. 20 Keweenaw Climate March and Sail courtesy Keweenaw Youth for Climate Action.

HOUGHTON -- This Friday, Sept. 20, a group of local students and community members will join young people around the world in a global strike to push for action on climate change. Marchers will cross the Portage Lift Bridge at 4 p.m. and exhibit signs on the bridge from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. At about the same time, boaters in non-motorized water craft -- sailboats, sculling boats, canoes and kayaks -- will sail under the bridge in solidarity with this climate movement.

Marchers are asked to meet near the parking area under the bridge at 4 p.m. Friday. 

September 20, three days before the UN Climate Summit in NYC (and a visit from Greta Thunberg), young people and adults will strike all across the US and world to demand transformative action be taken to address the climate crisis. In support of the Keweenaw Climate Strike and acknowledging Greta Thunburg's sail across the Atlantic to attend the UN Climate Summit, boaters are invited to join "Sail for the Environment" in the Portage Canal on September 20.*

Tentative details for boaters are as follows, pending weather:

4:45 p.m. - Skipper meeting by VHF Ch 68
5 p.m. - Boats will meet in front of the Houghton County Marina and circle around the canal
6 p.m. - Boats will dock at Houghton County Marina (limited number of free slips available) or depart for home berth.
6:30 p.m. - Dr. Sarah Green will speak a few words on the climate at the Houghton County Marina shelter building.

If you have an interest in being a skipper with your boat, please respond to CaptainBruce@SarahBelle.org as soon as possible.

Michigan Tech student John ("Jack") Wilson, one of the organizers of the Keweenaw event, said the global climate strike is led by young people fighting for their future.

"This is a youth led strike, because not only are youth disproportionately affected by climate change, but they are excluded from the electoral process which makes major decisions on this issue," Wilson said. "The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) suggests that we massively reduce our emissions by 2030, in order to avoid reaching the catastrophic implications of a rise of 2 degrees Celsius in global temperature. Even if every country stayed committed to the Paris Accord, we would still see a 3-degree increase by mid century."

Wilson called the youth-led strike necessary because previous efforts like petitions, letters to Senators or calling on governments to divest from fossil fuels have not worked and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

"Thus far, our societies' actions to address this crisis have been a catastrophic failure," Wilson added. "And so the question that should follow might be 'what do we do now?' To which our attention turns to the social sciences, and the social science says, 'If you want to rapidly change the political direction of a society, in the shortest amount of time, there’s one way to do it, and that way is mass participation in civil disobedience.' - Roger Hallam, PhD of Sociology at Kings College of London and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion."

Wilson noted the youth-led strike follows the example of previous non-violent civil disobedience movements for change.

"The civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, women's suffrage, the liberation of India -- all of these movements which transformed our society -- made their impacts by taking it to the streets," Wilson said. "We hope to follow in their footsteps to address the greatest challenge of our time. If Dr. King did it with one book about Ghandi and the Bible, I think we can do it with 30 years of climate science."

*Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist who has been raising global awareness of the risks posed by climate change and speaking out against politicians' lack of action on the climate crisis.

From Wikipedia: "In August 2019, Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from Plymouth, UK, to New York, US, in a 60 ft racing yacht equipped with solar panels and underwater turbines. The trip was announced as a carbon neutral transatlantic crossing serving as a demonstration of Thunberg's declared beliefs of the importance of reducing emissions. The voyage lasted 15 days, from 14 to 28 August 2019. While in the Americas, Thunberg will be attending the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City and the COP 25 climate change conference in Santiago, Chile."

See this Sept. 17, 2019, article: "Greta Thunberg is leading kids and adults from 150 countries in a massive Friday climate strike."

Prof. Sarah Green, Lake Superior expert, to lead discussion Nov. 18 at Carnegie Museum

HOUGHTON -- Sarah Green, Michigan Tech professor of chemistry and expert on Lake Superior, will lead a discussion titled "Lake Superior’s History and Future" from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 18, in the Community Room at the Carnegie Museum in Houghton. The discussion will be preceded by refreshments and introductions from 6:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.

"I will show how we can see day-to-day conditions on Lake Superior from buoys," Green says. "I will also talk about how the lake has changed over the past hundred years and what we predict for its future." 

The event is part of a monthly series of sessions on the Geoheritage and Natural History of the Keweenaw, held at the Carnegie Museum in Houghton. The discussions are aimed at the general public but focus on current research and science. All lectures are free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible.

Seminar organizer Bill Rose, Michigan Tech professor emeritus, notes, "The Keweenaw is very special, and it guides our lives. The connection we feel is strongly influenced by our natural history, as well as our cultural history. In exploring our region’s natural history, we will ask, 'What are the elements of Keweenaw Natural History?' and 'How can the community discuss, participate and celebrate these elements?'"

For additional information about the Carnegie Museum seminar series click here.

(Inset photo of Professor Sarah Green courtesy Michigan Tech University)

Michigan Tech News: Most Scientists Agree: Humans are Causing Global Climate Change

By Jennifer Donovan, Michigan Tech Director of Public Relations
Posted on Michigan Tech News May 16, 2013
Reprinted with permission

HOUGHTON --Do most scientists agree that human activity is causing global climate change? Yes, they do, according to an extensive analysis of the abstracts or summaries of scientific papers published over the past 20 years, even though public perception tends to be that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of climate change.

To help put a stop to the squabbling, two dozen scientists and citizen-scientists from three continents -- including Sarah Green, professor and chair of chemistry at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Mich. -- analyzed the abstracts of nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate change published between 1991 and 2011. They also surveyed the authors of those papers, to find out how well the analysis agreed with the authors’ own views on how their papers presented the cause of climate change.

They found that more than 97 percent of the scientists who expressed any opinion in their papers about the primary cause of global climate change believed that human activity was the cause. Approximately the same percentage of authors who responded to the survey said that their papers endorsed anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Nine of the scientists who analyzed the abstracts -- including Green -- reported their findings this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, published by the Institute of Physics.

Green says she got involved because she was curious about the apparent disconnect between the general public’s lack of concern about climate change and what she calls "the clear scientific evidence that humans are changing the planet's atmosphere." That led her to SkepticalScience.com, a web site that tracks and addresses common myths about climate change. She has since contributed several articles.

John Cook, who maintains the web site, is a climate communications fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia. He found that one dominant myth about climate change is the idea that scientists disagree about the cause. To investigate how much disagreement there really is in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, Cook set up an on-line system that enabled a group of SkepticalScience.com authors to rate nearly 12,000 abstracts from the Web of Science database (1991-2011) on whether they report human activities as the main contributors to climate change.

"John cleverly set up the rating process so it felt like a game to me," says Green. "After I rated five abstracts, another five would quickly appear, and counters showed how many each person had done, making it like a contest."

The abstract raters were a combination of professional and citizen-scientists from Australia, Canada, the UK, Finland, the US and Germany. The group was organized through the skeptical science web site.

"I read and rated 4,146 abstracts for this study, over about 4 months in winter/spring 2012," Green explains. "This is the first time I’ve published a paper where all the research was accomplished sitting on my couch." 

Green adds, "I found it fascinating to see the array of implications of climate change identified in the abstracts -- beyond the usual ones we hear about. They examined everything from production of tea in Sri Lanka, the stripes on salamanders, child undernutrition, frequency of lightning strikes, distribution of prickly pear cactus (and pine trees, kelp beds, wild boars, penguins, arctic fishes, canine leishmaniasis, and many, many others), mitochondrial electron transport activity in clams, copper uptake by minnows, lake effect snowfall, the rotational speed of the Earth and the prevalence of naked foxes in Iceland."

Green also found a large number of papers addressing mitigation of climate change through alternative energy and other ways to limit carbon emissions.

"It is critical to raise public awareness of the scientific consensus on climate change, so the public can make policy decisions based on factual evidence," she says. "Typically, the general public thinks that only around 50 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. This research has shown that the reality is 97 percent."

(Photo of Prof. Sarah Green courtesy Michigan Technological University.)