We talk about climate change in one of the Stats classes I teach. This past semester, my colleague Prof. Palmateer taught that lesson (as I was on sabbatical) and he was told by a student that it's against the Code of Ethics at Towson to talk about climate change that way, that he needs to open the floor for all dissenters if he's going to talk about it.
Well, I'm sorry, but no, he doesn't, and no, the dissenters no longer have a viable argument. Literally thousands of scientists, many of them listed here, have come to one conclusion based on years of research done by each of them. No matter what the oil industry argues, human-caused climate change is a fact- it's happening now, as in right now: for example, this in the news today. (No, that one news article isn't sufficient evidence, but it's illustrative.)
As open as I am to conversation and discussion, there are some topics that we can't talk much about. Does the sun revolve around the earth? No, it doesn't: Copernicus figured that out in the 1500's. Is the moon made of green cheese? No, it's made of rock and covered with space dust, as was hypothesized by my great-uncle Charles in 1963 and proven true a few years later when people landed on it. Climate change falls into this category: the science is settled. The question is what to do about it.
