On October 28th the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota hosted Apollo 7 astronaut Col. Walter Cunningham. Col. Cunningham’s lecture sought to show a new perspective on the climate change debate. He focused on the problems with anthropogenic, or manmade, global warming.
According to Col. Cunningham, one of the most important problems with the current climate change debate is a breakdown in the scientific method. Many proponents of manmade global warming assert that it is a theory, an established idea that has been backed up tests and widely studied hypotheses; however, this is not the case. Many of the proposed causes of manmade global warming have never progressed past being more than a hypothesis.
Also, many times short cuts are taken in explaining the relationship between the climate and the amount of manmade CO2 present in our atmosphere. Manmade global warming proponents will often imply causation from the correlation between the increasing amount of manmade CO2 in our atmosphere and changes in the earth’s climate. The problem is correlation does not mean causation, a fact which is overlooked by many scientists in the climate change debate.
The event was a great success and many students took a break from their studies to attend the lecture. Col. Cunningham challenged the students, even those that did not agree with him, to look at the data and facts about the climate change debate for themselves so they could be informed about the issue.