The just-published Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change couldn't have come at a more appropriate time. With each passing day it seems the need for effective education about climate change and energy is more important than ever. On June 1, President Trump announced his plan to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate. In spite of strong agreement about the fundamental causes and effects of climate change, the Heartland Institute began sending tens of thousands of copies of Why Scientists Disagree About Climate Change earlier this year. Ultimately, Heartland's goal is to send this booklet to every science teacher in the country - some 200,000 educators.
Most science teachers have had little if any formal training in climate science or how to teach it, and, while there is no serious controversy within the scientific community about climate change and human contributions to it, it is highly controversial from a political standpoint. All of that adds to the challenges of teaching an already complex subject.
The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change provides strong overviews of both the relevant physical and natural science
and the political, psychological, and social issues that make it more challenging to teach than other areas of the science curriculum.
Like all the other books in the
Teacher-Friendly Guides series (this is the tenth),
The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change is written for generally scientifically literate readers, but who may or may not have expertise in the specific disciplines addressed in the book. And, like all the other books in the series, the electronic versions are available
free. (Print copies are available of most of the guides at a reasonable cost). The climate change guide will also be of interest to anyone who wants to talk more effectively about climate change, whether it be in the classroom, on Facebook, around the holiday table, at a Rotary Club or in a church basement.
The first chapter of the book, "Why teach about climate change?" follows. Naturally embedded within that discussion is why you and I should learn about climate change, so it isn't just for teachers in the formal sense. Like every chapter in the book, this ends with a list of related resources.
Chapter 1: Why teach about climate change?
Weather tells you what clothes to wear and climate tells you
what clothes to own.1
In most places, a look out the window can provide good insights into the local
climate. The Earth’s climate is changing, and the changes are primarily the
result of human activities. Climate
change2 is
a real and serious problem for our environment and for humanity, and we can
take actions that will make the problems less serious. These processes, which
are expected to influence the lives of our students for decades to come, make
climate change an important topic for the classroom.
As a teacher, your starting point in planning to teach about
climate change depends upon a mixture of very local and personal factors.
Questions to ask yourself as you move forward include:
- What do I know about climate?
- What do the learners I’m working with know about
climate?
- What relevant misconceptions do my students and
I hold?
- What district, state, and, national standards do
I need to attend to?
- How has climate shaped my community, my region,
my country and the world?
- How is climate change likely to affect things in
the coming decades?
- How do I navigate the interconnected scientific,
political, economic, and psychological factors connected to this incredibly
complex problem?
- What are the most important facts and ideas for
my students to know and understand about climate change?
This book will help you begin to answer these questions.
Some of the questions, however, are richly complex and areas of ongoing
research and affected by ongoing societal change, and thus will involve a
lifetime of learning.
Box 1.1 Climate out my window
Weather is the face of climate. Look out the nearest
window to look it in the eye. How has the climate shaped what you see? What
do the plant life, the types of buildings, the weather right now, the
vehicles that you see, and the clothes people wear indicate about the
climate?
Climate’s fingerprints likely cover much of the view out
your window. Animals, plants, people, and infrastructure are all adapted to
the climate. Anytime of year, the area around Phoenix, Arizona looks very
different from the area around Buffalo, New York. It doesn’t need to be a
winter day to be able to tell that a place probably gets below freezing in
the winter. Even if it’s raining, you might be able to identify a place that
doesn’t get much rain. What are climate’s telltale signs?
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|
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(A) Deciduous forest (near Buffalo,
NY). (B) A desert setting (near Phoenix, AZ). What visual clues tell you
these places differ in their climates, even though the weather on the days
these photographs were taken may have been fairly similar?
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See Chapter 3: What is Climate? for
a more detailed explanation of weather and climate.
1. Why teaching about
climate change matters
“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, or suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”
~John Holdren, 2007.
John Holdren was
president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science when he
made these remarks. His summation of the problem of climate change concisely
describes the choices we face and does so without the level of pessimism
sometimes included in such pronouncements. When it comes to climate change there
is reason for pessimism, but there is
also reason for hope. We have the capacity to act, and many of the actions we
might take have benefits beyond climate. They also have the potential to save
money in both the short and long term and to improve health and other measures
of quality of life.
Scientific study of the size and age of the universe, and of
the geological and fossil record on Earth, have helped us to understand that
humanity is a blip in time on a speck in space
3 (
Figure
1.1). Because everyone we know and love is encapsulated in this blip and
speck, we treasure it deeply and want to preserve its richness, its diversity,
and its life-supporting aspects. We are profoundly lucky to live
right here and
right now. We have a duty to preserve our luck for future
generations. This does not speak to the absence or presence of forces beyond
nature, but it does speak to the awesomeness and wonder of nature.
Understanding the science of Earth systems may deepen our sense of wonder and
of our responsibility for sharing it forward.
We educators are lucky to do what we do.
Figure 1.1: View of
Earth from outside the Solar System, at a distance of about 6 billion
kilometers, from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The image was taken at the request
of astronomer and educator Carl Sagan.
2. Science learning, its
application, and politics
Effective and up-to-date teaching of the science of climate change is of
paramount importance to good science education, but simply sharing
scientifically accurate content is not the same as good teaching, and is not
sufficient to build meaningful understandings. The science does make clear that
the biggest challenges we will face in the coming decades will be related to
climate, energy, water, and soil, which are inextricably linked with each other.
Society depends upon a fairly stable climate, clean water, energy to power our
way of life, and soil to provide the food we need.4
This book addresses the science of climate change, how to
teach it, and climate change’s interdisciplinary nature. And much more than
that. All readers of this book are also well aware that climate change is a
deeply socially and politically contentious issue, thus effective climate
change teaching also requires an understanding of how people decide what is
true and worth acting on. This means we must delve into the fields of sociology
and psychology, to come to a deeper understanding of how our students think,
why they think the way they do, and how to consider our own influences and
biases.
There is an important philosophical distinction between
educating about the science of climate change, and educating about the sorts of
actions people can take to mitigate or adapt to climate change. The latter, in
focusing on personal actions, may be perceived as encroaching upon political advocacy.5 Effective
science education, however, should be relevant to learners’ lives, and climate
change is a defining aspect of our current world. No matter what their
political leaning, students will need to make lifestyle choices, make sense of
the news, and vote; a scientifically literate citizenry will make better, more
informed choices about science issues.
While teaching climate change we must, of course, be careful
not to tread into political advocacy. Effective discourse and learning requires
that students consider the classroom a safe place where their (and their
families’) world views will be respected. Working with other teachers may
permit, however, exploring change from different social and economic
perspectives. For example, students might explore how the implications of
climate change will vary among professions (farmers, insurance brokers,
military strategists, social workers, environmentalists, investors, bankers),
regions of the US, demographic setting (urban versus rural), and so on.
And we must communicate to our students that climate change
is politically but not scientifically controversial. More than 97%
of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activity. Many
in the general public believe scientists are divided, and that science teaching
ought to address this (perceived) divide. There is uncertainty and disagreement
about many of the finer details of climate change, but the overarching question
of whether human-induced climate change is occurring is not questioned by a
large percentage of climate scientists.
3. We all have biases
This book also gives attention to why many people have a
difficult time accepting the scientific consensus behind climate change
specifically, and, more generally, why perhaps everyone believes some refutable
ideas. There are a wide range of reasons
why people believe things that aren’t true due to various kinds of cognitive
biases and logical fallacies. Among the most important with respect to climate
change are the closely related ideas of “identity protective cognition” and “motivated
reasoning.” These are the unintentional thought practices that help us preserve
how we see the world and how we stay in good graces with people who think like
we do – our “tribe.”
There are obvious advantages to both fitting in with those
we affiliate with and to maintaining internal consistency among our ways of
thinking (worldview) about our community, the broader world, and
ourselves. When new evidence threatens
our worldview, we may find clever ways to discount the data to maintain our
conceptions. When we cannot create explanations for data that seem to conflict
with our views, we may instead compartmentalize our beliefs and thereby hold
onto perceptions of the way the world works that are in conflict with one
another.
Ultimately, we are likely to trust information from our own
tribe, including solutions for maintaining our view in conflict with ample evidence.
Determining the difference between reliable and unreliable information is a
struggle that has persisted throughout human history and the amount of
misinformation available related to both climate and energy is substantial.
Problematic arguments (in climate change and elsewhere) stem from both sincere
but incorrect information and explanations, and from intent to misinform;
though we may blame people with different worldviews for the latter, the former
is much more common. Responding to intentional falsehoods – lies – may require
a different kind of response than falsehoods that are believed by the person
making the argument.
See Chapter 10, Obstacles to Addressing Climate Change, for a more extensive
discussion of cognitive issues.
4. Systems and scales
To understand climate change deeply requires a systems
perspective. You, the climate, and the Earth are all systems of systems. Understanding
systems -- the connections among
individual components -- is as important as understanding those components in
isolation. Seeing things from a systems perspective requires some understanding
of feedback loops, tipping points, the history of the
system, and the ability to think across multiple scales (Figure 1.2). In terms of decision-making, it includes attention to
the notion that advocating against a particular course of action often
unintentionally carries advocacy for a course of action not considered.
Figure 1.2: Scales of
weather and climate in time and space. These sorts of diagrams that summarize
processes that occur at very different scales into one plot are sometimes
called “Stommel” diagrams after oceanographer Henry Stommel, who invented them.
The abstractions related to understanding very large and
very small scales weakens our abilities to make sense of the science and
mathematics of climate change and energy. For example, it is cognitively
extremely challenging to conceive of and compare large numbers such as a
thousand, million, billion, and trillion. Time and space scales smaller and
larger than common individual human experiences make it difficult to understand
intuitively the importance of atmospheric greenhouse gases and the collective
global impact of billions of individuals each influencing the environment in minor
ways over decades. We ask our students and the general public to trust the idea
that molecules they cannot see are real, that small percentages of the atmospheric
composition nonetheless represent billions of trillions of molecules per liter,
and that changes in the amount of these molecules over timescales stretching
thousands to billions of years have influenced the history of Earth’s climate.
Because systems and scales are inherently difficult
concepts, we must find models and activities to help students past these
hurdles. For these reasons and others we will need different approaches to
education than traditional didactic and discipline-focused approaches.
5. Love and beauty will
persist
Engaging in the important work of climate and energy
education can be profoundly depressing. Understanding the environmental challenges
we face means confronting challenges that are on a scale perhaps never faced by
humanity. Civilization and agriculture arose and came to thrive in a relatively
stable climate, and it was the general stability of the climate that allowed the
rise of civilizations. The climate is no longer as stable as it was, and is
changing in some ways that will be difficult to adapt to and some that are
difficult to predict. Teaching about it is also, however, an opportunity for
full engagement in a purposeful life.
And though climate is changing, and we will almost certainly
lose some wonderful environments, species, and human settlements, we won’t lose
it all, and to at least some degree new ones will also emerge. If the work gets
you down, consider, for example, spending time in a natural environment. Many
places that we consider of great beauty and value have been impacted by humans,
such as in the widespread forests of the Northeastern US. Regrettably, almost
none of this forest is original “old growth” – that was lost a few generations
ago to humanity’s hunger for fuel, building materials, and other land use. But in
certain respects there is in these areas more nature than there was a century
ago (Figure 1.3). And some of the
lakes and rivers in the region are much cleaner than they were fifty years ago,
as is the air of many cities. These are just a few examples of many stories in
which increased scientific awareness and understanding, and change that people
worked together to make, have made a positive difference.
Figure 1.3: Aerial
photograph taken in 1938 of land near Ithaca, NY and satellite photograph of
the same area taken in recent years. This regrowth of forest of typical of many
parts of the Northeastern US.
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Resources
Books
- Children’s book author Lynne Cherry and photojournalist Gary Braasch offer
an excellent introduction to climate change for middle grade students.
Scientist detectives uncover mysteries of the Earth's climate history through
mud cores, ice cores and tree rings and much more. The book is solution-
focused and includes ways that kids can reduce their carbon footprints and
emissions within their communities. Cherry, Lynne & Braasch, Gary. How
We Know What We Know about Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids
Explore Global Warming. Nevada City, CA: Dawn Publications, 2008.
- Sagan, C. and A. Druyan, 1994, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of
the Human Future in Space, Random
House, NY
- Award-winning climate scientist Michael Mann and Pulitzer-Prize winning
cartoonist Tom Toles offer rich insights into the science of climate change and
how to communicate it with a sense of humor. Mann, Michael E., and Tom
Toles. The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our
Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy. Columbia University
Press, 2016.
Online Resources
- The Skeptical Science website, https://www.skepticalscience.com/, offers a
wide range of resources to investigate skepticism of climate skepticism.
- The Debunking Handbook, https://skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_
Handbook.pdf, is offered through Skeptical Science and carefully lays out
strategies to avoid the back re effect and more generally how to engage with
people who disagree with the scienti c consensus about human contributions
to climate change.
- Climate Change Evidence and Causes, The Royal Society and The National
Academy of Sciences (2014), provides answers to frequently asked
questions about climate change science: https://royalsociety.org/~/media/
Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/climate-evidence-causes/climate-
change-evidence-causes.pdf.
Footnotes:
1 In practice, climate scientists define climate
based on weather averaged over a span of 30 years or more.
2 In this volume we generally use the term
“climate change” rather than the approximate synonym “global warming,” since
the climate change the Earth experiences involves more than just temperature
increase. Technical scientific literature tends to use “climate change.”
3 In 1994 Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan published the
book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space on
perspectives of Earth given our understanding of space.
4 Co-founder of Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson
noted, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.” An
opportunity for cross-curriculum discussion with social studies, history, and
economics could include mapping out how these environmental variables have
influenced US and world history, and how they might influence the future.
5 You can read a more in-depth review of these
issues in Christopher Schlottmann’s article "Climate Change and Education"
in the book Canned Heat: Ethics and Politics of Global Climate Change
(Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political Thought) (eds. Marcello Di Paola
and Gianfranco Pellegrino), August 2014.
Figure Credits:
Box 1.1a: “Wars,” [CC Attribution 2.5 Generic] via Wikimedia Commons
Box 1.1b: “Fortunate4now,” [CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication] via Wikimedia Commons
1.1: NASA
1.2: Robert Ross, adapted from Figure 8 in Peterson, Garry; Allen, Craig R.; and Holling, C. S., 1998, Ecological Resilience, Biodiversity, and
Scale, Ecosystems 1998 1(1): 6–18 (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/
viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=ncfwrustaff)
1.3: Aerial photograph (left) from the Cornell University Library Digital
Collections New York Aerial Photographs from 1938. Satellite photograph
(right) screenshot from Google Maps, retrieved May 2014.
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