Happy Fourth of July from Seattlest
Seattlest Pix: 09Jul04
Seattlest Pix: 09Jul05
Seattle Int'l Beer Festival Ends at 7 p.m.
As we predicted when we first heard this story about Frosty Hardison--a parent who convinced the Federal Way school board to stop showing An Inconvenient Truth back in December--a whole host of sane, level-headed people wrote into the school board to suggest that Frosty was a bit off his rocker. Sadly, the Federal Way school board still insists that teachers, when covering a "controversial" topic, offer a "credible, legitimate opposing view" about that topic.
There are two obvious problems here: first, global warming is not controversial, except insofar as someone like Frosty wants to hang onto dying threads that it could be. And secondly, the Federal Way school board is telling teachers how to teach, valuing politics over the education of their own students.
Regarding the "controversy" we're certain that at least a few of the parents who wrote in to ask that the movie be allowed in the classroom pointed out this recent intergovernmental report to the board, which is "the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect" according to the UK Guardian. The report is stark in its conclusions, and as such the Guardian goes on to stress that:
Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary.If Frosty still thinks he knows more than several thousand climate experts, by all means let him crow away, but we're still not all that worried about him. His signal-to-noise ratio is minuscule. Clearly, we've got bigger problems.
As for the Federal Way school board, they need to get the hell out of the classroom. This P-I article rightly points out that many other school districts leave the judgment up to teachers, and allow that discussion of "controversial" topics is better than not discussing them at all.
A survey of Puget Sound-area school districts found that most officials were unsure if the movie was being shown in their classrooms, and that it was largely up to teachers and possibly principals to determine how best to handle the issue. In none of the districts had superintendents or school boards dictated what action to take.Don't we want our kids to grow up able to think for themselves? In case you skipped out on too much school yourself, Federal Way school board, that's how education works. It is about teaching young people how to think, not what to think.
Cartoon by David Sispress for the New Yorker.
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Wait, global warming is not controversial? That’s certainly news to me. Even conceding that the earth’s climate is on average growing warmer, contrary to what that “intergovernmental report” states, there is still a huge amount of controversy within the scientific community surrounding the effect, scope, and size of the climate change that’s occurring. Even more controversial is the debate over what actions, if any, we should take to stave off the potential detriments of such climate change. While to people in Al Gore’s camp global warming may seem to the be single biggest issue facing the earth today, there are others – myself included – that think it is borderline insane to enact cuts in carbon emissions (as proposed in the Kyoto protocol for example) when they could potentially slow, if not halt, economic progress being made in both the developing and developed worlds. Personally I see no reason to spend billions, possibly trillions, of dollars to maybe prevent any potential ill effects of global warming that may or may not occur at some undefined point somewhere in our distant or not-so-distant future.
I do not believe the earth was created 14,000 years ago. I do believe our climate is warming because of increased carbon emissions. And I do have a problem with Federal Way teachers showing An Inconvenient Truth in the classroom without dedicating equal time to Bjorn Lomborg or other similarly minded folk that believe our earth faces bigger problems than our thermometers going up a couple of degrees. Current models of climate change have no way of accurately predicting how much temperatures will rise, let alone what exactly the ill effects of such a rise will be. We know that dedicating money towards AIDS, malaria, or malnutrition, will positively affect human life on earth. Earmarking money toward these costs cannot have a detrimental effect. We have no idea what, if anything, cutting carbon emissions will do to help the quality of life on earth and taking the steps necessary to make sizable cuts in emissions could very well slow global development. The issue over the presentation of global warming in the classroom is not akin to the evolution/creationism in the classroom debate where one side is a scientific theory rigorously supported by hoards of evidence and the other is mere doctrine. There simply isn’t a consensus within the scientific community regarding what needs to be done to prevent global warming. I should know, I'm a member of it. The need for action against global warming is not a scientific theory, but a political viewpoint.
Have you seen the movie? With the exception of the last 10 minutes, the rest of the movie is about the science that proves the Earth is warming. Given that at least that much is agreed on by the vast majority of scientists at this point, why shouldn't it be shown?
What I find absolutely fascinating about debates over the science of global warming is that inevitably, critics claiming global warming doesn't exist will throw out the name of some lone-wolf academic they believe will make their case. According to the Wikipedia entry (admittedly not the best source of data always, but still) Bjørn Lomborg is an otherwise marginal academic sociologist and business professor who wrote a book questioning the effects of global warming that was deemed by the Danish Committee of Science and Technology "...to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty" for such trifling reasons as plagiarism, deliberate misinterpretation of others' work, and fabrication of data.
I've heard the sort of excuse Seth is putting forward many times before, that there is insufficient data on the subject to make good predictions or even to back up claims about increasing pollution. I wrote a story drawing into question Portland, Oregon's spurious claim a few years ago to have reached Kyoto compliance and found precisely this: that Portland's data was either insufficient to make claims on or misleading about the economic and development impacts on pollution (in this case, the displacement of industry from the city center contributed to substantial decreases in pollution).
But critics of global warming are always trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Seth may not like this, but his argument does a good deal like the Creationist mindset that "there's no missing link" to prove we really did evolve from apes. It's nothing but a canard, and so reductive and abstracted from evolutionary theory that I doubt even Richard Dawkins would know exactly how to start laying into such a strange claim.
In other words, at what point, Seth, will you be sufficiently convinced of global warming's consequences to support action to offset them, and at what point should a former vice president (and almost-US president) have the right to discuss the cause most important to him freely with students?
Hey Seth (not Seattlest Seth), do you mean this Bjorn Lomborg? That's like name-checking Pat Robertson in defense of fundamentalist Christianity. To be able to dredge up one person who is willing to tilt against windmills is no great feat, witness Iran's Holocaust-hoax conference. To stem the overwhelming tide of existing scientific research, well that would be a whole different approach. But to date it hasn't happened--science is based on consensus and repetition, repetition, repetition. One singular voice amongst what is literally thousands is, well, Frosty.
If you're going to claim that the models can't predict what is happening, you better be prepared to back that up. Stating that they cannot predict what will happen with absolute certainty is scientifically disingenuous, in that nothing can be predicted with absolute certainty. Such a simplistic assertion detracts from the sound base of research underlying those models. If you look at current climate events vis-a-vis the models developed 10 years ago, what you will see is that things are progressing worse than was originally expected, so in the sense that you are right on one thing: the models were off, but in the wrong direction.
And last but not least, if even the President, who has famously dragged his heels on this issue, can finally come to terms with the reality of what global warming means for the people on this planet (even if he will still move too slowly on the issue), then plainly we've reached the lowest common denominator when it comes to removing the intentionally distracting word "controversial" from our vocabulary about climate change. And if that isn't enough, even the damn industry is on the bandwagon now, with GE, Alcoa, DuPont and PG&E pushing Bush to go past market-based mechanisms and actually enact mandatory emission controls.
But maybe Lomborg could tilt a little harder at those windmills? We could use the extra wind power...
Just to clarify: I’m not a critic of global warming. I believe it exists, and I apologize if I came across otherwise. I actually agree with most of An Inconvenient Truth. A substantial body of research shows that global climate change is occurring and the trend is primarily due to increased carbon emissions. All I’m trying to say is that that there are good reasons not to buy into the Doomsday scenarios surrounding global warming and that Al Gore’s chef d’oeuvre works to trivialize the economic and developmental costs inherent in placing strong restrictions on carbon emissions. If you’d like to see some further rationalization of why investing in global warming will come at the cost of the world’s other problems try actually reading some Lomborg, or really any rational economist on scarce resources. Hell, you could even just pick up a copy of the Economist.
I’ve never quite understood why Lomborg is so hated among environmentalists, though I suspect the notion that climate change might not be catastrophic may challenge some fundamental essence of their being. He’s never denied the existence of global warming. He believes in the utility of alternative energy resources. He’s been quick to admit he made errors in The Skeptical Environmentalist. He embraces the scientific community even when studies arise that contradict some of his prior conclusions. He’s an incredibly rational person, and his claims are far from sensationalistic. Though Jeremy and Courtney seem to think otherwise, this disagreement is far from some sort of science vs. religion type schism. Both schools of thought accept the science; the debate is simply over how to apply the climate models to political policy.
Oh and my claim that climate models can’t precisely predict what’s going to happen isn’t particularly controversial, even Al Gore admits there are massive gaps between the best and worst case scenarios proposed. It’s not hard to see that the difference in harm caused by average global temperature rising 1 degree and it rising 6 degrees (the bounds of the IPCC’s predictions) would be huge.