How teachers are getting it wrong on climate change

[jpak]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/02/11/how-teachers-are-getting-it-wrong-on-climate-change/

A major new survey of U.S. middle school and high school science teachers has found that across the country, a majority are teaching about climate change in their classrooms — but a significant percentage are also including incorrect ideas, such as the notion that today’s warming of the globe is a “natural” process.

The study, published in Science Thursday by Eric Plutzer of Penn State University and a number of collaborators from Wright State University and the National Center for Science Education — which supports the teaching of evolution and climate change in schools — consisted of a mail survey of 1,500 teachers nationwide. They included both middle school science teachers and also high school biology, chemistry, physics and Earth sciences teachers, since it wasn’t entirely clear which classes might cover the subject (unlike evolution, which clearly belongs in biology class, climate change stretches across many disciplines).

One of the most striking findings: 30 percent of teachers said in the survey that they tell students that the current warming “is likely due to natural causes” — contradicting major scientific assessments of the matter. Thirty-one percent of teachers also said that they include both the scientific consensus position — that global warming is human-caused — but then also a “natural causes” position that contradicts it, thus presenting “both sides,” in the study’s words.

“We think any amount of legitimization of nonscientific perspectives sends a message to students that this may be a matter of opinion and values, and not one that can be adjudicated by evidence,” says Plutzer, who has also conducted research on the prevalence of the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in high school science classes.

<more>

ugh

[el_bryanto]

1. It's problematic - that said I can see why in some districts and class rooms teaching global warming

might well lead to job problems. A teacher who teaches in contradiction to the opinions of the community and the school board may find promotion opportunities evaporating.

That said, some of them also probably don't believe in Global Warming as a man made phenomenon.

Bryant

[Igel]

3. How the question's asked matters.

The greenhouse effect is a natural process. It's been going on for millions of years. That's what I teach my kids. Venus is runaway greenhouse affect, without the greenhouse effect the Earth would be colder now and 1 million years ago.

Climate change is also natural. Going from snowball Earth to the Cretaceous to the Holocene and all the changes that happened were natural. If you have the big picture in mind, that stuff is not anthropogenic simply because oi anthropoi weren't lurking to be the genetoi of any of those effects.

Dumping a lot of greenhouse gases into the air and watching the "natural" response is not a natural process, if we think of humans as being somehow unnatural. (The underlying premise of environmentalism; one that many would disagree with because it means we're apart from Nature and start looking like some sort of unique excrescence of Creation.)

But that means climate change is a combination of naturally occurring changes coupled with what is a much larger, much more temporally constrained human cause. However, even in this we're not doing something like setting up a huge space heater in space, but just amplifying selected inputs in what would otherwise be a natural process--the greenhouse effect and the changes that increased energy in a dynamic system produces. (The one real question is how quickly such a system will respond before it behaves in unexpected ways; presumably there's some chaos-theoretic alternative strong attractor that is "out there" and could make the system unstable.) You can't get around physics; physics is a bitch when it comes to doing things that break the laws of physics. What's more natural than physics. (Yeah, this becomes too wildly reductionist, but stopping the slide down that slippery slope is hard enough in college, much less high school.)

I don't know what most teachers teach. I don't know what most teachers would have responded. I do know that polls often have an agenda, and how they're asked and their numbers crunched aren't entirely arbitrary or necessarily fair.

[Hortensis]

2. The Kochs et ilk have been meddling with textbooks,

as well as school boards, for some time now. They recognized the dangers government action posed to their energy profits forty years ago now.

Even without those pervasive, corrupting influences, I know that in my very conservative southern district teachers could not present the simple scientific truth, unadulterated, without putting their jobs on the line.