By COLIN HICKEY
Staff Writer Wednesday, April 25, 2007

enlarge Staff photo by David Leaming

Howard Hayden, a retired University of Connecticut professor and editor of The Energy Advocate, gave a lecture critical of the recent hysteria surrounding global warming at Colby College in Waterville on Tuesday.

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But Hayden is an unabashed contrarian when it comes to assigning blame for the phenomenon.

Sports utility vehicle owners are innocent, he told his audience of about 90 people, most of them students, at Colby College on Tuesday afternoon.

The culprits, he said, are more likely astronomic and solar events.

"You think SUVs are the cause of glaciers shrinking?" he said to his audience. "I don't think so."

Hayden, though, certainly could be blamed for heating up debate on global warming causation, as well as debate between Democratic and Republican students at Colby.

Colby Republicans were the ones who invited Hayden to speak at the college, a presentation that took place in the Diamond Building.

Nathaniel Betz of the Colby Republicans said their objective was simply to provide a balanced account of an important issue.

"We are not trying to make this a partisan thing," he said.

Henry Beck of the Colby Democrats, however, had a different view.

"At times it was more an anti-Al Gore presentation," Beck said, "than a scientific presentation."

Hayden did poke fun at Gore in the course of trying to debunk the arguments of "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore's book and movie on global warming.

"Don't believe what you hear out of Hollywood and Washington, D.C.," Hayden said.

Hayden, a physics professor for 32 years at the University of Connecticut, is an editor of a monthly newsletter called "The Energy Advocate."

He also is the author of the book "The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World."

In his presentation, Hayden blended humor with computer-generated images of various graphs and charts on global warming and carbon dioxide levels over the centuries and millennia.

He argued that climatic history proves that Gore has the relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and global warming backwards.

A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, he said, does not cause the Earth to be warmer.

Instead, he said, a warmer Earth causes the higher carbon dioxide levels.

"The sun heats up the Earth," he said, "and the oceans warm up and atmospheric carbon dioxide rises."

Hayden said humans' contribution to global carbon dioxide levels is virtually negligible.

After the presentation, a Colby student asked Hayden to explain his belief that liberal politicians and the media promote the theory that humans are causing global warming.

Hayden said: "I don't pretend to understand people's motivation. I really don't."

But Hayden also said recent cap and trade policies earmarking big carbon dioxide emitters tend to benefit Third World countries and penalize highly industrialized nations.

Jacob Roundtree, executive director of Colby Republicans, said Gore's view on global warming also meshes well with the environmentalist agenda.

"Look at the people predisposed to that global warming view," he said. "They happen to be stewards of the environment."

Roundtree said he is not against protecting the environment but opposes promoting false information to achieve that goal.

Beck, in turn, rebutted the arguments of Hayden and Roundtree.

In a statement e-mailed after the event, Beck said Colby Democrats "believe that global warming is real and that governments must work toward solutions. Howard Hayden suggested that climate change science is a conspiracy by Al Gore and foreign governments. We reject that notion. This was political event about the issue of global warming."

Colin Hickey -- 861-9205

chickey@centralmaine.com