When science isn't

IF A middle-school science teacher wanted to introduce the subject of global warming to students, she could do worse than to show the Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Unless, that is, she lived in the Seattle suburb Federal Way, where some parents recently objected to having their children see it. One father agreed that the planet is warming, but said it is caused by God, not man, and is a sign that Judgment Day is approaching.

The school board knuckled under to the pressure, initially banning the movie and then requiring that teachers planning to show it first get written approval from their principals. The teachers also would have to "balance" the movie with alternate views approved by both the principal and superintendent of schools. The teacher who first tried to show the film, Kay Walls, said she was told she would receive a disciplinary letter for not following a school board rule requiring permission before using "controversial" material in class.

Federal Way has thus joined school districts around the country that refuse to stand up for teachers whose duty is to educate students about basic elements of biology, evolution, or what virtually all climate scientists believe is the greatest environmental threat: global warming. We hope the unfavorable publicity the Federal Way district has received will keep other school boards from caving in so readily to manufactured controversies.

It will be enlightening to see what "alternate views" teachers who want to show the Gore movie come up with. This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2,500 scientists will report that it is "very likely" -- more than a 90 percent chance -- that human activities, especially combustion of fossil fuels, are causing the warming of the planet that has occurred since 1950.

Six years ago, the panel put the likelihood at 66 percent or more. President Bush, who was then still in deep denial about global warming and had just broken off US involvement in the Kyoto protocol to curb greenhouse gases, sought an "alternate view" from his own government's National Academy of Sciences. But it only confirmed the findings.

In his State of the Union address last Tuesday, Bush himself finally referred to the "serious challenge of global climate change," so Federal Way teachers should not pore through his utterances for an alternate view. There is still the Republican ex-chairman of the Senate environment committee James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has called global warming a "hoax." Teacher Walls told a Washington Post reporter that the one alternate view she could dig up was a Newsweek article on "the cooling world" that was written 37 years ago. Maybe she could find her balancing "data" in Michael Crichton's novel "State of Fear." It's science fiction.