Expert Voices recently noted a new NSDL resource that just might be the last word in the argument over whether or not people are heating up the planet. It is a presentation by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, an historian of science at the University of California-San Diego, to the American Meteorological Society’s Environmental Science Seminar Series. Oreskes reviews decades of climate research to support a masterful description of how scientists prove things. The presentation ends this way: “We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere, causing sea level to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change. There is no reason to think otherwise.”

Oreskes’ presentation happened on June 22, 2007, so it reflects a consensus among scientists that was reached some time ago. But when you enter the term “‘global warming’ debate” in NSDL’s search box, you get 297 resources, some of which are more than ten years old and have not been updated recently. These older resources are useful artifacts of a time when there really was a debate over human-induced global warming, but they are not current information. You have to dig around to find that. A wiki project called “OurNSDL” is now in development that will allow users to share information on the best NSDL resources having to do with subjects such as climate change.

One recent OurNSDL test searched the collection using the term “‘global warming’ debate” to see what came up. The first resource listed was Dr. James E. Hansen’s January 1999 article The Global Warming Debate, which is posted on the website of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences. The article was published back when there really was a debate — but since it was written, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released two assessment reports that effectively ended the argument. If you know that James Hansen is a climate scientist with a long history of making high-profile warming warnings, you might do another NSDL search using his name. When you do, you get an abstract of Hansen’s March 2004 article in Scientific American magazine called Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb. Also listed is a more recent resource from NASA, Hansen’s former employer. It is a fact sheet on global warming from their Earth Observatory project. Hansen is now on the faculty of Columbia University, and the most current information listing his publications is on his web page.

NSDL users are surfing around like this every day to find the freshest resources and add them to their lesson plans. The goal of OurNSDL is to let users share what they have found.