Global Warming Not Just Hot Air

To the editors:

Bolek Z. Kabala (Opinion, May 8) correctly points out that evidence surrounding the greenhouse effect is not wholly conclusive, yet his article is more ad hominem attack on Al Gore than substantive argument. He ignores the harmful effects of depleting the ozone layer, acid rain, and the estimated 64,000 deaths each year from air pollution, according to a study done by the Natural Resources Defense Council, not to mention the environmental destruction due to strip mining, deforestation and oil extraction.

Kabala cites a 1997 article from Science claiming global warming theory as inconclusive. Surely, Kabala read the end of the article that cites a skeptic as saying he views warming theory with 97 percent confidence. Kabala cites satellite data that says there has been no global warming since 1979; surely, he is aware of the findings in Nature that show that those readings did not take orbital decay into account. After the correction, warming trends corresponding to temperature become evident. These scientists, backed up by NASA scientists in a more recent Science article, "conclude that the question now is not whether global warming exists--it clearly does--but what should be done about it."

Absent from Kabala's account the possible devastating consequences should warming theory be true: floods, disease, famine, severe economic dislocation and rapid species loss. Even most fossil fuel companies understand the necessity of moving toward alternative fuels and renewable energies. Clearly they, unlike Kabala, understand the risk is not worth taking.

Andrew D. Bradt '02

May 10, 2000

Reform Math Adds Up

To the editors:

Along with tens of thousands of other practicing elementary and secondary math teachers, I would dispute many of the claims that Wilfried Schmid (Opinion, May 4) laid against "reform" mathematics.

There is little of substance in the Professor's rambling discourse. He, as a professional mathematician, has no better sense of how 95 percent of children encounter mathematics in school than his colleagues in the School of Education would have to question his recent work on "nilpotent orbits."

Dr. Schmid is simplistic on calculators, incorrect on "downgrading skills," hyperbolic on the "avant garde reformers," irrational on textbook economics, ill-informed on "statistical studies and anecdotal evidence," inverted on the role of "understanding" in the "New Math " of the 60's (except that it was, indeed, "the mathematicians" who pushed that misguided effort into our schools) and tangential about "textbooks." He is correct to call for continuing improvement in teacher education to support more challenging mathematics in every classroom, but wrong to downplay the central role of pedagogy in pre-college math classrooms.

Let's not strew mathematics professors and long-division worksheets in the path of my students and millions of others who only in the past decade have been offered a glimpse of math classrooms in which they can honestly perceive themselves as thinkers, as problem-solvers, and as active participants.

Daryl R. Anderson '76

May 9, 2000