Guest reality check by David Middleton
8 Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any ClassroomApril 25, 2019
ANYA KAMENETZ
NPR/Ipsos conducted a national poll recently and found that more than 8 in 10 teachers — and a similar majority of parents — support teaching kids about climate change.But in reality, it’s not always happening: Fewer than half of K-12 teachers told us that they talk about climate change with their children or students. Again, parents were about the same.
The top reason that teachers gave in our poll for not covering climate change? “It’s not related to the subjects I teach,” 65% said.
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That raises the question: Where does climate change belong in the curriculum, anyway?
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1. Do a lab.
Lab activities can be one of the most effective ways to show children how global warming works on an accessible scale.
Ellie Schaffer is a sixth-grader at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C. In science class, she has done simulations on greenhouse effects, using plastic wrap to trap the sun’s heat. And she has used charcoal to see how black carbon from air pollution can speed the melting of ice.
These lessons have raised her awareness — and concern. “We’ve ignored climate change for a long time and now it’s getting to be, like, a real problem, so we’ve gotta do something.”
Many teachers we talked with mentioned NASA as a resource for labs and activities. The ones in this outline can be done with everyday materials such as ice, tinfoil, plastic bottles, rubber, light bulbs and a thermometer.
2. Show a movie.
Susan Fisher, a seventh-grade science teacher at South Woods Middle School in Syosset, N.Y., showed her students the 2016 documentary Before the Flood, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio journeying to five continents and the Arctic to see the effects of climate change. “It is our intention to make our students engaged citizens,” Fisher says.
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3. Assign a novel.
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Not A Drop To Drink belongs to a subgenre of science fiction known as “cli-fi” (climate fiction) or sometimes eco-fiction. You can find lists of similar books at websites like Dragonfly.eco or at the Chicago Review of Books, which has a monthly Burning Worlds column about this kind of literature.
4. Do citizen science.
Terry Reed is the self-proclaimed “science guru” for seventh-graders at Prince David Kawananakoa Middle School in Honolulu. He has also spent a year sailing the Caribbean, and on his way, he collected water samples on behalf of a group called Adventure Scientists, to be tested for microplastics. (Spoiler: Even on remote, pristine beaches, all the samples had some.)
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5. Assign a research project, multimedia presentation or speech.
Gay Collins teaches public speaking at Waterford High School in Waterford, Conn. She is interested in “civil discourse” as a tool for problem-solving, so she encourages her students “to shape their speeches around critical topics, like the use of plastics, minimalism, and other environmental issues.
6. Talk about your personal experience.
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7. Do a service project.
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8. Start or work in a school garden.
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Here are some more resources
After the publication of our climate poll story on Monday, we heard from people all over the country with dozens more resources for climate education.
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The Zinn Education Project (based on the work of Howard Zinn, the author of A People’s History Of The United States) has launched a group of 18 lessons aimed specifically at climate justice. Some are drawn from this book: A People’s Curriculum For The Earth: Teaching Climate Change And The Environmental Crisis.
NPR
NPR = Nitwit Pinko Radio
Nothing on that list of 8 idiotic “ways to teach climate change” is even remotely related to climate science… And citing Howard Zinn as a resource? Really? Citing Howard Zinn as a resource for anything other than Marxism is academic misconduct writ large. Yes, I know Howard Zinn is dead… So are Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao… Your point?
The article actually included an informative graphic:
55% of the teachers surveyed said they did not teach about climate change in their classrooms. 65% replied that it wasn’t related to the subject(s) they taught and 17% said the didn’t know enough about climate change to teach it… My hunch is that >97% of teachers, including the 45% who “teach” about it, are insufficiently familiar with the science to teach it.
Instead of having English teachers focusing on climate change, maybe they should just teach English…
–Ellie Schaffer, sixth-grader at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C.
“We’ve ignored climate change for a long time and now it’s getting to be, like, a real problem, so we’ve gotta do something.”
But then again, you can get, like, an Ivy League degree in, like, economics, you know, like by speaking this way. You can even, like, get elected to Congress, like you know, whatever…
I really liked this bit…
Terry Reed is the self-proclaimed “science guru” for seventh-graders at Prince David Kawananakoa Middle School in Honolulu. He has also spent a year sailing the Caribbean, and on his way, he collected water samples on behalf of a group called Adventure Scientists, to be tested for microplastics. (Spoiler: Even on remote, pristine beaches, all the samples had some.)
Who needs science teachers when you have a “self-proclaimed ‘science guru’ for seventh-graders”? A veritable Gardner McKay version of Bill Nye. Terry Reed studied geology and journalism at Ball State University and now sails around collecting bits of plastic… Green Adventures in Paradise! However, he apparently missed out on some important science lessons from George Carlin…
Sorry, George Carlin, Plastic Is Biodegradable
“The planet … is a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, ‘Why are we here?’”
Instead of showing the Leonardo DiCappuccino flick, they could just show “the American scientific film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, which demonstrated ‘the breath-taking catastrophe brought to mankind by climate change'”…
That raises the question: Where does climate change belong in the curriculum, anyway?
It belongs in earth science (geology, meteorology, oceanography, etc.) and physical geography classes for science majors in colleges and universities… Not in grade-school social studies and English classes.
“Fewer than half of K-12 teachers told us that they talk about climate change”…..
..and the other half does
Can you imagine if half the teachers all taught the same subject….
Hammer meet nail, this is exactly the scariest part. I went through school and graduated College and we talked about the greenhouse gas effect in on course Earth Science. The only science course ALGORE studied for which he recieved a Gentleman C and is not considered a universal expert (Global Warming) after serving in politics post college. But i digress.
Your point that half the teachers, instructing on subjects non science related, are indoctrinating young minds over the impending gloom and doom of global warm…ahhh climate change. When do they find the time to teach real stuff.
Now more than half the shows you see on TV sneak in lines about the concerns over the future in the face of climate change and I am always left wondering wtf does that have to do with the plot line? Just stick to the story already.
Even science fiction fantasy stories about Pick one: vampires, witches, zombies, dragons have to assert the concern in their FICTIONAL world over climate change. IT IS MAKE BELIEVE. But they cannot give their real world hobgoblin a rest. Heck the only fantasy show were the don’t talk about global warming is the one where it would be welcome, considering this: Winter Is Coming.
“Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands, and at whom it is aimed.”
–Joseph Stalin
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
–Joseph Gobbels
This is the “Age of the False Victim” – too many delusional fools mistakenly think they are Victims of some fictional or minor harm, so now they have a (false) Righteous Cause.
In general, these self-proclaimed Victims are self–indulgent imbeciles who know nothing of history or the state of the real world outside their privileged Western existences. In reality, False Victims are among the most dysfunctional and repulsive forms of humanity.
Some False Victims turn to violence, and harm innocents in their desire to be heard – the adult equivalent of a spoiled child’s temper tantrum, with violence added for effect.
These spoiled brats should travel to the third world to see what real victims look like – people who have been slaughtered, kidnapped, enslaved, and otherwise horrifically abused because of their religion, culture or race.
There can be no justification for violence – even for real victims, who do exist, the tendency is for violence to be misdirected and strike innocent targets. No violence is justified.
Global warming alarmists are among the worst of the lot. First, their alleged grievance is fictional – there is no real global warming crisis / wilder weather crisis, so they are truly False Victims. Next, their “green solutions” have done more harm than good to humanity and the environment– enormously so. Some have turned to violence. Details in Sections 5-8 at:
HYPOTHESIS: RADICAL GREENS ARE THE GREAT KILLERS OF OUR AGE
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/14/hypothesis-radical-greens-are-the-great-killers-of-our-age/
Regards, Allan
As always, I agree with Allan’s comments pretty much 100%.
It is becoming more and more clear how readily, and how completely, otherwise normal people can be convinced of something that is completely false.
It would be one thing if it was merely some abstract knowledge, or some set of facts that were difficult to verify, or some proposition for which one had no way to independently check.
But this is regarding the environment we all live in every single day!
And it is regarding circumstances that everyone, were they to actually stop and think carefully on it for a few moments, could readily discern is being misrepresented.
Just this past Winter there were several widely publicized instances of people being struck dead by cold, simply by walking outside. Healthy one minute, and stone cold dead shortly thereafter.
But no one can name an instance where a single healthy adult, anywhere on the planet, has died from heat merely by being outside for a little while, or even a long while, unless it was someone who was stranded without water somewhere. And you will die from that no matter the temp.
There is no reason for anyone to believe that we are living in places where we are on the cusp of dying from heat, and that a slightly warmer world will be the death of anyone, let alone everyone, everywhere.
I believe we must be witnessing some sort of mass hysteria.
It is the only explanation for people believing something which is so evidently untrue.
During heat waves “shut-ins’ (the elderly or infirm who cannot easily mobilize) do die from excessive heat or heat stroke. But these are not merely 1 °C warmer days, and more often than not they are trapped within an urban heat island (inner-city).
I suspect that that the individuals who walked out on a cold day and suddenly died were not in peak health either.
Hypothermia and hyperthermia will kill, but they are NOT CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE!
More often than not the deaths are caused by ignorance and stupidity compounded by a chain of poor choices.
Hypothermia and hyperthermia will kill, but they are NOT CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE!
Indeed, but the original point is that, generally speaking cold is the deadlier of the two. So if, as is claimed, man is warming the world, that’s generally a *good* thing vis-à-vis death from temperature extremes. Especially as the warming seems to be occurring more at night in winter when it’s the most needed.
Good comments Nicholas.
Excess winter deaths in the USA average about 100,000 per year – that is two 9-11’s per week for 17 weeks EVERY YEAR.
More than 50,000 Excess Winter Deaths occurred in England and Wales last winter – an Excess Winter Death rate about three times the per-capita average in the USA.
Reference:
COLD WEATHER KILLS 20 TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE AS HOT WEATHER
by Joseph d’Aleo and Allan MacRae, September 4, 2015
https://friendsofsciencecalgary.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/cold-weather-kills-macrae-daleo-4sept2015-final.pdf
Do a Lab:
You would hope at least one of the “science” teachers in that school would have stepped up and explained that’s not how the “greenhouse effect” of CO2 works!
I’ll give 1/2 credit here; that’s an actual phenomenon. She may even realize it is actual soot (carbon) but 5 will get you 20 that most of the students and half the teachers conflate “air pollution” with “carbon emissions” (the common lefist term for CO2).
The odds are that the “experiment” was conducted at room temperature.
Come ON – everyone knows that ice won’t melt at room temperature without carbon in the same room! The ‘science teacher just demonstrated that!
(sarc for those that need the hint)
It sounds like that 6th grader might be using plastic wrap to build a good facsimile of a greenhouse. Hopefully, the class will examine the differences between a greenhouse (with a solid barrier) and the Earth’s atmosphere (without a solid barrier). Or not…
Well, she is in Sixth Grade so at least she is smarter than a 5th grader
George,
Yes. Conflation is a word the children should learn. It’s aggravating to see propaganda being directed at children where it works on its most deceptive and basic levels. Given a false attribution often enough, we tend to believe it. Suggesting that climate of the earth is easily alterable, and which we have already changed, is incredibly powerful mind-warping stuff to children.
A PBS nature program tonight http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/american-spring-live/ takes 13 minutes to begin to chatter seriously about climate change and warming temperatures in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The young woman fails to mention the record snowfall in the Sierras and the rest of the West this year.
Here’s are in Colorado, the Rockies are still at an amazing 117% of normal snow pack.
https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/states/co/snow/state/daily/co_update_snow.pdf
26 minutes into American Spring climate change, we are told, will only make the West’s forest fires worse.
The show ended by once again blurring the language and boundary between science and climate: “… due to (or) because of climate change…” the moderator says casually as though it were a scientific fact understood by all. It’s a benign fact which we should just gloss over because everybody knows it is true.
Kudos to these children for researching the effects of carbon blackening on glacier albedo. Ten demerits for fusing this phenomenon with climate. Fifty demerits for using “climate” and “change” in the same breath without understanding that they are both natural phenomenon.
They should really ask a real scientist how it works
http://www.amortization.com/images/suzuki.gif
Maybe they could do Anthony’s experiment showing exactly how badly the greenhouse effect was demonstrated in big Al’s more fi than sci film.
James Bull
My dogs are smarter than this. Seriously.
All dogs are smarter than this… Dogs had to be smart in order to not have to be wolves any more.
40,000 years ago, Late Pleistocene…
After 5, Early Pomocene…
On Twitter, I recently came up with an idea for a new TV show, called something along the lines of “Stupidest Troll on the Internet”.
The field of potential contestants is vast.
But not nearly as large for my newest idea, inspired by your comment and picture, David.
This one would be for grade school teachers, and I am very curious how many of these lot, who are teaching kids all about their doomsday religion, could prove themselves in the show called “Are You Smarter Than a Toy Poodle?”.
😎
Mine is real smart – especially about defending the home.
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Chauvet Cave house cat 35,000BP
Felis Catus today
Leo looking East 10,500BP
“Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” – Ignatius of Loyola*
This attack on our childrens’ innocence by NPR is either mindless or vicious.
* St. Ignatius probably didn’t say that; Voltaire attributes it to him, though.
There must be
50 ways to teach the climate
50 ways to teach the climate
You just slap on a pack, Jack
Go for a hike, Ike
Pick up the can, Stan
And set yourself free
Simonized and polished up – hot wax!
Regarding teaching in Australian Schools, our Education Ministers resolved in 2010 to approve Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” for inclusion in the school curricula.
Oblivious to the fact that Justice Burton had held that without corrective material the movie was in breach of Sections 306 and 307 of the UK Education Act ( Dymock v. Secretary of State for Education) and was propaganda not science, the decision was made.
So out in the ‘colonies’, US and Australia, without the “Guidance Notes” aka List of Errors, we are teaching our students large slabs of junk science.
Don’t forget that the point of all this is to create compliant voters, incapable of critical thought.
It’s the old dumb ’em down to fleece ’em routine.
Might take a few years, but by then you’ve got ’em where you want ’em.
Just like fishing, eh?
People have been going on about pollution for yonks: people still leave litter. You may be able to change the way people think but it’s a lot harder to change the way they behave.
In 2016, The Portland, OR Board of Education passed a resolution requiring the district “review current textbooks for accuracy around the severity of the climate crisis and the impact of human activities. PPS will abandon the use of any adopted text material that is found to express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities.”
Imposing hat sort of terribly biased (and wrong) restriction on teachers is atrocious. It is not only stupid, but it is also communistic. Someone should have filed suit against the school board for stupidity. If they did, I’m not aware of it.
You should have filed it yourself.
You have the perfect name for it too.
We have not had a good Brown vs. the Board of Education case in way too long!
‘ PPS will abandon the use of any adopted text material that is found to express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities.’
This is unbelievable. Cults have dogmas, science has not. There is no current crisis, nor certainty on humans will cause one. Sensitivity could be less than 2C. 2C is not a certain crisis (or define what is a crisis).
The world has warmed, and it has been good. It is the other way around, removing the CO2 would be a crisis. Cooling crisis, food safety crisis.
Hugs – I think maybe only you and I are the only ones concerned about this kind of activity.
The Portland, OR School Board’s action to order the elimination teaching materials that express doubt that global warming is a huge problem and is man cause is extremely bothersome to me.
This would never be allowed in the old USA. This is the kind of thing done in the old USSR or China or any of a number of other corrupt countries. This kind of communistic/socialistic control over teachers is beyond bad. How can this be happening in our country?
And, I wonder why many people have not commented on it.
RE: “Where does climate change belong in the curriculum, anyway?”
‘Climate Change, aka AGW, belongs on the ash heaps of frauds and failed pseudosciences throughout history. It should be taught as a cautionary lesson to be skeptical of scary stories of impending crises that lack convincing supporting empirical evidence.
Frightened sheep get fleeced.
It belongs in Creative Writing class.
It belongs in the analysis of propaganda or popular delusions class
It doesn’t belong in school!
Talking in generic terms about teaching climate change is wishy washy nonsense you lot normally assign to left wingers.
What you teach seven year old differs radically from what you teach fourteen year olds.
You start seven year olds off by learning about day and night and the seasons of the year. A min max Temperature record could be a one year project teaching how to gather data, record it in Excel, calculate monthly means and plot some simple graphs. Seven year olds could do that. Any adult capable of setting a monthly food budget has the maths to run that project.
To set the scene for a temperature measurement project, you raise awareness amongst children about what hot and cold feels like. You have a bonfire and show kids how it goes from hotter to colder by stepping further away from the fire. You stick ice into water and show them what putting their hand in feels like.
Then you introduce the concept of a temperature measuring guage. You explain how the Centrigrade System uses two well known phenomena, the melting point of ice and the boiling of water, to create a one hundred degree scale. You explain that this is arbitrary, could be other things, but it is simple and accessible to everyday life. You chat about how different thermometers might be very precise over narrow ranges but some might be effective over much wider ranges.
Then you learn about how to design a thermometer and how different technologies have been used. Mercury thermometers are just one. You ask parents to send their kids in with soil thermometers and cooking thermometers if they have any. You look at their designs, what they are made of, how the scale works.
If lots of grass cuttings occur nearby, you build a compost heap and use a soil thermometer to monitor heap temperature for ten days. Another simple bar chart to plot.
If food is cooked at the school, you get the cook to show the kids what temperature a cooked meat joint reaches. It can raise interest in how to bring some precision into cooking.
In the spring, children can monitor vegetable garden soil each week as spring emerges to show how soil warms up steadily and gradually at a depth of four inches. They can learn at what soil temperature it is ok to sow, plant or transplant seeds and seedlings of different vegetables.
Children can learn about body temperature and the effects of being too cold or developing a fever. They can learn the importance of correlating elevated body temperature with feeling unwell. They can learn how medical teams warm people up who have been immersed in cold water….
All that is a far cry from studying climate change.
Before you do that, you need to learn about the sun and the moon. You must learn about the earth and its crust, its land masses, its oceans and its atmosphere.
You need to learn about the icecaps in Antarctica, Greenland and many mountain ranges, not to mention sea ice.
You need to learn about rainfall and the low pressure systems that cause it, along with high pressure which brings dry often sunny weather.
You need to learn what climate means, namely the thirty year mean of weather.
You need to learn about different climates around the world, from deserts to Mediterranean climates, to temperate damp climates, equatorial rainforest climates, monsoon seasons, regions with continential interior climates, not to mention how mountain ranges can affect climate.
Before you learn how climate changes, you need a grasp of what climate means to different folks. What research has brought forward to explain how climates occur, things like the Azores High and the Icelandic Low. How storm systems arise in the Gulf of Mexico and track north either across the interior land mass or up the Eastern seaboard. How pineapple expresses form in the Pacific and make landfall along the West Coast of North America, how they cross the Rockies and reemerge across the mid West. Etc etc etc.
You cannot just teach climate change.
You have to build a knowledge base of the things which impact upon climate, understand why such things are important for human life and why changes need to be evaluated for how they impact on the key human issues of growing and preparing food, providing warmth and shelter and maintaining water supplies.
It is fun to watch the alarmists try this and that, grasping at straws, they know the ship is sinking, no one cares about CC any more, and now they are trying to motivate others to carry the dying torch, to teach kids gloom and doom, pathetic, but entertaining.
Just a wild guess on my part, David, did you spend your formative years listening to George Carlin? He got in some good points about continental drift versus plastic bags as existential threats. One thing from your cited items and your personal observations, it is amazing how anthropogenic global warming is included in the theme of pollution in general, like if you throw trash in the street you also want to incinerate the earth by owning a SUV.
Back then, I listened to more Cheech & Chong than I did George Carlin… When I wasn’t listening to Aerosmith, Kiss, BTO, Frampton, etc.
Dang, brings back memories. Saw Aerosmith live once…now, “Dude looks like a Zombie.” 🙂
Hell… Steven Tyler (71) is a youngster compared to Keith Richards (75)… 🙂
Heh, I’ve said this before, but Keith Richards actually doesn’t look too bad now that he’s actually as old as his face looked 50 years ago.
After reading this course of Warmunism (beautiful term – thank you) aimed at our children’s brains … I now fully support “climate strikes” by school children. Resist! Do NOT go to public schools of indoctrination. Stay home and form Home School cooperatives.
I tell people that may car radio has been “fixed” so that it cannot be tuned to NPR.
I pre-programmed all the channels I listen to in the car. NPR isn’t one of them. As I only select from the pre-programmed channels I don’t even know what channel NPR is on and I like it that way.
I had a friend who programmed his TV to do the opposite: only PBS, BBC and the CBC Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for him…
We no longer talk, mostly because he’s dead, but we did find enough to discuss anyway…
“We’ve ignored climate change for a long time and now it’s getting to be, like, a real problem, so we’ve gotta do something.”
Something to do
Honestly, it’s not that hard of a sell – this is an age group that believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny – it’s actually the rare kid that questions what an adult tries to tell them.
Hey, now… I believed in believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny when I was a kid, and loved it at that time. But I grew out of it, no harm done.
The point is you believed it because someone told you – just like kids believe this garbage about the end of the world because they’re being taught it.
There isn’t any harm to believing in Santa – there IS harm in being force-fed climate change indoctrination.
Hummm, there is a song in there somewhere. Perhaps M4GW can find it and bring it to life? Perhaps a Paul Simon parody?
“The First International School on Climate System and Climate Chang”(sic) ? ..Aha! Chinese collusion…!
yeah i was going to mention it, but its so funny I thought it should be left;-)
even the wording under the pic says the same 😉 lol
Or….they could try teaching critical thinking.
I’d start with contrasting “Leonardo DiCaprio journeying to five continents” with “fighting climate change”
and go from there…
Seriously most modern non-math teachers could barely pass the math courses I took in the 80s. The high school ones…
“Assign a novel.” How about Creighton’s “State of Fear”.
Some things should be obvious… 😉
I read Creighton’s “State of Fear” recently — listened to it actually, in ‘audio on disk’ form. Creighton does a good job in presenting an extreme environmental group as the “climate fakery” villains of the story. He even manages to make the “evil weather control” aspect of his plot believable enough that I quite enjoyed the novel. The plot made at least as much sense as any other thriller novel, with the subject matter adding to the story in an interesting way.
In the story, the naively believing protagonist Peter Evans, almost literally has to be hit on the head over and over again with the prospect that his environmental acquaintances are not only lying in a highly organized way, they are also preparing to commit mayhem to help further their agenda. For the protagonist, the plot here is very much the standard thriller trope of the hero miraculously surviving while practically every other poor sod in the way of the villains ends up being “toast”. Anyway, it is perhaps a hopeful bit of symbolism (and maybe not too much of a spoiler just to say so) that the character Evans does manage to make it through, to learn better by the end of the story?
Having said that, I guess the story as such is also a bit sobering! I mean, how many brushes with icy death (combined with lots of counter arguments to fake research) do we have to assume it might take, just to educate a person in what real science is about, in the end?
I’ve done a little teaching at most all levels – k through university. For k-12, teachers will show a movie, but that’s about it. It will give them a day to do paperwork while checking a box on the ‘must do’ list. In the class, maybe three or four will pay attention to the movie; two will comprehend the gist of it; and no one will remember it (how many educational school movies do you remember?).
Their only take-away will be climate change is bad, and we need to reduce gasoline consumption. The latter will be forgotten when they get their driver’s license.
I agree that indoctrination of kids is a loathsome technique, but I don’t see any hope of it succeeding for this topic. Teachers don’t understand the science – either real data or the imaginary data of models, so they won’t try to teach the science. There are no re-education camps, or any other punishment, for not giving up transport by car or plane, or fossil-based products, and the first time anyone tries to take away any of these, the climate will get very hot, indeed. Without immediate, severe punishment, it is difficult indoctrinate someone to do anything that involves a personal sacrifice. Once you try, they will demand proof that the sacrifice will actually solve the problem.
People are already rebelling against McDonald’s switch from plastic to paper straws. Just imagine trying to ban all plastics.
I prefer natural products. I’m in favor of whale oil lamps for light and elephant ivory to replace all kinds of uses of plastic.
Teachers don’t understand the science – either real data or the imaginary data of models, so they won’t try to teach the science.
You are being optimistic there. Not understanding has never been a barrier to the more ideologically driven “teachers”. They’ll teach what they “know” even if/when what they know isn’t true.
or to quote what’s been attributed to Mark Twain — ‘What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.’
Thanks for sharing the George Carlin clip, David. I was rolling on the floor!
Like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Caddyshack and Animal House… Some things never get old… 😉
Looks like my last went into moderation ?
#DefundPublicBroadcasting
“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” – Thomas Jefferson
I have a suggestion for a good experiment kids can do at home. Get your parents to turn of your home’s main electric panel breaker for 3 days. Record your experiences as you live a net-zero lifestyle.
Just as an aside, Boston U is definitely not an Ivy League school, and she does not have a degree from an Ivy League School.
For some reason I thought she went to Columbia… Like, whatever, you know.
Nicholas you’re, like, you know, just more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
NPR – Long known as National Propaganda Radio
It would be nice to have a news organization that would inform and edify rather than push a nonsensical political point of view.
A good exercise would to find actual evidence that man’s CO2 is causing serious global warming.
You would have to teach a little about evidence:
–Evidence of warming IS NOT evidence that man’s CO2 is the cause.
–Warming is NOT evidence of its cause
–Unusual weather occurrences are not evidence of its cause
–Correlation is not causation
–An expert’s assertion is not evidence.
–Majority belief is not evidence
–Government assertions are not evidence.
–“What else could it be” is not evidence
–Polls are not evidence
–Climate models are not evidence
IMHO the best book all time on climate change is Micheal Crichton’s “State of Fear”… I doubt you will find it on the recommended book list. I wish it was mandatory reading at every public school high.
Global warming is so serious, our summer is too long and there is no way to deal with it.
If children can be taught climate science in elementary school by elementary school teachers then what does that do the the climate scientists’ position that the opinions of deniers don’t matter because they haven’t studied climate science in college?
I’ve found that 100% of the teachers sufficiently familiar with “climate change” to teach it DON’T because it’s bullshit political doubleclaptrap.
Temperature at sea level is limited by gravity.
100% of all Glacial ice is displacing its mass in crust and magma.
95% of all temperature increases are due to land-use incursion on the sense radius of the weather stations.
When you try to average temperatures across distances you literally make your original data points anecdotal, so 100% of “climate data” is anecdotal in nature.
First International School on Climate System and Climate Chang… Something wong here?
Imagine the consequences of history teachers including climate change.
Explaining how periods warmer than today were prosperous as a result and how cooling caused climate refugees.
I thought you were joking about “the American scientific film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, which demonstrated ‘the breath-taking catastrophe brought to mankind by climate change’” …
until I went to the link on The First International School on Climate System And Climate Chang (ISCS) and read the official comments of this farce.
Note the “Climate Chang” … 🙂
Climate “science” is a farcical Monty Python’s clownery !
It would be of enormous benefit if middle schoolers were taught the concepts of empirical, reproducible science and high schoolers were taught the principles of the testable hypothesis and the climatological history of the world starting a billion years or so ago. But nooo, let’s have geography teachers talk about Orange Man Bad and CO2 ruling the weather.
I suggest that the schools disconnect from the grid and run off wind and solar power.
Assign a novel??? Like Camp of the Saints or Atlas Shrugged?
A few years ago I was asked by local teachers to talk to middle school kids about polar bears. The context was an educational focus on the Arctic ecosystem. In the end I had talked to about 8-10 classes.
Without exception, every single teacher was astonished to learn that there were 10s of thousands of polar bears left in the world: they all thought a few hundred.
Where did they all get their false information from? Did they all read the same book or this the result of trying to simplify the concept of ‘endangered’ species enough so that kids that young could comprehend it? A nuance like ‘might be threatened with extinction in 45 years if everything goes as planned’ probably gets lost.
This is only one small aspect of the global warming narrative. Yet every single teacher got it wrong and passed that falsehood along to their students.
I shudder to imagine the damage done when these same people try to explain how ‘climate change’ is supposed to work.
“Did they all read the same book”
I doubt it was a book.
Or even a magazine article.
Probably a half-remembered tweet from the Usual Suspects, who deal in deliberate obfuscation and emotion – all the better for the gullible to “learn”.
How about a real science experiment to see how much plants grow with different levels of CO2?
This whole “climate change” morph, what does it mean? Of course the climate has changed. We have the Midieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, the Holocene which followed the last Ice Age and many more before that going back millions of years. Yes, the climate has been changing since day one. Do you teach or believe in “climate change”? It is all a morph as to mean AGW. I do not mind teaching a theory, the scientific method, but AGW is just that, a theory and not a fact, and easily disputable and only weakly supported at best, and I would claim on best evidence that AGW does not exist. These young children are being taught it is a fact, AGW masked as “climate change.” This is indoctrination and programming. We have hordes of celebraties and politicians knowing little about it pushing the same meme and virtue signaling to join in and save the planet. This amounts to nothing more than teaching religion, not science.
“That raises the question: Where does climate change belong in the curriculum, anyway?
It belongs in earth science (geology, meteorology, oceanography, etc.) and physical geography classes for science majors in colleges and universities… Not in grade-school social studies and English classes.”
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Leaves the question – who needs “climate change” in the curriculum:
Obviously grade-school social students and English classes.
Religious Studies classes?