George Taylor has too much class to complain in public, so he’s retiring instead as the state climatologist and head of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University.

For several years now he has been under fire and sometimes personal attacks because his views on the causes of global warming differ from those that now have become the conventional wisdom. He thinks natural causes such as solar radiation and long-term cycles in the world’s climate play a bigger role than the greenhouse gases that are increasingly put in the atmosphere by industrial society.

Instead of being proved wrong by convincing evidence, he’s been condemned or even ridiculed. Last year, Governor Kulongoski let it be known that it was embarrassing to have a state climatologist at odds with the warming theories on which he was basing the state’s energy policies.

The legislature made sure that Taylor would be sidelined. It approved a new climate research center to be based at OSU, and charged it with pretty much the same tasks as the one a previous law had spelled out for the service headed by Taylor.

A man can buck the bureaucracy and the establishment for only so long. Then it makes sense to take a different route.

That’s what Taylor is now doing. Don’t expect him to complain about being pushed out, or about being unfairly treated. He is far too good-natured and smart for that.

Taylor has a solid reputation as an expert on Oregon weather whose long-term forecasts are right far more often than they are wrong. And the good news is that he’ll still be around.

Getting away from the university and the state government may give Taylor a chance to be more outspoken on climate issues than he has been so far, especially in recent months, when he had been lying kind of low.

So we hope that now and then, when a counterpoint to the popular wisdom would be particularly interesting and instructive, he’ll not be shy about letting the public in on what he knows. (hh)