Students are learning energy and climate change advocacy, not climate science
Guest opinion by David R. Legates
For almost thirty years, I have taught climate science at three different universities. What I have observed is that students are increasingly being fed climate change advocacy as a surrogate for becoming climate science literate. This makes them easy targets for the climate alarmism that pervades America today.
Earth’s climate probably is the most complicated non-living system one can study, because it naturally integrates astronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, hydrology, oceanography and cryology, and also includes human behavior by both responding to and affecting human activities. Current concerns over climate change have further pushed climate science to the forefront of scientific inquiry.
What should we be teaching college students?
At the very least, a student should be able to identify and describe the basic processes that cause Earth’s climate to vary from poles to equator, from coasts to the center of continents, from the Dead Sea or Death Valley depression to the top of Mount Everest or Denali. A still more literate student would understand how the oceans, biosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere – driven by energy from the sun – all work in constantly changing combinations to produce our very complicated climate.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s definition of climate science literacy raises the question of whether climatology is even a science. It defines climate science literacy as “an understanding of your influence on climate and climate’s influence on you and society.”
How can students understand and put into perspective their influence on the Earth’s climate if they don’t understand the myriad of processes that affect our climate? If they don’t understand the complexity of climate itself? If they are told only human aspects matter? And if they don’t understand these processes, how can they possibly comprehend how climate influences them and society in general?
Worse still, many of our colleges are working against scientific literacy for students.
At the University of Delaware, the Maryland and Delaware Climate Change Education Assessment and Research (MADE CLEAR) defines the distinction between weather and climate by stating that “climate is measured over hundreds or thousands of years,” and defining climate as “average weather.” That presupposes that climate is static, or should be, and that climate change is unordinary in our lifetime and, by implication, undesirable.
Climate, however, is not static. It is highly variable, on timescales from years to millennia – for reasons that include, but certainly are not limited to, human activity.
This Delaware-Maryland program identifies rising concentrations of greenhouse gases – most notably carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – as the only reason why temperatures have risen about 0.6°C (1.1º F) over the last century and will supposedly continue to rise over the next century. Students are then instructed to save energy, calculate their carbon footprint, and reduce, reuse, recycle. Mastering these concepts, they are told, leads to “climate science literacy.” It does not.
In the past, I have been invited to speak at three different universities during their semester-long and college-wide focus on climate science literacy. At all three, two movies were required viewing by all students, to assist them in becoming climate science literate: Al Gore’s biased version of climate science, An Inconvenient Truth, and the 2004 climate science fiction disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow.
This past spring, the University of Delaware sponsored an Environmental Film Festival featuring six films. Among them only An Inconvenient Truth touched at all on the science behind climate change, albeit in such a highly flawed way that in Britain, students must be warned about its bias. The other films were activist-oriented and included movies that are admittedly science fiction or focus on “climate change solutions.”
For these films, university faculty members were selected to moderate discussions. We have a large College of Earth, Ocean and the Environment, from which agreeable, scientifically knowledgeable faculty could have been chosen. Instead, discussion of An Inconvenient Truth was led by a professor of philosophy, and one movie – a documentary on climate change “solutions” that argues solutions are pertinent irrespective of the science – was moderated by a civil engineer.
Discussion of the remaining four films was led by faculty from history, English and journalism. Clearly, there was little interest in the substance of the science.
Many fundamentals of climate science are absent from university efforts to promote climate science literacy. For example, students seldom learn that the most important chemical compound with respect to the Earth’s climate is not carbon dioxide, but water. Water influences almost every aspect of the Earth’s energy balance, because it is so prevalent, because it appears in solid, liquid and gas form in substantial quantities, and because energy is transferred by the water’s mobility and when it changes its physical state. Since precipitation varies considerably from year to year, changes in water availability substantially affect our climate every year.
Hearing about water, however, doesn’t set off alarms like carbon dioxide does.
Contributing to the increased focus on climate change advocacy is the pressure placed on faculty members who do not sign on to the advocacy bandwagon. The University of Delaware has played the role of activist and used FOIA requests to attempt to intimidate me because I have spoken out about climate change alarmism. In my article published in Academic Questions, “The University vs. Academic Freedom,” I discuss the university’s willingness to go along with Greenpeace in its quest for my documents and emails pertaining to my research.
Much grant money and fame, power and influence, are to be had for those who follow the advocates’ game plan. By contrast, the penalties for not going along with alarmist positions are quite severe.
For example, one of the films shown at the University of Delaware’s film festival presents those who disagree with climate change extremism as pundits for hire who misrepresent themselves as a scientific authority. Young faculty members are sent a very pointed message: adopt the advocacy position – or else.
Making matters worse, consider Senate Bill 3074. Introduced into the U.S. Senate on June 16 of this year, it authorizes the establishment of a national climate change education program. Once again, the emphasis is on teaching energy and climate advocacy, rather than teaching science and increasing scientific knowledge and comprehension.
The director of the National Center for Science Education commented that the bill was designed to “[equip] students with the knowledge and knowhow required for them to flourish in a warming world.” Unfortunately, it will do little to educate them regarding climate science.
I fear that our climate science curriculum has been co-opted, to satisfy the climate change fear-mongering agenda that pervades our society today. Instead of teaching the science behind Earth’s climate, advocates have taken the initiative to convert it to a social agenda of environmental activism.
Climatology, unfortunately, has been transformed into a social and political science. There is nothing wrong with either of those “sciences,” of course. But the flaws underpinning climate science advocacy are masked by “concern for the environment,” when climate is no longer treated as a physical science.
Climate science must return to being a real science and not simply a vehicle to promote advocacy talking points. When that happens, students will find that scientific facts are the real “inconvenient truths.”
David R. Legates, PhD, CCM, is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. A version of this article appeared on the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy website.
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“two movies were required viewing by all students, to assist them in becoming climate science literate: Al Gore’s biased version of climate science, An Inconvenient Truth, and the 2004 climate science fiction disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow.”
Both are science fictions but Dennis Quaid was more credible in playing scientist. Al Gore looked like a bad actor pretending to be a scientist. Students will learn more credible science watching Sesame Street. At least Oscar the Grouch doesn’t think the earth’s crust is several million degrees hot
To David Legates: Thank you for your article bucking the “97% consensus”. You mention that water vapour is hardly ever mentioned, even though it is the main greenhouse gas. How do we know this? Answer: from the infrared (IR) absorption spectra, for example the MODTRAN spectrum available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing which very closely models (except for the Planck black body background temperature) an actual spectrum obtained by a satellite looking down on a cloudless surface at Guam, available at http://climateaudit.org/?p=2572 (see Fig. 3). However, both of these spectra illustrate the ignorance in the climate change literature of the nature of these spectra, which are referred to as “emission spectra” instead of “net absorption spectra”. To understand the difference, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_spectrum , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_lines and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_line . Except for a “220 K” truncation of the downward CO2 absorption ditch centered at 667 cm^-1, the IR spectra are absorption spectra similar to the Fraunhofer lines, except that molecules have spectra consisting of many, many closely spaced lines forming absorption bands. The “220 K” truncation IS due to CO2 emission lines, but this emission is powered by incoming Solar UV and visible radiation absorbed by ozone in the stratosphere (which explains the temperature inversion from 10 to 50 km altitude). We know this because the “220 K” CO2 emission spectrum at central frequencies appears higher than the 210 K Planck black body spectrum emitted by a Thunderstorm Anvil cloud (see Fig. 8.3(c) in Grant W. Petty’s excellent book “A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation, Second Edition”); since net heat cannot flow spontaneously from a colder to a hotter region, the “220 K” CO2 emission cannot be powered from the 210 K clouds below. This “220 K” CO2 emission at central frequencies exactly matches the truncation of the Tropical Western Pacific spectrum in the same figure, so what we see is stratospheric 220 K emission superimposed on an absorption spectrum showing zero Radiance (complete absorption) at those frequencies in the troposphere below. However, the sloping flanks of the CO2 absorption ditch correspond to less-than-complete absorption, so the emission from the cold thin atmosphere at 10-40 km is small, and the Radiance signal measured by the satellite is essentially modified Beer-Lambert absorption of the emission from the 288.2 K surface, reduced gradually over the entire 10-40 km path length until final escape of IR photons to outer space. Therefore the literature explanation of the greenhouse effect, as argued by Sir John Houghton in the climateaudit article, is wrong. That even spectrum experts like Petty have got this wrong is shown by the truncation of the horizontal wavenumber axis at 1500 or 1600 cm^-1. This truncation seems reasonable if these are emission spectra, for the Radiance approaches zero at 1600 cm^-1. But note that the 288 K (or 295 K in the Guam spectrum) Planck black body surface emission is nowhere near zero at 1500 or 1600 cm^-1, and the difference must be due to net absorption. In fact, the bond-bending vibrational band for water vapour absorption stretches from 1000-2200 cm^-1, with the “band origin” at 1595 cm^-1, so the entire R-branch absorption from 1595 to 2200 cm^-1, has been ignored, wrongly interpreted as “zero emission” instead of “100% absorption”. For the complete IR absorption spectrum for greenhouse gases from 625-2750 cm^-1, see Fig. 3 at http://smsc.cnes.fr/documentation/IASI/Publications/ClerbauxACP2009.pdf . Because the satellite and MODTRAN spectra have a linear vertical scale for Radiance in mW/[m^2.sr.cm^-1] and a linear horizontal scale for wavenumber in cm^-1, equal areas will correspond to equal values of mW/[m^2.sr] which is proportional to flux in W/m^2 . Therefore I calculated a 288.2 K Planck black body function at 100 cm^-1 intervals from 0 to 2400 cm^-1, and matched its value with that of a printout of the MODTRAN spectrum at 900 cm^-1, the middle of a “window” of zero absorbance from 800 to 1000 cm^-1. The area BETWEEN the 288.2 K Planck curve and the actual spectrum is then due to the net absorption by greenhouse gases. The region from 0-600 cm^-1 is due to absorptions by water vapour, between rotational energy levels in the ground vibrational state. It is basically an R-branch, with molecules whose rotational quantum numbers change by +1 (e.g. from J=3 to J=4) after absorption of a photon. The absorption from 1200 to 2200 cm^-1 corresponds to absorptions from the ground vibrational state (with vibrational quantum number v=0) to the vibrationally first excited state (with v=1), with an R-branch due to changes in J of +1, and a P-branch (below 1595 cm^-1) formed when J changes by -1 (e.g. from J=3 to J=2). The P-branch is possible because the jump in vibrational energy, proportional to 1595 cm^-1, is greater than the width of the entire branch (500-600 cm^-1). The total area of absorption due to water vapour, CO2 and ozone (O3) must correspond to 383.34 – 260.12 = 123.23 W/m^2 , where 383.34 W/m^2 is the Stefan-Boltzmann emission of a 288.2 K Planck black body of emissivity 0.98, and 260.12 W/m^2 is the TOA (Top Of the Atmosphere) flux that escapes to outer space. The result of the complete spectrum from 0 to 2400 cm^-1 is absorption of 38.1 W/m^2 due to CO2, 80.4 W/m^2 due to water vapour, and 4.7 W/m^2 due to ozone. These numbers are not to be taken seriously to 3 significant figures, because other spectra can vary widely, especially in water vapour. However, it is obvious that water vapour is about twice as important as CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Note also that the 3.39 W/m^2 radiative forcing on doubling CO2 from 300 to 600 ppmv is only 8.9% of the total CO2 absorption at 300 ppmv, of 38.1 W/m^2. The change is a factor of 11 smaller than the 100% expected if absorption were strictly linear with concentration; this is due to saturation of almost all central CO2 frequencies, and shows up as only a small area difference, between the green and blue curves in the MODTRAN spectra.
A 1 degree rise in temperature raises the vapour pressure of water by about 7% (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clausius-Clapeyron_relation ). Therefore a 7% increase in water vapour might be expected to result in an increased absorption of 0.07(80.4) = 5.63 W/m^2, which is 166% of the 3.39 W/m^2 radiative forcing on doubling CO2. Perhaps this is where the estimate of a 200% positive feedback came from, which boosted a climate sensitivity (not including feedbacks) of 1 degree to 1 + 2 = 3 degrees. However, this is way too high, because most of the water vapour lines are highly saturated, especially above 1200 cm^-1 (the R-branch above 1600 cm^-1 is almost 100% absorbed, and cannot result in more absorption).
In addition, the 1 degree warming due to doubling CO2 (not including feedbacks) is too high. A TOA flux of 260.12 W/m^2 corresponds to a perfect black body (emissivity 1) at 260.25 K (obtained using the Stefan-Boltzmann law backwards = the 4th root of [260.12/(5.67 x 10^-8)] ). A TOA flux of 256.72 W/m^2 corresponds to 259.40 K. The temperature difference is 260.25 – 259.40 = 0.85 K, which is approx. 1 degree, the climate sensitivity on doubling CO2 (not including feedbacks). But the main components of the troposphere, N2, O2 and Ar, are non-polar molecules which cannot and do not emit any significant IR at all, so the idea of the troposphere being made up of shells which absorb and emit Planck black body spectra is all wrong!
Instead, we can calculate changes in surface temperature as follows: at 300 ppmv CO2, 260.12 W/m^ escape at the TOA when a 288.2 K Earth’s surface emits 383.34 W/m^2 (assuming emissivity is 0.98). Therefore the transmission factor for the troposphere is 260.12/383.34 = 0.6786 . If the radiative forcing at the TOA on doubling CO2 is 3.39 W/m^2, this means that the Earth’s surface must emit 3.39/0.6786 = 5.00 W/m^2 more, for energy balance. Therefore the new total emission must be 383.34 + 5.00 = 388.34 W/m^2, which on using the Stefan-Boltzmann law backwards, must mean a new temperature of the 4th root of [388.34/(0.98 x 5.67 x 10^-8)] = 289.14 K. Therefore climate sensitivity (not including feedbacks) must be 289.14 – 288.2 = 0.94 K. Doesn’t this mean that the literature, including the Wikipedia article on Climate sensitivity, is correct in estimating 1 degree? No, because the 3.39 W/m^2 at the TOA is for a cloudless surface. We note that at 300 ppmv, the TOA flux is 260 W/m^2, way higher than the 240 W/m^2 average flux necessary for energy balance. Clouds cover approx. 62% of the Earth’s surface, so the TOA flux above clouds must be 228 W/m^2 [Check: 0.62(228) + 0.38(260) = 240 W/m^2]. Because the cloud tops are cooler than 288.2 K, they emit less Planck black body emission to be absorbed. Combined with the smaller number of CO2 molecules in the path length from the cloud top to outer space, and the smaller fraction of molecules in the first vibrationally excited state (the extra absorption occurs in sidebands centered at 218 and 721 cm^-1), this means that the net overall extra surface emission must be 3.57 W/m^2, corresponding to a climate sensitivity of 0.67 K (not including water vapour or cloud feedbacks).
Because central CO2 frequencies escape in the stratosphere, from about 20-30 km altitude, there is actually a slightly increased emission when the MODTRAN calculations are extended to 70 km altitude, instead of being truncated at 10 or 20 km [see the section “The hard bit” at http://www.barrettbellamyclimate.com ]. This decreases the climate sensitivity (not including water vapour and cloud feedbacks) to 0.51 K. Therefore water vapour feedback is not the 7% increase on a 1 degree rise in temperature, but about 4%, and this is reduced by a factor of 3 due to saturation effects [the calculation gets too messy for this Comment, but I can send you details on request to my email address of rtaguchi@rogers.com ],
The bottom line result is that water vapour feedback will be between +0.21 and +0.33 degrees, but cloud feedback will be about -0.2 degrees which cancels much or most of the water vapour feedback. So climate sensitivity, including water vapour and cloud feedbacks, will be about 0.6 K, a factor of 5 times smaller than the oft-quoted 3 K. This 3 K must be at least a factor of 2 too high, since the historic rise from 280 to 400 ppmv CO2 means the number of doublings is [log(400/280)]/log2 = 0.51, and 0.51(3) = 1.54 degrees, a factor of 2 higher than the 0.8 +/- 0.1 degrees in the historic record from 1850 to 2015. And this latter calculation assumes that ALL of the historic rise in temperature has been due to CO2 and related feedbacks. It is staggering to me that no one, including President Obama’s former science advisor who won a Nobel Prize in Physics, could do this simple high school math…. But they were blinded by faith in the simple 1 + 2 = 3 degree calculation which was wrong in both components.
My daughter (now age seven) started coming home with environmental advice from kindergarten at age five. She would actually cry about things like my use of wood to build a deck. I spent a lot of time explaining to her why people do these things that are allegedly ruining the Earth–that these things often make a reasonable life possible and are actually very “sustainable”, whatever that might mean.
I am very glad the public school system is teaching her to read, write, do some elementary arithmetic, letting her be in plays, do art and so forth. At least I get some value from my tax money. However, any reasonable parent has to understand that the education of children is near criminally unbalanced and incomplete if left entirely in the hands of teachers. The “rule of thumb” stated by Gentle Tramp, earlier in this thread is more or less true.
If someone uses the word “trend” when they say they’re talking about science, leave them on the ground with a bloody face.
Problem is “stuff” gets done [implemented] by the powers that be while people are trying to discern the propaganda from the actual science.