Text 28744, 107 rader
Skriven 2007-05-12 22:42:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Global Warming
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http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Local/newEAST01ENV0512
07.htm

May 12, 2007

ERAU professor seeks balance in global warming debate

By MARK HARPER
Education Writer

DAYTONA BEACH -- Nick Shipley, an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
freshman, had just spent a week of classes watching two films with
polar-opposite conclusions about global warming.

"After watching 'An Inconvenient Truth,' I was relatively convinced," Shipley
said one day last month in class. "(Al Gore) did a good job in presenting his
points very methodically one after the other. They all build up to essentially
prove his point.

"After watching 'The Great Global Warming Swindle,' my thinking completely
changed," he said. "I kind of did a complete flip-flop."

College students aren't the only ones being confronted with climate change, its
causes and what -- if anything -- can be done about it.

A Democratic Congress, an Academy Award for "An Inconvenient Truth" and
continuing United Nations' proclamations have all contributed to the drumbeat
for reducing carbon dioxide emissions as a strategy for fighting global
warming. Some scientists are concerned the forces that are shaping debate and
making policy decisions are not based on truths -- convenient or not.

James Wanliss, a space physicist who teaches at Embry-Riddle, showed students
the two films in an honors course titled "The Politics and Science of Fear"
because he said more and more the public is being sold one side of an issue
with many dimensions.

"I fear that attempts are being made to purposefully subvert the public
understanding of the nature of science in order to achieve political goals," he
wrote in an e-mail. "Science is not about consensus, and to invoke this raises
the hackles of scientists such as myself. The lure of politics and publicity is
no doubt seductive, but it nevertheless amazes me that so many scientists have
jumped on the bandwagon of consensus science, apparently forgetting or ignoring
the sad history of consensus science."

"An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary starring Gore and a lot of graphs,
makes the case that humans have contributed mightily to a 1-degree rise in the
Earth's temperature in the last 50 years. It uses images of melting ice caps
and dying polar bears to nudge viewers toward action for reasons of morality.

"The Great Global Warming Swindle," an anti-Gore documentary, doesn't question
the Earth's temperature increase but takes to task the questions of why and
what's next. For example, it suggests solar activity may have more to do with
the planet's warming than carbon dioxideemissions.

Wanliss said he doesn't necessarily subscribe to either film, but believes his
students -- and the public -- should remain skeptical of theories such as
Gore's explanation of global warming.

Other Embry-Riddle scientists are less outspoken than Wanliss, but one -- John
Olivero, professor and chairman of the department of physical science --
allowed that skepticism is an essential tool of the scientific method.

"Science lives with internal conflict all the time," Olivero said. "Part of
what we have to do is continually challenge each other."

That process, they say, leads scientists closer to truths that may be elusive
for lifetimes.

The truths of global warming are, if not inconvenient, incomprehensible,
Wanliss argues.

"The atmosphere is incredibly complicated, and we know very little about it,"
he said. "We are studying a system which is so big . . . we don't know what all
the variables are."

Pointing to quotes in magazine articles, Wanliss says Gore and the producers of
the "Swindle" film are purposefully overstating their science as a means to a
political end.

His views are certainly controversial.

Penelope Canan, a professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida,
leans toward Gore's way of thinking.

"There's really no doubt that human activities have altered the global carbon
cycle and the natural balances that have thickened the blanket of greenhouse
gases that have kept our planet like Baby Bear's soup for thousands of years,"
she said in an e-mail. "I am certain that the data presented by Al Gore was
digested by hundreds of thousands of research hours and peer-reviewed data by
the world's leading scientists."

Sam Rabin, a freshman activist at Stetson University who helped screen "An
Inconvenient Truth" on his campus, said many policymakers avoid difficult
decisions that may come from carbon dioxide emission limitations, while
journalists ramp up the skeptics' arguments in the name of balance.

"This is horribly misguided and counterproductive," Rabin wrote in an e-mail.
"There is virtually no scientific debate about global warming or its cause."

But Wanliss' students at Embry-Riddle leaned toward the skeptical. The
professor said that is an important lesson about science.

"You want certainty, but it's hard to get that," he said. "Science isn't about
certainty."

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