Music icon Sheryl Crow just wrapped up her "Stop Global Warming College Tour." And while no Rhode Island school hosted her biodiesel bus, the pop singer's persistence on propagandizing young and malleable minds with greenhouse hype sure did resonate with the leftist faculty at Roger Williams University (RWU).
The week before Earth Day, professors teaching CORE 101: Science, Technology and Society broke from a normal day of classes to watch Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The eco-marching orders were handed down by the assistant dean of the science department, Jeffrey A. Hughes (contact info here).
On the surface, such an action doesn't sound off alarm bells. Shouldn't institutions of higher learning introduce students to a wide variety of ideas, even ones espoused by liberal politicians?
Perhaps. Students are cheated out of a real education if they don't wrestle with tough questions and if they are not exposed to controversial subjects.
But that's exactly what didn't happen at RWU. An Inconvenient Truth, and only An Inconvenient Truth, was shown by Hughes' cabal, as if that film were the authoritative voice on global warming. So, every core science section—12 in all—consisting of philosophy, political science, english, engineering, and psychology majors needing the class to graduate received only Gore's big government "solution" to climate change. (The same Al Gore who invented the Internet, won the 2000 presidential election, and just discovered he was a scientist.)
RWU junior Dana Peloso asked Assistant Dean Hughes, "with the scientific community unsure if global warming is man induced or part of the natural cycle of the earth, do you think that it is intellectually honest to show only the alarmist viewpoint? If the movie is still shown, what plans are there to incorporate the ideas of leading global warming skeptics into class discussion?"
The answer: none.
In his response—obtained exclusively by Young America's Foundation—Jeffrey Hughes claimed that "scientists no longer question whether the atmosphere is being warmed due to human activities and instead are increasingly impressed with the speed and impact of the process. I repeat: there is no doubt that we're warming the earth and that a continuation of our activities will lead to profound changes."
Case closed! End of discussion! No more debate! Science—or should I say the Left—has spoken!
Well, if it were only that simple. A person of Jeffrey Hughes' stature should know that science is not about consensus; it's about truth. If consensus were the last word, history textbooks would still teach that the sun revolves around the earth and that the earth is flat.
Few question that the planet has warmed over the last century—around one degree Fahrenheit—but it's a bold-faced lie for Assistant Dean Hughes to argue that all scientists agree to its cause. Prominent academics and scientists have poked gigantic holes in the belief that man is largely responsible for heating up the planet.
Take Bjorn Lomborg—author of Skeptical Environmentalist and named by TIME magazine as one of the most influential people of 2004—and Richard Lindzen—professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology—as two examples among many.
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