Guest essay by Eric Worrall
If you thought the most important mission of universities was to provide kids with professional skills to help them get a better job, think again.
Climate change is the most important mission for universities of the 21st century
June 4, 2020 6.09am AEST
Lauren Rickards Associate Professor, Sustainability and Urban Planning, School of Global Urban and Social Studies; Co-leader, Climate Change and Resilience Research Program, Centre for Urban Studies, RMIT University
Tamson Pietsch Associate Professor, Social & Political Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
This essay is based on an episode of the UTS podcast series “The New Social Contract” that examines how the relationship between universities, the state and the public might be reshaped as we live through this global pandemic.
Universities are confronting the possibility of profound sector-wide transformation due to the continuing effects of COVID-19. It is prompting much needed debate about what such transformation should look like and what kind of system is in the public interest.
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How can universities credibly claim to be preparing young people for their futures, or to be working with employers, if they do not take into account the kind of world they are helping to bring about?
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Universities are key to enabling Australian society to transition to a safer and lower emissions pathway. They are needed to provide the knowledge, skills and technologies for this positive transition. And they are also needed to foster the social dialogue and build the broad public mandate to get there.
This means old ideas of universities as isolated and values-free zones, and newer notions of them as cheap consultants to the private sector, fundamentally fail to fulfil the role universities now need to play.
They must become public good, mission-driven organisations devoted to rapidly progressing human understanding and action on the largest threat there has ever been, to what they are taken to represent and advance – human civilisation.
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Teaching and research too must change. University students can choose programs and optional modules dedicated to climate change. But this isn’t enough. Climate change has to be integrated in all disciplines.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-the-most-important-mission-for-universities-of-the-21st-century-139214
I think we should be grateful that universities have clarified their mission, helped us to understand they consider climate indoctrination and shaping social policy to be higher priorities than educating kids and helping private industry.
Next time governments consider cutting costs, funding for universities should be considered part of the climate budget, not part of the education budget.
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Just did a Google search for “climate change” and found this:
https://www.nj.com/news/2020/06/nj-schools-will-teach-climate-change-education-with-new-curriculum.html
Just sayin . . . – JPP
When Thomas Carlyle coined the term “The Dismal Science ” in reference to Economics, he could not possibly imagine that Social Science would soon appropriate that title. Where nothing is quantifiable and everything has value.
It is a social imperative, more than the just universities, have commented many times about Sigma Xi doing this sort of thing, but this is going to be really interesting. CERF [Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation] which I was formerly a member since its inception has a new –“Rising TIDES initiatives are planned to benefit all career stages, from supporting underrepresented minority students with cohort-building and focused mentoring activities to training professionals in becoming champions of inclusivity…..As a scientific society, CERF respects and values the many facets of diversity. These include differences among individuals in social identity such as race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, gender identity and expression, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, and socioeconomic background, as well as differences in discipline, career path, and life experience.”
“CERF Broadening Participation Comprehensive Plan The Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) is dedicated to broadening participation in coastal and estuarine science and management. Rising TIDES (Toward an Inclusive, Diverse, and Enriched Society) is a comprehensive program for enhancing the diversity and inclusion of our scientific society and CERF conferences. As a scientific society, CERF respects and values the many facets of diversity. These include differences among individuals in social identity such as race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, gender identity and expression, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, and socioeconomic background, as well as differences in discipline, career path, and life experience.”
https://cerf.memberclicks.net/assets/site/CERF_Broadening_Participation_Comprehensive_Plan.pdf
I still get their mail and they asked for suggestions, so I wrote a nice letter about how we had been through most of this a half century + ago and some of their crowd probably benefited. I added what some of the real problems were. They have a long history of real science and some officers that do real science, and they just got into this from the American Statistical Association “Ending Reliance on Statistical Significance Will Improve Environmental Inference and Communication” which the editors acknowledged with sense.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12237-019-00679-y
My mentors are up to warp speed.
“…differences in discipline, career path, and life experience.”
Hey, I have zero experience in coastal and estuarine science and management! Can I please have a job? I lose out on being white and gendernormative, but I think the lack of experience more than makes up for that.
I know I can look forward to your offer, because I know you don’t want to talk to my lawyer. Have a nice equality-infused day!
It’s worse than we thought. they’re not actually talking about climate change. It’s phony climate change. They can’t even get that part right.
So the core curriculum moving forward is…
Climate Change
Gender
Social Justice
What else?
Nice to know that kids are going 6-figures into debt to learn about “climate change” instead of gaining the skills required to be able to pay back 6-figures of student loan debt.
But we’ve known that our universities have been failing at that mission for decades now:
Why majority of college graduates feel they are unprepared for working life
Over the last few years academia has been very busy destroying its reputation as it has lost the plot. Education is teaching students HOW to think not WHAT to think.
Some here have commented about putting scale an issue, to evaluate proportions, does the data have any significance in relation to the whole.
During the first year of collage and university in the early 1970’s, we used slide rule or slipstick. The advantage or problem with the slide rule was that you had to have a sense of proportion in order to put the decimal separator correct. You would also have to evaluate the precision needed, like if you had to utilize a computer terminal or if the slide rule was adequate.
I strongly believe these evaluations became a strength you don’t easily gain from using the modern calculator. The evaluation of proportions is important, also in climate science. I am sure all engineers and scientist knows about precision and proportions, but the common layman not so much.
If AOC and her fellow culprits had grown up with this learned wisdom, they would better understand how futile and out of proportion their GND is.
PS: I do not suggest we go back to the slide rule though, I prefer my good old Galaxy 40x from Texas Instruments.
This is really just solid, incontrovertible evidence that Climate Change is a pagan religion to these academic IYI’s.
They way that Lauren and Tamson here talk with reverence towards “climate” (as though it were a divine deity) and how it must be integrated into all facets of teachings at the university is no different than a theologians of the Enlightenment advocating the The Word of God into all facets of life. Of course a word as interpreted by those same theologians of the Church, and it be integrated into the teachings of all students.
Here in France back in the summer of 2019, some of our esteemed parliamentarians (Macrons morons and others) proposed a new bill to do exactly this.
The bill proposed that higher education institutions systematically integrate “the teaching of issues related to the preservation of the environment and biological diversity and to climate change within planetary boundaries” into their training so that all students are taught (indoctrinated), whatever the course chosen.
The presidents of eight major French universities signed a letter in opposition to the proposed law, their main beef was of course about academic freedom.
“In which democratic country are university programs dictated by law? If universities have a public service mission to assume, the law guarantees them autonomy and academic freedom to determine the best way to ensure it, in particular by defining the content of its teaching programs.” they said.
They (certain political persuasions) want to create an army of Non Player Characters that will conform to ideology, rather than have educated free minded individuals that will ask questions.
“Universities are key to enabling Australian society to transition to a safer and lower emissions pathway. They are needed to provide the knowledge, skills and technologies for this positive transition.”
Every totalitarian or would be totalitarian has a similar mindset. I am right, you are stupid and that gives me the right to utterly ignore your point of view and instead dictate to you how to live your life. The passion to rule. The reality is nearly always inverted. Just another example of arrogant, conceited, delusional people enamoured of their distorted self perception and puffed up belief in their own superiority.
Do they ever wake up to their arrogance and idiocy? I very much doubt it. One could of course point out for example that most major transformational inventions/advances come from industry not universities, from people who live and work in the real world not some fantasy environment but I doubt the people making the comments in the article have enough handle on reality to understand the point.
Michael you are right about the statements coming from the people in the article. In the last couple of decades education at all levels has been dumbed down and turned into a propaganda machine. Freedom of speech has gone, along with the freedom to research subjects more broadly.
Political Scientist, those words do not belong together. Science has become a part of politics and I am sure it wasn’t always that way. Science should be helping politicians make policies not the other way around, which is politicians paying scientists to justify their policies. Politicians should not be allowed to influence scientists.
Social Scientist, really, all they have to do is tag on the word ‘Scientist’ and they are one? This must be revised, you can’t invent a new field of study and simply tag on the word Scientist as though it means something.
It just occurred to me that it’s in the interests of politicians to have as many ‘scientific’ fields as possible just so they can say “The science says…” just to justify whatever scam they’ve come up with.
There is nothing like fear to feed the gravy train that was invented by bureaucrats with the commercialisation of tertiary education.
Academia may want to first ensure that human activity has some impact on temperature (apart from the Urban Heat Island effect.)
More than a century ago commodity speculators in England noticed a correlation between some crop yields and sunspot activity. That correlation was consistent enough to attract hedging and speculating. While correlation does not necessarily imply causation, it was not unreasonable to suspect that varying sun activity may have had some impact on crop yield.
The obvious influence of cloud cover on temperature has been a concern of climatologists but direct measure of cloud cover was not even a possibility before satellites were launched. So far it has been convenient to just assume that “climate” itself was responsible for cloud cover.
However, more than two decades ago Henrik Svensmark, a Danish physicist, and his associates (an astrophysicist and an oceanographer) proposed a new climate theory which, incidentally, did not involve CO2. Svensmark claimed that both warming and cooling periods were brought on by variations in sun activity cycles. Svensmark claimed that sun activity has an impact on a relatively constant stream of cosmic rays which otherwise penetrate the lower atmosphere. During periods when more cosmic rays penetrate the lower atmosphere that leads to cooling because more cloud cover results in the deflection of more sun radiation back to space. (CERN subsequently confirmed Svensmark’s theory that cosmic rays can influence cloud cover.) The reverse is also true. When there is less penetration of cosmic rays into the lower atmosphere that leads to less cloud cover so more sun radiation reaches the earth’s surface which leads to warming. These variations in sunspot activity often occur in 11 year cycles.
The average level of cloud cover during one of these cycles determines whether there has been global warming or global cooling. More dramatic interpretations are that the universe controls our climate, or cloud cover determines climate. Recently (December 2019) sun activity dropped significantly. The prior low in sun activity was about 11 years earlier, in 2008, but that low was not as significant as the inactivity level beginning during 2019. If this new inactive sun cycle persists for the usual decade or more, it will result in a cyclic increase in the average cloud cover which, according to Svensmark, should result in another cooling period.
Recently Don Easterbrook, a well-known geologist, published a comprehensive study (an entire book, accessible via Amazon) which makes use of data covering the past 800,000 years. That extended duration even includes the last few ice ages. (Each ice age is now referred to as a “glaciation”, apparently because the past 65 million years shows a long-term cooling trend!) Easterbrook’s book title says it all: “The Solar Magnetic Cause of Climate Changes and Origin of the Ice Ages”.
The conclusions in Easterbrook’s book are clearly not wishy-washy. He has put his reputation on the line, probably recognizing that the usual peer-review by a like-minded scientist at the adjacent desk would end with the results being filed away in that special black hole containing all the other unmentionables.
Easterbrook’s firm conclusions (page 176) follow:
“EVERY cool period was characterized by low sunspot numbers, indicating low strength of the sun’s magnetic field, and high production rates of beryllium-10 and radiocarbon, indicating a high intensity of cosmic rays. EVERY warm period was coincident with high sunspot numbers and low production rates of beryllium-10 and radiocarbon. Thus, it is unequivocally clear that climate changes, large and small, are driven by fluctuations of the sun’s magnetic field.”
While Easterbrook claims that his data and conclusions stand, whether or not Svensmark’s theory survives, his results appear to further validate Svensmark’s theory.
Alarmists insist that neither the Medieval Warming Period nor the subsequent Little Ice Age were global events. Where is their justification? Easterbrook’s analysis implies that all prior warmings were caused by sun activity. If true, the data itself demonstrates that ALL prior warmings (and coolings) were, by definition, global events. This clearly implies that the alarmist version of climate science must be re-examined.
Even if there is no further increase in the CO2 level the alarmist theory demands that the current warming level must persist, at least until some of the CO2 is re-absorbed into the biomass. But the same suspects declare that CO2 disappearance from the atmosphere will take a very long time. There are other conflicts with the alarmist position, including a three decade cooling from 1945-1975 as CO2 continued to increase, and also the IPCC recognition of a “hiatus” in temperature during the 2000s as CO2 continued its increase.
Finally, the year 1998 still holds the record as the warmist recent year. Follow-up “corrections” to previously recorded temperature data brings up another suspicious issue. There has been a consistent record of biased revisions to the temperature database. Older temperature data revisions ALWAYS show more cooling, and revisions to more current data are ALWAYS biased towards more warming.
The greenhouse gas theory, apparently a substitute for actual evidence and used as justification by alarmists, must in some cases be accompanied by a necessary (but not sufficient) condition. When the GHG application involves the open atmosphere there must also be an accompanying “signature”, a warmer region about 10km above the tropics. Despite decades of radiosondes that necessary “hot spot” has never been found and it’s not a matter of missing data. Actual temperatures have been recorded both above and below 10km. The two attempts by CAGW proponents (Sherwood and Santer) claiming to explain that missing “hot spot” both ignore the existing data and further exacerbate that dubious act with speculation about what happened to the required “hot spot”. But this is no surprise. The open atmosphere is not a greenhouse. Satellites detect heat escaping to space. This fact, along with the missing “hot spot” have apparently also been filed away in that same unmentionable black hole, and not only by alarmists, but also with the concurrence of an agenda-driven major news media.
It is amazing that most of the major news media science writers ignore what appear to be obvious implications of Easterbrook’s study. The MWP and earlier warmings were global (and, as Phil Jones, an early proponent of anthropogenic-caused warming, has publicly stated, namely, if the MWP was global it’s a different ballgame. Jones’ uncertainty indicates that the alarmists do not have much in the way of supporting evidence.) Actually it is not difficult these days to demonstrate from existing MWP studies (@co2science.org) that the MWP was global. The alarmists’ silly argument that the MWP warmings must be “synchronous” would also disqualify our current warming from being classified as global.
Any credible climatologist should by now feel obligated to investigate and verify or rebut Easterbrook’s data. If that data is valid the conclusions are a no-brainer. ALL prior warmings (and coolings) were brought on by sun activity so were global events. Since there is no evidence that CO2, a trace gas, has ever had any impact on our global temperature, why should we even suspect that the cause of our most recent warming, beginning in about 1975, was related to CO2 (a trace gas) increase? As pointed out earlier, correlation, particularly a cherry-picked short term duration, does not imply causation. The GHG theory, insofar as its applicability to the open atmosphere, is clearly not settled.
Increasing CO2 level remains an important concern but that is likely unrelated to warming or cooling, so also unrelated to various other events, all supposedly brought on by increasing temperature, such as sea level rise, hurricanes, tornados, droughts, floods, or your grandpa’s arthritis. Claims that sea level rise is caused by human activity is laughable, given that the sea level has risen over 400 feet since the last glaciation began melting and during the last century (during human supposed involvement) the total sea level rise has been a few inches!
It appears that it is the cosmos, rather than human activity, which remains in charge of our climate. CO2 concern is best left to such disciplines as health researchers and botanists rather than climatologists.
Eric,
What the bloody hell has changed regarding what is taught at Australian universities?
I completed an Engineering degree in the mid seventies and the socialist, climate awareness/catastrophe permeated the subjects then. Put forward cogent argument on subject content and you were “put down” by lecturers. I expect, most of us wanted to pass and rid ourselves of the confines of the uni. So you went along with the flow.
It would seem that the Communist axiom of achieving “the long march through the Institutions” has succeeded.
Correct Tony. When ex prime minister Julia Gillard announced her ‘Education Revolution’ it wasn’t just about building school halls.
“If you thought the most important mission of universities was to provide kids with professional skills to help them get a better job, think again.”
I never thought that. I thought that universities had two missions. One was research, to increase knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world. The other was education, both general and professional. Both types were intended to make better people and better professionals. But in neither case was the mission to help them to get a better job.
And how do you include Climate Change (TM) into courses on symbolic logic, mediaeval Persian literature, astrophysics, or brain surgery?
I agree RoHa, if people want to study climate then it should be a stand alone course including subjects that they choose to study. Climate is complex, it is not something that should be tagged on to all subjects so that anyone can call themselves an ‘expert’ or even worse a scientist.
In their simplest form, the purpose of universities is to provide young people with meal-tickets by teaching them new skills.
Hmm, The Conversation….
Ooh, you know the art of conversation must be dying
Ooh, when a romance depends on
Cliches and toupees and threepes – 10cc
‘The Conversation’ might as well be called ‘The Overton Window’, or what ‘white liberals’ think we should be talking about now.
I mean, really, what else did you think it was about? Time to take all that high-octane IQ and generalize a little to regions hitherto unknown, at least unknown to you.
Has it never occurred to any of you that our highest achieving are also our most completely brainwashed? Well, ‘The Conversation’ basically celebrates that fact.
Are you new to the site DMH? I’d say confidently that all the regulars to this site understand that Universities are more about leftist propaganda than they are about education. Sadly though, it’s not just universities, it starts in kindergarten.
Megs, the incapacity or unwillingness of journalists to understand anything more complex about climate science than the CO2 warming hoax has a lot to do with it. You can find my explanations on Quora.
Yes, found this on Google searching for “climate change”.
https://www.nj.com/news/2020/06/nj-schools-will-teach-climate-change-education-with-new-curriculum.html
– JPP
DMH you will often seen articles on this site written by The Guardian, the ABC and The Conversation and other leftist organisations. The Conversation is commonly referred to as The Monologue by regular contributors here, if you refute what they say on their site they won’t publish it anyway. Propaganda obviously.
The articles are ‘on topic’ at least in the eyes of the leftists and are easily picked apart on this site, trouble is it’s not easy to find MSM or newsprint that will publish anything other than leftist propaganda and of course that’s the plan.
Rather than criticise you could consider having an actual conversation. There are many here with qualifications in ‘real’ science as opposed to ‘Social Sciences’ and such.