Roberto Rizzarto at Flickr under Creative Commons License.

I’m often misunderstood to be a raging, far-right, anti-environment, hyphen over-user.  But in fact, I’m not anti-climatic at all (see what I did there? Also, is there actually a Wiki page for hyphen?? The beast must be stopped).  The cold truth is that I just generally recoil to most forms of extremism.  I have long been an adherent to Alexander Hamilton’s belief that ‘the masses are asses,’  and I’m a quick naysayer and critic of any idea or product that tends to rapidly attract a mass following of disciples (12 is enough for me).

Unfortunately, this sort of fanaticism often comes hand in hand with advocates of global warming / climate change / weather.  In fact, my first editorial ever was written in response to an article in my high school newspaper that claimed global warming was as dangerous of a threat to the world as international nuclear warfare.  It’s this type of rhetoric that really bothers me; especially the type of political and legislative reform that it deems necessary.

I am a naturalist and conservationist at heart; I grew up roaming the Sierra Nevadas in California and the Rockies in Colorado.  I suck at growing beards and I’m no John Muir, but the point is that I care more about the environment than many of my libertarian colleagues.  I believe that men are the stewards of their land and would be doing a great harm to themselves by not allowing it to thrive.  But when carbon-billionaires (no naming, here) like Al Gore demand sweeping and drastic preventative action to combat ideas that are formulated on debatable foundations, it bothers me.

Vincent Carroll of the Denver Post has a concise article that encapsulates this feeling quite well when applied to science in the classroom.

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.”

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.