A former Carleton professor is refuting claims that he’s a climate change denier and that a course he taught at Carleton took an incorrect and biased stance on climate change.
In a report published Feb. 28, 2012, Tom Harris’ former earth science class “Climate change: an earth sciences perspective,” is alleged to have presented an “unbalanced” and “factually inaccurate” view on human involvement with global climate change.
The report was released by the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism, a group that responds to scientific, medical and technological claims made to the public.
Its parent group, the Centre for Inquiry Canada, was responsible for the 2010 atheist bus ads that challenged the existence of a god.
“A lot of the report, I thought, was pretty nasty, not just the approach, but the language,” said Harris, a self-described climate skeptic.
“The language is not a professional science language. It’s the language of politics.”
The report is co-written by Chris Hassall, a Carleton post-doctoral fellow in biology who has studied the effects of climate change on insects.
“This isn’t a critique of a man,” Hassall said. “What we’ve done is we’ve critiqued the science.”
The report is based off an audit of ERTH 2404, a half-credit course on climate change for non-earth science majors. Tim Patterson, a Carleton earth science undergraduate advisor and climate skeptic, wrote most of the course’s curriculum.
Harris, who specialized in fluids, thermodynamics and heat transfer as a mechanical engineering student at Carleton, taught the course from 2009 to 2011.
The authors found 142 incidences of Harris or one of his guest lecturers making claims during the 2011-2012 academic year that were uncertain or wrong on a scientific basis, the report states.
Each claim is addressed in the report with references to scientific research supporting the committee’s review.
The claims include statements like, “I don’t think humans control climate change. We have a certain amount of influence and we’ve got to figure out what that is,” and “Carbon dioxide of course is a greenhouse gas, but it is not a pollutant. It’s invisible, odourless, it’s essential to plant photosynthesis.”
Hassall said the audit was conducted to give a scientific rebuttal to the claims for the sake of Carleton students’ education and for the correction of similar errors that come up in popular discussion on climate change.
But Harris, the executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition and a policy advisor for the Heartland Institute, a free-market oriented think tank, said he thinks there are no right answers when it comes to climate change.
“We’re not denying anything,” he said.
“We’re saying climate changes all the time and it can be pretty dangerous, but the cause of that change is a very, very difficult scientific topic and it’s not one that’s even remotely settled.”
Harris said he showed students the usual theory of greenhouses gases causing climate change and told them he was presenting alternative viewpoints of the origins of the phenomenon.
“I treated the students like adults, very different to how a lot of professors teach them where they ‘tell them the truth,’ they tell them what to believe,” he said.
Harris said he sees the report as an attempt to limit his academic freedom. But Hassall disagrees.
“It’s not wrong to teach dissenting opinions,” Hassall said. “Academic freedom is extremely important.”
Science courses aren’t like arts courses, he said. There’s isn’t the same amount of room for subjectivity.
“This isn’t an English literature course where we’re comparing Shakespeare and Marlowe and anybody’s opinion is valid,” Hassall said.
“This is a case where the instructor is making scientifically-testable claims and the empirical evidence for those claims is lacking or there’s evidence contradicting his claims.”
For the university’s part, Carleton media relations officer Caitlin Kealey released a statement about Harris.
“Academic excellence is a priority at Carleton and we have a process in place for reviewing courses that balances content with academic freedom and the rights of our instructors as outlined in their collective agreement,” Kealey said via email.
