Don't lie to your students!

Do as I say ...

Mike O'Doul was my college roommate back in the seventies. He was working toward a master's degree in teaching. I was working toward a doctorate. It didn't quite work out as planned. Mike ended up earning a Ph.D. long before I did and became a professional mathematician, while I took a detour into state government. It took several more years before I finally ended up back in academia as a teacher and a retread grad student. In the meantime, Mike had racked up teaching experience at the elementary school level (during his master's program), high school (after earning his master's and earning a secondary credential), and college (during his subsequent doctoral program). He had also moved into the consulting business and had jetted about the world, working on U.S. Navy contracts and sailing as part of the civilian complement of carrier groups. He climbed the corporate ladder in the consulting business till he reached the top-level management position of chief information officer. His year-end bonuses were more than half my annual teacher salary.

I was impressed. My old roomie had lapped me on the track several times.

Some good things come to an end. During a period of contraction and corporate acquisitions, Mike's company was purchased by another consulting firm. He found himself working under a manager whom he had once dismissed from the company. His new manager was eager to return the favor and Mike was handed his walking papers.

I've already established that Mike O'Doul was no dummy. He was mathematically acute, articulate, and extremely hard-working. During the fat years, he had tucked away big chunks of his earnings in preparation for possible future lean years. The lean years had arrived and Mike was pleased to discover that his preparations would permit him to retire at a comfortable middle-class level without ever working another day in his life. That prospect, however, did not completely satisfy him. He and his wife had young children, some of whom might actually want to go to college. Mike decided it would be nice to continue earning some wages, both for the satisfaction of staying active and to widen the margin between prosperity and penury.

Dr. O'Doul dusted off his secondary credential and found a job teaching high school math. He enjoyed being back in the classroom, but he was less than delighted with the many hoops he was required to jump through. Even so, he applied himself with his characteristic diligence and established himself as a major resource in the math department. Soon the department chair tapped Mike to teach the AP calculus class in their high school. It would require Mike's enrollment in an orientation and training seminar, but Mike didn't anticipate any problems. He consented to the assignment and put the seminar on his summer calendar.

Mike wasn't surprised on the day of the seminar to discover that it included another series of hoops. In addition to outlining the content of the AP calculus syllabus, the seminar leader was going to tell Mark how to do his job. Perhaps it wouldn't be a problem. Mike would keep his light under a bushel basket and listen quietly. During the preliminary introductions, he didn't mention his doctorate, his previous teaching experience, or his career in research mathematics and consulting; Mike simply said that he was a second-year instructor in the school district who had been assigned his first AP calculus class for fall. He was willing to pick up some tips from more experienced AP calculus instructors.

Mike was encouraged by the way the seminar leader launched his presentation:

“Be very careful not to lie to your students! It's much too easy to offer level-appropriate answers that mislead your students by being stated too definitively. For example, do you tell your beginning algebra students that no one can take the square root of a negative number?”

The teachers smiled appreciatively.

“You need to qualify such statements, mainly by providing the appropriate context. Negative numbers do not have square roots in the real numbers. You don't have to offer your students a premature explanation of the complex plane, but you have discussed the real line and your point is that square roots of negative numbers do not exist there, on the real line.”

So far, so good.

Mike wondered whether he should ask about cautioning students against “distributing exponentiation,” as in the notorious (x + y)² = x² + y². Should we tell them that it never works, except over a field of characteristic 2? Mike decided he didn't need to push the envelope quite that hard, so he keep his question to himself.

The seminar leader moved briskly through the AP calculus topics, offering insights on presentation and cautions on possible overstatements. Mike was pleased at the level of the discussion and ready to concede that this seminar was better than average. Then the discussion move to polynomials and power series.

“Don't hesitate to write polynomials in ascending order. It can significantly raise the comfort level of your students when you get to power series, which are always written in that order, and prepares them to see power series as a natural generalization of polynomials. They already know that polynomials are easy to differentiate as often as you want, so it prepares them to understand the point that functions with derivatives of all orders can be written as power series.”

Mike pricked up his ears at the presenter's fumble and waited to see if the speaker would catch his own mistake and offer a correction.

“Remember that the term for functions with derivatives of all order is analytic.”

Double oops! thought Mike. We're dealing in real variables. He interjected:

“You mean smooth, right?”

The presenter paused, looked at Mike, and blinked.

“No, analytic is the right word. If it has derivatives of all orders you can construct a power series that represents it. A function that can be represented as a power series is called analytic.”

The presenter turned away as if to continue, but Mike was not done.

“Excuse me, but it's not the same thing. Yes, a function that can be represented as a power series is called analytic and it does have derivatives of all orders. However, the converse is not true. Functions that have derivatives of all orders are called smooth”—Mike decided not to mention C ^∞—“but it doesn't follow that the function can be represented by a power series.”

The presenter didn't exactly glower as the junior faculty member (an older guy, yes, but a very junior faculty member) who had dared to contradict him, but he did seem a bit piqued. The man who had warned people not to lie to students proceeded to tell a presumably inadvertent untruth:

“You're missing a very obvious point, sir. If you have all the derivatives, you can easily construct a Maclaurin or Taylor series to represent the function.”

“Very true,” agreed Mike. “But the series might not work. Consider the function f(x) = e^−1/x2, where we also define f(0) = 0. The function is infinitely differentiable at 0 but the Maclaurin series does not represent the function. The derivatives are identically zero and so is the series, while the function manifestly is not.”


The presenter decided he had encountered a teachable moment. He turned to the board and began to sketch out a derivation of the derivatives of the function Mike had offered as a counterexample. While the audience fidgeted a bit anxiously, the presenter scribbled away. While Mike had been surprised that the presenter had stumbled over the analyticity of real-valued functions, he noted that the fellow was doing a pretty good job of checking the counterexample. With an occasional suggestion from Mike, the presenter was discovering that every derivative of f(x) was indeed equal to 0 at x = 0. Eventually he turned back to the seminar attendees.

With a somewhat awkward smile, he said, “Okay, you see what we have here. It's a definite counterexample to the notion that infinitely many derivatives are sufficient to ensure the existence of a representative power series. The good thing is that you probably shouldn't go quite this far in a high school calculus class. I imagine that I don't have to underscore the lesson here.”

“No, I remember,” said Mike. “Don't lie to your students.”

Conservapedia versus reality

Reality is winning

The well-known liberal bias of reality seriously irks conservatives. They have responded by declaring that they make their own reality, but that didn't pan out too well. They have worked to build an alternative universe where Fox News is the voice of truth and the GOP is God's Own Party. Conservapedia is part of that alternative universe, the conservative counterpart to Wikipedia.

Conservapedia first came to my attention when its founder Andy Schlafly (yes, the spawn of Phyllis) appointed himself a peer for purposes of peer-reviewing a scientific research paper on E. coli mutation. Aschlafly (as he unselfconsciously styles himself on the Conservapedia site) demanded that Richard Lenski “post the data supporting your remarkable claims so that we can review it.” (Schlafly is the holder of a B.S.E. and a J.D., which he proudly appends to his name, so he's more than qualified to evaluate research in biology.) There followed an exchange between Lenski and Schlafly in which Lenski thoroughly eviscerated Schlafly, and even dangled the guts in Schlafly's face, but Schlafly never seemed to grasp the offal truth. The one-sided fight was followed with much amusement by several blogs, including Pharyngula, which is where I learned what was going on.

Since then I have always been able to count on Conservapedia as an infallible source of comic relief. It's actually difficult sometimes to remember that Schlafly and his minions are in dead earnest. The Conservapedians take themselves very seriously, which is probably one of the reasons Aschlafly mistook himself for a scientist.

Now Schlafly turns out to be The Shadow, who knows what lurks in the hearts of men. In particular, Schlafly knows that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Probably, anyway. The likelihood is so high, at least in Schlafly's opinion, that he insists on including his speculation in the Conservapedia entry for the next president of the United States. You'll have to risk going to Conservapedia itself if you want to track down all of the references yourself. I didn't preserve the links in the following excerpt. I did, however, stick in a bunch of comments, which you'll find embedded in braces:

Obama will likely be the first Muslim President

The argument that Obama is a Muslim is largely based on his Islamic background. It also includes:

• Obama's background, education, and outlook are Muslim, and fewer than 1% of Muslims convert to Christianity.^[26][27] {Notice how Aschlafly assumes that Obama at least used to be a Muslim, because otherwise the argument about the paucity of conversions is inane.}
• Obama's middle name (Hussein) references Husayn, who was the grandson of Muhammad,^[28] which most Christians would not retain.^[29] {On what basis does Aschlafly think that it's common for Christians to change their names to remove non-Christian antecedents?}
• Obama recently mentioned his religion as “my Muslim faith.”^[30] {Aschlafly pretends not to know that Obama was referring rhetorically to McCain's welcome refusal to insinuate that he was a secret adherent of Islam.}
• Obama said the Muslim call to prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset,” and recited “with a first-class Arabic accent” the opening lines: Allah is Supreme! ... I witness that there is no god but Allah ....”^[31] {I think Handel's Messiah is wonderful, but that doesn't make me a Christian.}
• Obama stated that the autobiography of Malcolm X, a Nation of Islam leader who became a Muslim, inspired him in his youth.^[32] {Damn, but this one is weak! I once read Moby Dick, but I'm not a whaler.}
• Obama raised nearly $1 million and campaigned for a Kenyan presidential candidate who had a written agreement with Muslim leaders promising to convert Kenya to an Islamic state that bans Christianity.^[33] {The citation is to WorldNetDaily, so that tells you all you need to know about their credibility.}
• Obama's claims of conversion to Christianity arose after he became politically ambitious, lacking a date of conversion or baptism.^[34] {This is actually good, because it means Obama isn't one of those who prattle on about the date of their “second birth.”}
• On the campaign trail, Obama was reading “The Post-American World” by Fareed Zakaria,^[35] which is written from a Muslim point-of-view.^[36] {Shocker! That Fareed is such an Islamic militant!}
• Contrary to Christianity, the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya encourages adherents to deny they are Muslim if it advances the cause of Islam. {Yeah, so?}
• Obama uses the Muslim Pakistani pronunciation for “Pakistan” rather than the common American one.^[37] {This may prove that Obama isn't really an American, since we can't pronounce foreign names!}
• Obama was thoroughly exposed to Christianity as an adult in Chicago prior to attending law school, yet no one at law school saw him display any interest in converting. Obama unabashedly explained how he became “churched” in a 2007 speech: “It's around that time [while working as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago]^[38] that some pastors I was working with came around and asked if I was a member of a church. ‘If you're organizing churches,’ they said, ‘it might be helpful if you went to a church once in a while.’ And I thought, ‘I guess that makes sense.’” {Law school is one of the best places to convert to Christianity, right? Why wait till pastors recruit you when you could fellowship with law professors?}
• Obama is mentioned as helping to organize the 1995 million man march led by black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan from the Nation of Islam. ^[39] {Obama attended the march but criticized the organizers in an interview with a Chicago newspaper. Was he criticizing himself?}
• Obama has chosen the Secret Service code name “Renegade”. “Renegade” conventionally describes someone who goes against normal conventions of behavior, but its first usage was to describe someone who has turned from their religion. It is a word derived from the Spanish renegado, meaning “Christian turned Muslim.”^[40] {Presidents don't pick their own code names. The Secret Service assigns them.}
• Obama enjoyed a bigger increase in voter support in 2008 (compared to 2004) by Muslims than by any other voting group, including blacks;^[41] “Muslim turnout in the U.S. elections reached 95 percent, the highest Muslim turnout in U.S. history.”^[42] {Proving exactly nothing, except perhaps that Muslim voters despise the GOP.}
• “President-elect Barack Obama has yet to attend church services since winning the White House earlier this month, a departure from the example of his two immediate predecessors.”^[43] {Obama should be more willing to disrupt church services by his security-accompanied presence.}

Obama tries to downplay his Islamic background by claiming that his Kenyan Muslim father was a “confirmed atheist” before Obama was born, but in fact less than 1% of Kenyans are atheists, agnostics, or non-religious.^[44] {What? No record of Obama Sr. joining an atheist church?} There is apparently no evidence of any Christian activities or local church participation by Obama while he was in Massachusetts from 1988 to 1991, nor of Barack Obama's joining of a Mosque (The Islamic house of worship) at any time in his life. Finally, Obama abruptly left his radical Christian church in Chicago in 2008, when it became politically controversial, without first finding another church to join. Obama was sworn into the US senate on a Bible.

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After the Lenski affair, no one can possibly be surprised that the standards for evidence at Conservapedia are skewed in whatever bizarre way Andy Schlafly prefers. Even some of the moderators at Conservapedia have noticed this and are concerned. One of them summarized the dissension in the right-wing ranks:

The facts, however, remain that:

1. DanH—a strong editor and respected sysop—quit this project in disgust at what he saw as an attempt to “smear” Obama as a Muslim.
2. PJR—the most patient and eloquent defender of YEC I have ever encountered—categorically refutes the idea that there is any credible evidence that Obama is a Muslim.
3. Conservative—principal author of several of Conservapedia's defining articles—remains wholly unconvinced of the strength of the Obama/Muslim case, and is concerned that its inclusion in the article could damage Conservapedia's credibility.
4. Tim/CPAdmin1—one of the original members of this project—has repeatedly objected to its inclusion.
5. And finally, ChrisS—again, one of the original Conservapedians—even felt moved to describe this article as the most sorry excuse for an encyclopedia entry I have ever seen.

What kind of synthesis do you hope to achieve in the face of such demonstrably principled opposition? These are not lone, liberal voices. These are long-standing contributors who collectively insist that this is plain wrong and must be removed.

Good night (and good luck). —JohnZ 17:39, 18 November

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How can Aschlafly respond to this detailed and specific indictment? Not a problem:

We respect the views of a minority among us (and note that the minority you cite has displayed almost no experience with Islam and/or Islamic education). Regardless, obviously logic prevails over even the opinion of a majority.

—Aschlafly 17:46, 18 November 2008 (EST)

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No question, therefore, why Andy is resolutely standing his ground. Unlike his in-house critics, Schlafly is an expert on Islam.

Just as he is on biology!

Universal experts

Bringing home the Bacon?

Sir Francis Bacon famously said, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” As a philosopher in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Bacon could say such a thing without being thought ridiculous. It was still possible to be a Renaissance man with catholic interests. Today, however, even single fields of scientific endeavor have grown so broad as to defeat anyone's attempt to be acquainted with all of its aspects, let alone master them. Mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists—all are specialists who carve out particular areas within which they hone their expertise.

We nevertheless still enjoy the presence among us of latter-day Bacons. These contemporary universal scientists are willing to proclaim themselves and offer authoritative opinions on any topic. It seems a pity that instead of honoring their erudition, we most often hide our grins behind our hands and try not to chuckle too loudly. For some reasons, engineers seem to fall into this trap quite often, mistaking their training in one circumscribed field as the foundation for expertise in biology (see the Salem hypothesis). Engineers aren't alone in this. Mathematicians like William Dembski and semi-mathematicians like David Berlinski demonstrate that a head for numbers may also contains pockets of hard vacuum.

An example of one of these self-proclaimed universal experts wandered into the clutches of Judith Martin, who writes an etiquette feature under the name of “Miss Manners.” The following item is from her column of November 27, 2008, although it may have been published on other dates by various newspapers:

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I sometimes find myself in social gatherings where people are discussing some social or political issue with a single point of view clearly preferred by most or all other members of the group, when it is a point of view I cannot bring myself to share.

I am aware that sometimes (as in the case of climate change), this occurs because of my scientific background and my thus having certain knowledge that most people do not, while it sometimes has more to do with my inclination toward contrariness, a character trait that has horrified my wife and which I am working (with limited success) to reduce.

My personality traits aside, is it rude to respectfully share a fact that flies in the face of the apparent group consensus?

An example: “You may not know this, but for the past few years there has been a trend among scientists toward skepticism regarding global warming. Many feel the media is hyping the issue, and several have asked the U.N. to take their names off the report.”

Or is it better to remain silent and allow the discussion to continue on its course with more and more agreement, though I find it sad that such lovely, well-educated people could hold such ill-informed opinions?

GENTLE READER: It is not enough for you to supply the dialogue; Miss Manners would have to hear you speaking it and check out your audience.

She can imagine your words about the environment being said pleasantly, in the clear spirit of, “Well, there is another side to this,” in a freewheeling conversation among dedicated but open-minded friends.

But your wife’s reaction worries Miss Manners. It seems only too likely that you are enjoying your dissensions far too much. That is your cue to stop.

---

It's not a bad answer that Miss Manners gives, though it appears to err—understandably—on the side of politesse. Here's my answer, which is less constrained:

DEAR MR. KNOW-IT-All: Are you a climatologist? No? Then wherein does your “scientific background” lie? The consensus regarding global warming and climate change is stronger than ever among climatologists, so it would be interesting to learn the basis for your contention that there is a “trend among scientists toward skepticism.” (I hope you don't mean the pathetic list compiled by the Heartland Institute.) You state that “several have asked the U.N. to take their names off the report,” by which I presume you mean the the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Can you name even one? There's Christopher Landsea, who left the IPCC over the issue of the impact of global warming on hurricanes, which is his specific area of expertise, but even Landsea does not deny the reality of global warming (“we certainly see substantial warming”). Can you name anyone else?

Your wife is right to be concerned that you are coming off as a pompous ass. If you keep quiet, perhaps no one will suspect.

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Note

I was reminded of the Miss Manners column when I noticed that PZ Myers had tossed a naive anti-evolution “expert” to the ravenous hordes over at Pharyngula. (I took a quick nip myself.) If you bother to read Halfway There then you're more than likely to have already seen PZ's post this morning on poor old Martin Patterson (“I just want to share what I have learned with other intellectuals”), but if you haven't, don't miss the fun.

The truth about global warming

Just kidding!

Whenever D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries decides to explain science to its congregants, you know you're in for as much fantasy as you'd be likely to find at a science fiction convention. Despite Kennedy's prolonged illness, his minions continue to mine his video archives for material with which to entertain the viewers of The Coral Ridge Hour, the ministry's hour-long weekly television program. Having already announced the death and defeat of evolution (more than once, actually), Coral Ridge has moved on to concerns about global warming and climate change—or, as they are more likely to characterize it, environmental extremism. And God doesn't like that.

The weekend of April 14 saw the debut of a Coral Ridge Hour program devoted to debunking the idea of anthropogenic global warming. It included a pitch by D. James Kennedy himself, speaking in a previously recorded sermon from the pulpit of his Fort Lauderdale church. Kennedy's segment was bracketed by pitches encouraging people to send money to receive a booklet titled Overheated and a video titled Global Warming: The Science and the Solutions. Bits of the video were featured throughout the Coral Ridge Hour program.

I recorded The Coral Ridge Hour and transcribed the introduction at the beginning of the program as well as the extended commercial for the booklet and video that purport to debunk global warming. As you'll see, even extremists like the good folks affiliated with Dr. Kennedy have abandoned any pretense of pretending that global warming is not occurring. They concentrate their fire instead on the notion that human activity has anything to do with it. The supposed experts in the program also suggest that global warming might be good for us. Perhaps it's all part of God's plan.

The Coral Ridge Hour

Broadcast April 14-15, 2007

D. James Kennedy: It's tragic that there are so many that are so hopeless and whose lives are filled with despair. They say there seems to be no future for the earth itself. We're destroying the ozone layer. We're melting the ice in the poles. We've got global warming. But the truth is that people become hopeless because of unbelief.

What is Global Warming?

Narrator: Are they warning signs of an approaching man-made catastrophe or the results of a natural weather cycle running its course? The debate over global warming is heating up, but what's the truth? Our answers could cost billions of dollars and millions of lives, so we must become informed on this critical issue.

That's why Dr. Kennedy wants you to have the new booklet entitled Overheated. It's adapted from an enlightening Truths that Transform discussion between Dr. Kennedy and Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, a professor at Knox Theological Seminary and expert on global warming. You'll receive Overheated when you call or write with a gift of any amount to this ministry. You'll also receive a special Coral Ridge Hour report entitled Global Warming: The Science and the Solutions. The video, available in VHS or DVD, is your along with the new booklet Overheated when you send a gift of any amount to Coral Ridge Ministries, Box 40, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 33302.

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I don't have my copy of the booklet and DVD yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. I sent my extremely modest “gift of any amount” a few days ago. (Modesty is a virtue, you know.)

Narrator: It's the subject of news reports and headlines and even an Oscar-winning documentary. It appears that global warming has become the hottest topic around.

Dr. John Christy, Director, Earth System Science Center (University of Alabama, Huntsville): Global warming is a popular phenomenon now because of the expressions of disaster that tend to come along with the story. And if you can show a story that has big icebergs falling off and drought and deaths or thousands of animals and so on, well, that's going to get the media's attention certainly—and people's attention.

Narrator: But with all the doomsday scenarios, what do scientists really know about global warming?

Christy: The simple answer on “What is global warming?” is to say that the earth's temperature has risen in the past 150 years. We've been able to measure that with thermometers.

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Although Dr. Christy was identified on the screen as the director of the Earth System Science Center, The Coral Ridge Hour neglected to inform its viewers that the center is located at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. An oversight? I don't know. It's not as though this affiliation is something that needs to be concealed lest is discredit Christy's research center. The University of Alabama is a real school and not an example of institutionalized wackiness like Bob Jones University. I suspect, however, that the Coral Ridge video editors chose to omit the UA affiliation from Christy's identity lest people get the impression that their panel of contrarian scientists had no breadth. As it just so happens, the very next scientist to appear on the program is Dr. Christy's University of Alabama colleague, Dr. Roy Spencer. In Spencer's case, the UA affiliation was clearly stated on the screen, but the casual viewer had no way of knowing that Coral Ridge's experts were two peas from the same pod.

Dr. Roy W. Spencer, University of Alabama, Huntsville: There isn't anybody I know that doesn't agree we are unusually warm right now.

Narrator: But that's where the agreement among scientists ends.

Christy: Once you understand that the temperature is rising, the question is, well, why, and that is where a number of issues come to bear—and opinions—because we cannot know for certain.

Narrator: The most widely publicized theory and the view presented in Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth is that greenhouse gases are largely to blame for the warming.

Christy: Greenhouse gases are gases that absorb energy in a certain part of the spectrum that keeps thermal or heat energy in the atmosphere. I think the simplest way to think about this is that if you were in a desert at night, you find that it gets very cold. If you're in the southeastern United States—say, Florida or Oklahoma somewhere—you'll find that the night-time temperatures in the summer stay warm. Well, water vapor—or humidity—is a greenhouse gas that keeps the heat in and doesn't allow it to escape at night.

Spencer: Sunlight comes in and warms the earth, but what most people don't realize is that, for all of that sunlight coming in, there has to be an equal amount of infrared heat energy going back out into outer space. Now the climate modelers claim that there's this fragile balance between the incoming sunlight and the outgoing infrared, and that when we add the CO₂, we're upsetting that delicate balance.

Narrator: CO₂, or carbon dioxide, is the greenhouse gas that grabs most of the headlines.

Spencer: They make it sound like it's the radiation balance that determines what the temperature of the earth is, but I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I think that it's the sunlight coming in that determines how warm things are going to get. Weather creates a greenhouse effect—which is mostly water vapor and clouds—and, in other words, the weather has control over the greenhouse effect. And, if we add CO₂, I think the weather is going to change slightly in order to reduce the warming from that extra CO₂.

Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, Knox Theological Seminary: The great question is how much, if at all, does that account for the warming that we have seen in recent years, and the best scientific evidence that I see indicates that it is a very tiny proportion of the total cause, if in fact it can even be viewed as a part of the cause at all.

A bit of inconvenient truth is missing from this Coral Ridge program. While Beisner heaps disdain on the notion that humans could be contributing significantly to climate change, Christy is on record as saying “It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way.” Of course, one can't be absolutely certain, so it is this aspect of Christy's remarks they prefer to quote immediately after Beisner's dismissive remarks. You'll note that Christy doesn't actually endorse Beisner's view; he merely notes that people are still disagreeing about the details.

Christy: We can't look out and develop an instrument that says, “This tells me why the temperature is changing.” Some people think all that you see in terms of global warming is caused by humans and the greenhouse gases we emit because of energy production. Others say it's completely naturally induced—like changes in the solar input from the sun, or various ways in which the weather fluctuates due to natural changes in the ocean circulation, or wind systems, and so on like that.

Narrator: The bottom line is that, contrary to popular reports, not all scientists agree that global warming is man-made.

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Although Christy does, at least to a significant degree. Spencer, on the other hand, is rather more accommodating. That is, until he starts flogging the notion of proper credentials.

Spencer: I would say that the mainstream view of global warming is, yes, we are unusually warm right now and most of it is probably due to mankind. Now you'll hear that there's a consensus of scientists that believe this. It turns out that there are very few scientists who know enough about the whole problem to actually be able to cast judgment on this. So if you hear that a thousand scientists agree that global warming is due to mankind, chances are only ten of that thousand actually know enough about the problem to cast any judgment on the issue at all.

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This was my favorite part of the program. While Spencer and Christy both have actual credentials as scientists, even if they do stand outside the mainstream, what other “experts” appear in Coral Ridge's program? Dr. Beisner, promoted by Kennedy's organization as an expert on global warming, is a professor at Knox Theological Seminary—D. James Kennedy's very own seminary, part of his Coral Ridge empire. Beisner has no science degrees, so Spencer would undoubtedly consider him eminently unqualified to preach on the nature of global warming. As noted on Beisner's own website:

Beisner is a graduate of the University of Southern California with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion and Philosophy; of International College with an M.A. in Society with a Specialization in Economic Ethics, both magna cum laude; and of the University of St. Andrews, in St. Andrews, Scotland, with a Ph.D. in Scottish History.

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Beisner is an expert all right—on Scottish history. In terms of climatology, he is a layman.

Narrator: Aside from the causes of warming, the effects of global warming are also up for debate.

Spencer: As far as Al Gore's movie goes, An Inconvenient Truth, I think there was a lot of misrepresentation and half-truths in that movie. He showed a lot of dramatic footage of different things going on, you know, ice crashing off of glaciers into the ocean and droughts and floods and, of course, what he didn't mention was everything he showed in the movie happens naturally.

Christy: You know, in science, as Lord Kelvin said, “All science is numbers.” And so, when I hear people talk about polar bears, I say, “Well, let's be scientific about them. Let's actually count the polar bears.” And it turns out the polar bear population has grown by a factor of over three in the last forty years.

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Just how scientific are Dr. Christy's numbers for the polar bear population? They're actually very speculative. For someone who counsels caution in drawing conclusions about the nature of global warming, Christy is very quick to accept as reliable estimates of polar bear population that naturalists consider highly doubtful. Well, one can't be expert in everything!

Narrator: Some experts say the record-setting 2005 hurricane season is evidence for global warming, but not all agree.

Spencer: There's a lot of uncertainty over whether hurricanes are either more frequent or more intense. Certainly 2005 was a record year for hurricane hits in the United States. That was pretty amazing. But then you remember that 2006 was a flop, basically. It was below normal. And it turns out that since we only have good hurricane data—as far as how many hurricanes are out there in the Atlantic—since we've had weather satellites back in the 1970s, that we really don't know how many there were before then with much confidence.

Narrator: But what about the future? News reports claim global warming is the number one threat to our future survival as a planet, saying that ice caps could melt, submerging entire cities under the ocean.

Beisner: For example, on sea-level rise, where people have—particularly because of Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth—they have these pictures in mind of sea level rising 20, 40, 60 feet. Something like that. Well, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates sea-level rise through the entire 21st century at probably not more than a total of 16 inches in the entire century.

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Beisner lays it on pretty thick, doesn't he? Gore cited a 20-foot rise in sea level as the consequence of melting the southern ice cap, should global warming continue unchecked. There is a lot of frozen water in Antarctica. The IPCC report confirmed that the southern ice could raise the oceans by as much as 7 meters, in agreement with Gore's statement. It's a warning, rather than a simple prediction. The folks who accuse Gore of hyping worst-case scenarios are pretty stuck on worst-case scenarios themselves, aren't they?

It's time for another expert with sterling credentials when it comes to global warming and the environment. This time it's a Dominionist theologian. Dr. Spencer must be pretty tweaked at the poseurs who were presented right alongside him as experts like himself.

Dr. Richard Land, author, The Earth is the Lord's: Whether the oceans are going to rise 2.5 feet over the next hundred years, or whether they're going to rise 20 feet—which is the model that Al Gore uses for his Inconvenient Truth, his “crockumentary” that won an Oscar—I mean, is a doomsday scenario that there's absolutely no scientific evidence for. No reputable scientist is talking about a 20-foot increase in the oceans.

Narrator: Some experts say we should take aggressive action to reduce consumption of fossil fuels, not only to protect the environment itself, but also to save people living in poverty. Others say the opposite is true.

Spencer: We have at least one million Africans dying each year because of lack of access to electricity. We have Africans dying by the hundreds of thousands, mostly children, because we've got poor people burning wood and dung in huts, which cause respiratory illnesses, which kill mostly children. Meanwhile, these people can't have electricity because environmentalists that don't even live in Africa put pressure on their governments and don't let them build hydroelectric dams that could give them electricity and save their lives. So basically what's happening is we are sacrificing the poor at the altar of radical environmentalism.

Narrator: Even if scientists don't have all the answers, Christians should be concerned about global warming, but they should be concerned about their approach to the issue.

Beisner: I think there are some very significant risks to evangelicals getting involved with this without really knowing the science or the economics well. The first and most important risk, the one that I care about the most, is that they might unwittingly endorse a policy that is very destructive to the poorest people in this world, the most vulnerable people. Those people desperately need abundant and cheap energy to drive the economic development that will lift them out of absolute poverty.

Land: In Genesis chapter 2, Adam was put into the garden to keep it and to till it. To keep it means to guard it and to protect it. To till it means to cause it to bring forth its fruit, to develop it. For what purpose? For human good.

Spencer: Well, from the biblical standpoint, I think we are called to be good stewards of the environment, right? And that's where Christians, you know, understandably get involved in environmentalism. Of course, what does good stewardship mean? I mean, it's clear that humans come first, but at the same time we shouldn't be destroying the environment wantonly. So there's a gray area, and people have to decide, you know, how far you go to protect the environment.

Land: I think we need to, in our evangelical Christian churches, to do a far better job than we have of helping people to understand what a biblical earth-keeping ethic is. What creation-care really means and what our responsibilities are in terms of creation-care, and part of that being to understand that human beings come first in God's creation, not last. And they're not irrelevant and they're not considered the enemies of God's creation.

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Actually, Dr. Land, some people are the enemies of what you call God's creation. I think you and I would disagree, however, on who they are.

I'm from the government...

...and I'm here to help you

'Tis the season for various media luminaries to go on vacation and turn their spots over to guest hosts and substitutes. During the week after Christmas, I heard Tammy Bruce sitting in for Laura Ingraham on the latter's radio talk show. (Imagine how humiliating it must be to serve as second-string to Laura Ingraham.) Bruce, in case you didn't know, is that oddly pieced-together platypus of a media celebrity who cheerfully describes herself as “an openly gay, pro-choice, gun owning, pro-death penalty, voted-for-President Bush progressive feminist.” She also apparently voted for Ronald Reagan. I presume it's that self-proclaimed “progressive” aspect that permits her to be an “out” lesbian, because otherwise gays who vote for Republicans are expected to remain discreetly closeted (although I did once hear a rumor about there possibly being a lesbian in Dick Cheney's family).

Bruce took the opportunity of her turn in Ingraham's small spotlight to whinge about the FDA's announcement concerning the safety of meat and milk from cloned farm animals. “Oh, I suppose they know so much better than we do because they're from the government,” she hissed.

Well, as a matter of fact, they do. It's not simply a case of being “from the government”; it's because they're from the Food and Drug Administration, which has professional requirements for its personnel. We may be distracted at times by the obvious fact that the top levels of government are packed with many grotesquely incompetent individuals and quite a few scoundrels (think Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hastert, et al.), but those folks aren't representative of most government employees. The people at the top levels get there by means of election (so it's our fault, I'm afraid—except perhaps for that scandal in 2000) or appointment (making it the fault of those elected to the appointing positions). They just need political connections, so they can get by with having as little knowledge and as few skills as, say, a talk-show host.

It is a different story in the trenches. You can't get a job in the rank and file of the civil service without passing a qualifying test that assesses your skills and abilities. I took a few of these tests myself when I spent several years in the California civil service. Guess what? I actually had to know some operations research to pass the test that put me on the hiring list for Operations Research Specialist I. Damn! (I was right near the top, too.)

I'll bet the people who work for the FDA know a hell of a lot more about food safety than Tammy Bruce. Sure, she probably makes more money than they do, while she sits in front of a microphone and sneers at them from her lofty perch, but I dare say the civil servants take more care in their work than their loud-mouthed critics. The scientists in the FDA work to protect us from unsafe food and drugs. That's their job. Bruce can thumb her nose at them all she wants, but I wonder what would happen to her if she had to make all her own food and drug safety decisions. Maybe Bruce would like a free market approach: Let's not shop at those markets whose customers die from tainted food products. Let's buy drugs on the Internet at random (or maybe according to their pretty colors) and see if they cure us or kill us. Um. You go first.

Unfortunately, the civil servants in the FDA and other federal and state agencies are human beings, and therefore fallible. They certainly catch hell for their mistakes, being alternately damned as interfering bureaucrats and condemned for not catching every single danger. I've worked in their ranks—although mercifully not in a front-line public safety capacity—and I've seen that a large majority of civil servants are highly qualified, do their work well, and shoulder their responsibilities admirably. Most of the problems I've observed in civil service have stemmed from the interference of political appointees who overrule their staff people for ideological reasons. In recent years, examples of this sort have been a staple of the Bush administration.

In the case of meat and milk from clones, it's already clear that the public has deep reservations. Commercial success seems unlikely. No doubt rants from people like Bruce will contribute to that fear and distrust. That, however, is not what the FDA report was about. The FDA says it's safe. It's not the FDA's job to determine whether it's marketable. The commercial sector can work that out for itself.