Outspoken ASU prof draws ire..(GW)
Corinne Purtill
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 11, 2007 12:00 AM
Arizona State University climatologist Robert Balling attended the premiere of Al Gore's global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
He served on the United Nations' climate-change panel and studies how drought and warmer temperatures will affect the West.
He bikes to work and eats organic food.
But environmentalists hate him.
Balling, 54, has spoken and written extensively against the widely held scientific view that the documented rise in global temperatures is the result of human activity and that serious consequences will result.
Even if humans are warming the planet by causing the buildup of greenhouse gases, he says, the doomsday scenarios forecast by many climate scientists may never happen.
His views have elicited outrage from environmentalists and scorn from some fellow scientists.
They've also resulted in conference invitations and research grants from industries with a stake in debunking the large body of research that supports a link between human activity and global warming.
Despite his notoriety as a hero of the skeptic crowd, Balling's research and lifestyle contain some surprising contradictions.
He is in charge of climate studies at the Decision Center for a Desert City, an ambitious ASU program that looks at how drought will affect the Valley.
He's a registered independent and lives a lifestyle that the hardiest environmental activist would recognize as green.
His outspoken views and the criticism they get have put ASU in an awkward position as it tries to shape itself as a leader in climate-change studies, ASU officials said.
Balling seems bemused by his reputation among activists.
"Somehow I've been branded this horrible person who belongs in the depths of hell," he said. "There's just no tolerance right now."
The critic gets criticized
For most of his career at ASU, Balling's work focused on climate issues such as the urban-heat-island effect, drought and desertification - many of the same themes now viewed as possible consequences of climate change.
He was head of ASU's Office of Climatology for 16 years.
In 1992, he wrote a book called The Heated Debate. The book assailed several aspects of mainstream climate science.
Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh began quoting the book. Sales took off. An invitation to address the directors of a coal company followed.
His reputation as a global-warming skeptic was made.
Balling has been booed at public appearances.
A fellow climatologist publicly dismissed his widely circulated critique of An Inconvenient Truth with the observation that "some people believe the Earth is flat, too."
In May, Vanity Fair magazine published a cartoon labeled "Dante's Inferno: Green Edition." Balling was in the eighth circle of hell.
The National Academy of Sciences, NASA and a host of scientific academies have endorsed the conclusion that global temperatures are rising and that warming is likely the result of greenhouse gases emitted by human activity.
"It is fair to say that it is not absolutely certain that the warming we have observed so far is largely due to human activity, but (it) is very likely. And it is virtually certain that continued rises in greenhouse gases will lead to significantly more warming," wrote Eric Steig, a professor at the Uni- versity of Washington, in an e-mail.
Balling's research over the years has explored sun activity, pollution from volcanoes, the urban-heat-island effect and errors in past temperature models as possible causes of rising temperatures.
His positions have modified over time. Today, he says that about half the warming recorded since 1975 can be attributed to greenhouse gases.
Research questioned
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