Inconvenient truth with a 'political' slant

When it comes to global warming, Earth sciences professor Robert Giegengack gets heated up about people playing politics.

So, while Al Gore's film on the subject, An Inconvenient Truth, has garnered the former vice president praise and a recent nomination for the Nobel Prize, Giegengack isn't so enthused.

Giegengack voted for Gore in 2000. If Gore were up against Bush again, he said Gore would still have his support.

But Giegengack is speaking out against the film - and he's getting quite a bit of attention for it.

"We're not destroying the Earth," he said. "The planet is fine, thank you."

The film is politically motivated, he says, trading real scientific analysis for sound bytes.

"I'm irritated when politicians feed [students] a story that pretends to be a scientific summary but incorporates political ideas," he said.

Current warming trends began over 20,000 years ago, and Earth has gone through many climactic changes and temperature cycles, he says. Giegengack doesn't dispute that global warming is happening - he just thinks that Gore is oversimplifying the issue.

And because global warming may affect humans much more than the Earth, "when you look at the problems facing humans, global warming doesn't even make it into the top ten," he said.

Instead, Giegengack points to issues like nuclear proliferation and depletion of natural resources as more pressing problems.

In particular, he finds the movie's claims about rising sea levels overly exaggerated.

"Seven thousand years ago, the rate of rise [of sea levels] slowed down for some reason," Giegengack said. "Some people think that the rate of rise has picked up a little, but the jury is still out.

"Now Al Gore shows water invading New York, but at the present rate, that's going to take 3,000 years. The data doesn't show a picture of urgency."

Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Al Gore, said Gore "does not see global warming in terms of whether it is real or not, as a debate."

She added that a team of scientists reviewed the film and the changes it proposes.

But Giegengack says the proposed changes in the movie are "absurd" because the projected economic development of India and China will pour large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, rendering Gore's proposals useless.

"Al Gore is playing the politics of fear the way Karl Rove did," he said. "He is trying to line people up behind his particular point of view by scaring the hell out of them. And it works."

While Giegengack has received some criticism from environmentalists, he insists his approach to the issue is that of an objective scientist.

"It irritates me that I can't engage in open discussion of a science without acquiring in the process a political label," he said. "But I'm still naive enough to believe that the truth will set you free."

And the need for quick answers may prove most harmful to solving these issues, which he said "require much more attention from a scientific basis than anybody is willing to give them," he said.

Whether or not scientists will eventually discover the answer, Giegengack says the issue only reinforces his teaching philosophy.

"I don't teach students what to think," he said. "I teach students to think."

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