BATON ROUGE (AP) — An LSU professor who says he was trying to provoke students to think about the consequences of global warming claims he is being wrongly accused of bias by conservative bloggers who have posted video out-takes of his climate change lecture.
Astronomy professor Bradley Schaefer said he wasn’t marginalizing global warming skeptics by telling them “blood will be on their hands” if they support a policy that would have the U.S. doing nothing to restrict greenhouse gas production.
Schaefer said he was trying to provoke discussion with inflammatory rhetoric and gave equally tough criticism to students who advocated other points of view.
“What I was doing was very intentional. I was posing all sides of how to handle global warming, and I was challenging all sides of it, too,” Schaefer said in an interview Wednesday.
A video of Schaefer’s comments — cut to a few minutes from a nearly hour-long lecture — is popping up on YouTube and conservative blogs, with critics describing it as an attempt to indoctrinate students.
An organization called CampusReform.org, which calls itself “a network of conservative and libertarian student activists,” filmed the lecture Nov. 3 and posted clips online, saying it showed Schaefer berating students for their conservative views.
One student can be heard saying in the video, “I think this is an opportunity for our teacher to openly mock us. That’s about it.”
Schaefer said the clips misrepresent the point of his lecture, which he said was intentionally provocative. He said the video came from an organization “trying to use YouTube to make a university faculty teach what their political position is.”
The dean of LSU’s College of Science, Kevin Carman, said no student has complained about the lecture and no action will be taken against Schaefer, who Carman called a “spirited professor” with consistently positive student reviews.
“In academia, sometimes our faculty push the envelope. Certainly this is pushing the envelope, but I have no intention of doing anything in response to this,” Carman said.
The Washington, D.C.-area-based CampusReform.org provided The Associated Press with a longer, 39-minute unedited video of Schaefer’s lecture.
In it, Schaefer tells the students to choose where to sit in the classroom based on their answer to the question, “Should the U.S. vigorously restrict greenhouse gas production?” Eleven options are given, and students sit in sections that range from advocating that the U.S. do nothing to mandating birth control and eliminating all engines.
To the students in the section that supports no involvement from the U.S., Schaefer says, “That’s really good for you, at least for the next decade or two. Then you’re in trouble, and then you’ll remember having sat on that corner. You will not want to tell your children, if they live, why you’re sitting on that corner, that you were part of the trouble, right?” Later he tells them, “Blood will be on your hands.”
He also criticizes those sitting on the opposite extreme, saying their position would break the world economy.
“Where would I sit? I don’t know. I would not sit along either of the two edges. I think those are insane,” he tells the class.
Bryan Bernys, national director of CampusReform.org, said Schaefer’s comments were far more pointed to students who chose the conservative point of view.
“He’s clearly introducing his own opinion to the class, and it doesn’t seem to be a very open position for conservative thinkers,” Bernys said.
In the lecture, Schaefer repeatedly told students he was trying to force them to think about the implications of global warming. He blamed his generation and his parents’ generation for climate change and apologized to the students for “screwing you royally.”
He also said there is scientific agreement on humanity’s effect on global warming. When a student questions the science of climate change, Schaefer responds, “Screwing around with the science results is stupid. Making the political decision, that’s something else. Screwing in the science is wrong. You’re monsters putting your head under the sand.”
Bernys said one of his organization’s “field representatives” attended the class with a student to record the lecture. Schaefer said the filmer misrepresented why he was there, which Bernys denied. Schaefer said he never saw a camera, though Bernys said it was placed on top of a backpack in plain view.
