Vermont students launch 'flat earth' award
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By ANDREW BARKER Correspondent - Published: March 13, 2005
Rush Limbaugh is surely accustomed to accolades by now. Three times he has been named the syndicated radio personality of the year by the National Association of Broadcasters for his hugely popular radio program, "The Rush Limbaugh Show," which reaches about 20 million listeners each week.
Soon, Limbaugh may need to find more room on the mantelpiece, because another less-coveted award may be coming his way: the Flat Earth Award.
Limbaugh leads in online voting for the dubious honor, which was created by three Middlebury College students this winter to expose a prominent public figure for "denial of the facts of global warming." The project was one outcome of a January term class at the college entitled, "Building the New Climate Movement," in which students collaborated with six companies and nonprofit organizations to find new ways to focus public attention on the global climate find new ways to focus public attention on the global climate change crisis.
"It's not a serious award, but it's a serious issue," said sophomore Makely Lyon, who created the award with sophomore Minna Brown and senior John Hanley. "We wanted to find something that would catch someone's eye whether they believed in global warming or not, and lead to an educational opportunity. Hopefully people will go to the Web site and learn more about global warming."
The three students developed the award in conjunction with the Green House Network, a Portland, Ore., nonprofit that supports education, outreach and lobbying efforts to promote a clean energy future.
As of March 10, Limbaugh had garnered 45 percent of the 3,200 votes cast in six weeks of polling at the Web site (www.flatearthaward.org). He was nominated by the award's creators for his repeated high-profile insistence that the evidence for global warming is merely the "hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists."
The other nominees for the inaugural award are Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, a think tank on climate and environmental issues in Washington, D.C., and author and film director Michael Crichton. Singer has been a leading skeptic of global warming within the scientific community for decades, but is drawing just 18 percent of online votes for the Flat Earth Award.
Crichton was nominated on the basis of the appendices to his 2004 best-selling novel, "State of Fear," in which he dismisses the idea that human production of greenhouse gases will significantly warm the planet and offers selective evidence to support his position. The novel itself tells the story of eco-terrorists who provoke natural disasters to perpetuate a hoax that catastrophic global warming is taking place. Crichton is running second in online voting for the award with 36 percent.
Neither Crichton nor Limbaugh was available for comment, but Singer responded cheerfully to his nomination for the award.
"I feel honored, of course, to be in the company of these two gentlemen," he said, but added that he does not deny that global warming is happening. "I believe that the climate is currently warming as a result of the increase of greenhouse gases. The greenhouse effect is real. However, the effect is minute, insignificant and very difficult to detect. There is a discrepancy between what we expect from theory and the facts, and we need to explain that. That's what we're all working on."
Singer also said that if he were to win the award, he would be happy to collect it in person, so long as his travel expenses were paid and he "didn't have to wear a tuxedo." In fact, Singer proposed that the award finalists be invited to Middlebury to make presentations on global climate change for the student body. "Then they can vote and we can collect our prizes," he said.
But Brown said she wasn't interested in Singer's proposal. "It would have been fun, but the point of the award wasn't to say, 'Here's the other side, and they're wrong.' It's not even a question anymore." As evidence, she pointed to a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a highly respected body of scientists that was created by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme in 1988. The report predicts that the earth's surface temperatures will rise by an average of 2.4 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100, due to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Similarly, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded in a 2001 report that "temperatures are, in fact, rising" around the world, and that a continuation of current trends could produce rising sea levels, increased rainfall and increased susceptibility of semi-arid regions to drought in the future.
In December 2004, an article in "Science" magazine by science historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California at San Diego reported that not a single article was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal between 1993 and 2003 that disagreed with the consensus position on global warming.
"There is absolutely a scientific consensus," agreed David Sandalow, environment scholar at the Brookings Institution, a centrist public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. "The planet is warming and human activity is the likely cause."
"The only debate that's really going on is between people like Fred Singer, or Rush Limbaugh, or Michael Crichton," added Hanley.
This year's Flat Earth Award winner will be announced April 1 at a ceremony at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. The prize is a copy of physicist Spencer Weart's book, "The Discovery of Global Warming." If all goes well, the Green House Network will make the competition an annual event, according to volunteer executive director Dr. Eban Goodstein.
Even as the humorous award gains momentum, its creators say their efforts are just a small part of a much larger and more serious project afoot at Middlebury – and around the country – to reframe the discussion about climate change and create workable solutions.
"The challenge in facing global warming is to make people understand what's going on in a sense that's wider than the environmental consequences," said Lyon. "It's a health issue and a jobs issue and an energy issue. It's not just about saving some species in the Arctic. We need to make the issue so wide that people can't disagree with it."
Dr. Jonathan Isham, assistant professor of economics at Middlebury, who taught "Building the New Climate Movement," said it is essential that people begin to understand the opportunities that will come from climate change. "Some of the solutions to global warming are going to be great for society," he said. "There will be millions of new jobs created. We'll have cleaner air in our cities. It's not smoke and mirrors. It's real."
Isham said several other projects completed by students in the climate movement class were also highly successful. One group collaborated with Environmental Defense, the New York-based nonprofit environmental group, to map out a strategy to persuade New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu to support federal legislation on greenhouse gas reduction. Another group worked closely with representatives at Ben and Jerry's to help steer marketing efforts for the company's new ice cream flavor, "Fossil Fuel," which was created in part to raise awareness about global warming.
Perhaps most exciting, Isham said, a team of students began working to create a new coalition of Vermont organizations that will push for action at the state level to slow global warming.
"We didn't want just another interest group," said junior Thomas Hand, who worked on the coalition-building project. "It needs to be broad-reaching, including everybody who has a stake in global warming: business organizations, Rotary clubs, farmers, sugarmakers, hunters, anglers, trappers, snowmobilers, ski area associations, the Vermont lodging and restaurant groups, representatives from the Legislature, and representatives from the power companies."
"You'll notice," he said, "it doesn't really have environmental groups in there. If you define climate change as an environmental problem, then by definition only environmentalists should care about it. But everyone has a part in causing (global warming), and everyone is going to be affected by it."
Isham is already acting on some of the recommendations from Hand's group. He is working this spring with another group of students forming a coalition to support legislation recently introduced in the Vermont House that would establish a state climate crisis commission and create goals for greenhouse gas reductions in the state. Passage of the legislation would be one of the first concrete steps toward fulfilling the Climate Change Action Plan that former Gov. Howard Dean embraced at a 2001 summit of New England governors and Eastern Canadian provincial premiers.
While there is much serious work to be done to respond to climate change, even Isham admits he has gotten caught up in the excitement about the Flat Earth Award.
"Frankly, if Rush Limbaugh wins and we can get him to talk about it on his show – even if he denigrates it – it will be good for us," he said. "Any attention is great."
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