Al Gore Is a Greenhouse Gasbag

It's the last day of November, which means winter begins in three weeks. Yet the temperature on the Penn campus is nearing 70 degrees, and it's muggy. Walking to the offices of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science from a remote parking lot makes me sweaty. Global Warming.

Driving here this morning, I heard a report on WHYY from National Public Radio that the International Ski Federation was canceling races because there's no snow in the Alps. Got to be Global Warming!

Yesterday, down the road in Washington, where the temperature was 16 degrees above normal, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case in which 13 state governments are suing the Environmental Protection Agency to force the government to begin controlling carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the decades-old Clean Air Act. If that doesn't happen, the states claim, the rising sea levels caused by greenhouse gases will rob them of coastline. GLOBAL WARMING!!

And this is just one ordinary day in the new normal. Even if daily weather has nothing to do with global warming, and even if the scientific debate about it is not quite done, its cultural moment has certainly begun. Insurance companies have stopped writing policies for coastline residents. A government report out of England warns that global warming may be so economically deleterious that it will make the upheaval of the Great Depression and World War II seem benign.

Michael Crichton has already dramatized the issue in a best-selling novel. Leonardo DiCaprio is working on a documentary on the subject. A recent Time magazine cover featured a polar bear in danger of drowning and the warning: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."

I've come to Penn to see the skeptic.

In Room 100 of the classic Christopher Wren-inspired Towne Building, Robert Giegengack seems much less than worried. The 67-year-old professor is preparing to give one of the semester's final lectures to his 150-student class in environmental analysis, a popular science elective among Penn's arts and sciences undergrads.

For decades, Giegengack was content to be a relatively obscure geologist who taught more than he published. Recently, though, he's stepped into the swirling tempest surrounding global warming, in part because he says it's not even one of the top 10 environmental problems we face. To make that point, he occasionally joins in a panel discussion, or gives a quote to a science writer. He's thinking about writing something for one of the smarty-pants magazines. "I've always been interested in this question," he says, "but when I first started working, no one cared — you couldn't get an article published if you wanted to." Now, though, "The public appetite for all this crap seems to be insatiable."

Giegengack is a slim man of medium height, with a prominent nose and a very high forehead. "I traded my hair for eyeglasses," he's been known to say. In this weird late-fall weather, he's dressed as if he might run off for a round of golf or a sail — khaki pants, striped dress shirt (short-sleeved) and boat shoes. His name is pronounced "GEEG-in-gack," and over the nearly four decades he has taught at Penn, students have developed the habit of simply calling him "Gieg."

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