Your Opinion: University workshop and academic freedom

Dear Editor:

Are you concerned about academic freedom? Sam Orr, a paid business consultant, says in a Sept. 17 letter he is. In August 2014 he helped set up a carbon industry-sponsored workshop at the University of Missouri Ag department. Ameren utilities, several Mid-Missouri electric cooperatives and an MU meteorology professor who consults for the carbon industry, Heartland Institute, all played a role. An Aug. 28 Huffington Post article explained it.

Orr is paid to misunderstand my criticism and others of this event. The electric co-ops are very specific on their Web sites that this event was meant to battle against the EPA and the science behind limiting carbon emissions. There is another story to be told they say. That story is mostly a business plan that is disrupted by the inconvenience of carbon emissions causing damage to our environment.

Much of the workshop was simply the nuts and bolts of power plant production. A trip to the University Nuclear Plant was included. All good stuff. Well known in Mid-Missouri this professor presented his skeptical view of climate change. It's just not proven fact he says.

One of the other organizers, an energy engineer and researcher, stated there was an effort to present a balance. The workshop balance was the business perspective delivered by one professor versus the inference that all others are just plain wrong. Among those who study the environment, this view is an outlier view. It's the view of no more than 3 percent of climate scientists. Balance would have been 32 additional scientists explaining the dangers of unchecked carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

The professor who presented his conference views has every right to do so. That is hardly the issue. The deceitful construction of the workshop is the issue. The effort to provide credits for attendance and the provision of meaningful data is laudable. The inclusion of a "poison pill" of misinformation is not.

Orr says speculative "modeling" is the basis for climate change theories. The man has a degree in forestry. Yet, he demeans the scientific process. It is a process in which multiple studies using data confirm or reject a premise. That carbon emissions are dangerously heating our planet is a fact as much as smoking tobacco causes cancer.

The Center for Public Integrity issued a paper on Sept. 12 showing how money is buying influence in America's universities. I don't call that academic freedom.

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