An Inconvenient Debate

While some schools are showing Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” without rebuttal, a university class is demonstrating that perhaps the global warming alarmists can’t handle balance.

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.”

It appears that the reason we have more global warming alarmists, especially on college campuses, is that the liberal activists and media are simply not…well….fair and balanced.

To be fair, both sides do their share of exaggeration, but both sides should still be allowed evaluation.

[James] Wanliss [space physicist who teaches the class] 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.

And yet the Left talks of their foes in Holocaust-denial terms. The stifling of dissent in Al Gore’s America.

Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change, Al Gore, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, James Wanliss, John Olivero

Filed under: Global Warming • Politics

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