I encourage everyone to watch the video of last night?s debate between Dr. John Christy, noted climate scientist and Alabama State Climatologist, and Dr. William Schlesinger, President of the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies and former dean of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. What I thought was particularly interesting is that right after making a few opening remarks about how nearly “all scientists agree” and that it’s time to stop discussion and get on with making dramatic changes to curtail CO2 emissions and change our lifestyles, Schlesinger said that he was not going to discuss the science. He then went directly to rattling off scary scenarios about the future. So about two thirds of his talk was scare mongering with no actual defense of the hypothesis that human induced catastrophic global warming is in the process of occurring. What is interesting is that in “skipping over the science” he flipped through a number of slides that he had prepared to use including the now infamous and discredited ?hockey stick? graph showing 900 years of no climate change and the last 100 years of dramatic warming. If he really believed in the story the graph told it would have been very important for him to use it in this context. Furthermore he had a perfect opportunity to pull it up during his rebuttal to Christy. In his presentation Christy noted that the mid-evil warming period occurred naturally and was warmer than it is today. The logical thing for Schlesinger to do would have been to call up the hockey stick to counter Christy?s claim. He did not. It was quite clear that he was ready to use the graph, and does in his usual schtick to sycophants, but was not about to bring it up when he faced knowledgeable opposition.
When Christy came to the podium he carefully went through data—temperature records, sea level rise, melting ice caps—all the important stuff. What was interesting is that Schlesinger rebutted none of it. And he had plenty of time to do so.
I also want to note that the crowd was great. There were well over 250 people in attendance and they clearly seemed to get a lot out of the program. Over a hundred questions were turned in on cards for the Q&A; unfortunately we only had time to get to about 10 of them.
We also want to thank that Reese Institute for the Conservation of Resources at Lenoir-Rhyne University for co-sponsoring the event. They did a great job on the ground in Hickory.
