When my son was in eighth grade, his science teacher — a generally first- ]rate instructor — showed the class Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” to heighten their consciousness of global warming. It was a decision that irritated me to no end.
Not because I objected to a sober presentation of climate-change science, but because Gore’s film is anything but sober. It is throbbingly propagandistic. And it is sprinkled with dubious or alarmist assertions on everything from the likely sea-level rise to the cause of snow loss on Mount Kilimanjaro, to the possible shutdown of the North Atlantic conveyor currents.
Three years ago, after a parent tried to get “An Inconvenient Truth” removed from British secondary schools, a High Court judge there concluded the film contained nine major scientific errors, according to the Daily Telegraph, and could “only be shown (in classrooms) with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.”
Although my son’s experience is far from unique, I still think parents in Mesa County who are petitioning the board of education to bar lessons on global warming are just plain wrong. As The Post’s Nancy Lofholm reported last week, “Rose Pugliese, an unsuccessful candidate for a District 51 school board seat in the last election, presented a petition with 700 signatures to the board asking that science teachers stop giving lessons on global warming.” Pugliese’s group apparently represents the vanguard of a fledgling national movement seeking “to remove the teaching of man-made global warming from science classes.”
Climate change happens to be an important scientific issue, and it would be foolish to ban its discussion simply because some teachers are too unsophisticated — or too ideological — to distinguish between propaganda and an appropriate lesson plan. In fact, climate change is a model topic for teaching students the complexities and uncertainties that characterize evolving scientific theories, while introducing them to a range of opinion among scholars — from MIT’s Richard S. Lindzen to NASA’s James Hansen — as well as the “consensus” view represented by the scandal-plagued Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Students could examine a phenomenon often linked to warming, such as natural disasters. Have they become more common and more deadly? Is there a debate about it? Why? And just how do scientists reconstruct surface temperatures from long ago? Are some of their methods controversial?
A global warming unit would also provide an opportunity to point out that science itself does not dictate the appropriate policy response, whatever activists (and some scientists) insist. Students could be asked to identify the best arguments for taking dramatic steps to reduce consumption of fossil fuels as well as the counter-arguments — that such steps won’t achieve their goals, for example, and would meanwhile slow economic growth and thus cripple the world’s ability to adapt to whatever warming eventually occurs.
Neither position is scientifically “right” or “wrong,” as they depend on economic and value judgments. If students learned just that much, it would be more than some educated adults seem to understand.
Maybe I’m naïve about the capacity of schools to address a charged topic like climate change without the end result sounding like a Greenpeace action plan. But I’ve known some very good science teachers. And the alternative — banning the topic altogether — is simply too defeatist and anti-intellectual to contemplate.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
