Posted on 06/26/2014 3:43:34 AM PDT by markomalley
It starts with Al Gore.
When it comes time to teach his high school sophomores about global warming, Wyoming science teacher Jim Stith shows An Inconvenient Truth. The green documentary delivers an unambiguous message: Human activity is driving dangerous climate change.
But the third-year teacher is no devotee of the former vice president. "I make sure they watch it on a day I'm gone because I can't stand to listen to him talk," Stith said.
And he doesn't teach Gore's conclusions as settled science. After the film, his class watches a movie called The Great Global Warming Swindle. It trots out an array of scientists, politicians, and economists who dispute the idea that climate change is man-made.
Then Stith asks his students to take a position. They can argue whatever they want as long as they back their claims with evidence. In the end, the class is left to draw its own conclusions. "We're putting stuff into our atmosphere that isn't great. And it's undeniable that the climate is changing," Stith said. "But whether humans are the cause, that's a bit more open to interpretation."
It's a conclusion that drives climate scientists crazy, especially when it's passed on to students. Here's why: Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is underway and human activity is the primary cause.
The scientific consensus, however, has no equivalent political agreement. Instead, rejection of the link between human activity and climate change has become a near-universal stance in the Republican Party.
All this puts science teachers in an awkward position: Scientists insist that teaching the controversy—and not the consensus—is a dereliction of duty and a propagation of falsehood. But a powerful conservative coalition opposes any effort to standardize a consensus curriculum, and they've had success in blocking such a standard from taking effect.
The end result: a patchwork of climate instruction guidelines that largely leaves teachers to their own devices, facilitating massive disparities in global-warming education from school to school and state to state.
"There's a lot of variability in how this is taught right now," said Minda Berbeco, the National Center for Science Education's programs and policy director. "What's really troubling is a lot of students are not receiving accurate scientific information."
An effort to change that is under way, but has so far faced significant headwinds in a handful of red states. Last year, a coalition of scientists and educators released a set of academic standards for kindergarten through 12th grade that require schools to teach the scientific consensus on man-made global warming.
That academic framework—known as the Next Generation Science Standards—has won praise from high-profile scientific organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society. They say teaching the consensus is crucial, especially as global warming begins to intensify.
Conservative organizations with tea-party ties, however, oppose the standards, particularly the part that deals with global warming. Truth in American Education, a network of tea-party and conservative groups, has come out against the standards. A researcher with Heartland Institute, a think tank that promotes global-warming skepticism, said the guidelines "impose alarmist global-warming ideas on children," and conservative advocacy organization the Wyoming Liberty Group said they "drive an eco-agenda."
The standards have so far been adopted in 11 states: California, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, along with the District of Columbia.
But elsewhere, the academic framework has been rejected. In March, Wyoming lawmakers blocked their adoption. Two months later, an Oklahoma House committee voted to prevent them from taking effect. And South Carolina's Legislature passed a measure to prohibit the guidelines in the state before they had even been made final.
While the fight drags on, most of the existing standards that mention global warming provide little to no direction as to how it should be taught. And some make it exceedingly easy for educators to teach the controversy.
Georgia's state science standards ask students to "judge the current theories explaining global warming." West Virginia compels high school science classes to "debate climate changes." Louisiana and Tennessee, meanwhile, have laws on the books protecting teachers who promote climate denial.
The net result is that climate skeptics get equal airing in many classrooms.
Georgia teacher Virginia Kirima asks her 11th-grade environmental-science students to debate whether climate change is natural or man-made. According to Kirima, there is no right or wrong answer. The team that offers up the most compelling scientific evidence wins. "It's up to them to accept whether climate change is natural or caused by humans," Kirima said.
Meanwhile, several thousand miles away in sunny California, high school teacher Heather Wygant ensures her students understand the consensus. "We talk about the fact that most scientists agree on this and we look at the evidence. I also spend a lot of time talking about misconceptions and why people don't believe things because I don't want there to be any confusion," she explained.
In West Virginia, where the coal industry wields massive political clout, high school science teacher Kathy Jacquez's students leave the classroom with a firm grasp on the global warming consensus. And, she says, that lets them think critically about the political battles currently unfolding in the state. "If you look at the headlines, they talk about cutting air pollution and say it's the death of the coal industry," Jacquez said. "But when I talk to my kids it's really amazing. None of them think this is up for debate. They know climate change is real, and it's something we have to deal with."
Other teachers stop short of spelling out facts simply because they're afraid. "I stay out of the process because when I first started teaching this I was labeled an evangelist. I have a kid of my own, and I have a job to keep," said Colorado science teacher Cheryl Manning. "I want my students to come away understanding that human activity has caused global warming. But I don't tell them that explicitly."
Scientists insist that teaching the controversy—and not the consensus—is a dereliction of duty and a propagation of falsehood.
Translation: this is secular dogma. Honest scientific inquiry is not permitted. Heresy against dogma MUST be punished.
Shows who the actual free thinkers are in today's society.
When did Global Warming stop being a theory?
So stop teaching the consensus, consensus is NOT valid scientific method!
I loved the part where the author bemoans the ‘intensifying global warming,’ what intensifying...I froze my butt off this past winter and this summer doesn’t even put some legs on the tomatoes!
Proof that our entire school system is nothing more today than public indoctrination centers.
History will look back at how America fell and the key will be the public indoctrination centers.
Politics today are the result of political correctness and the hate of the white working male that was taught in all levels of these indoctrination centers...from public school through college.
In 1965 they were teaching us that we’d be in an ice age by 1975. They said we’d be out of oil by 1970. When we got to 1970 the moved it to 1980. It has since been indexing forward under names like “peak oil.” I was scared to death as a kid. Now I realize a lot of what I learned was propaganda. It’s still propaganda but it’s now anti-western, anti-American and anti-white.
We basically need to get government out of education.
Really? This is a statement of faith, rather than science, especially given what we know about the falsification of climate data.
If it was simply a recognition that "climate" is always changing, one way or another, that would be unquestionably accurate, but the context doesn't indicate this.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/younger_dryas_to_present_time_line1.png
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
Whenever you run into a AGW kook, ask him to explain the MWP (medieval warm period) followed by the LIA (Little Ice Age).
Most likely they had never heard of either one.
By the way, it was during the MWP that America was discovered, and Europe flourished.
“Scientists insist that teaching the controversy—and not the consensus—is a dereliction of duty and a propagation of falsehood.”
In other words “you disagreed, shut up and drink your hemlock”.
This has been debunked so many times that every time I read it I want to scream, but they still keep throwing it out.
Sigh...
97% of climate scientists, eh? You mean the guys who are dependent on grants for their livelihood? Do THEY back their position with EVIDENCE like the students are challenged to do? And how firm is that 97% number?
DoublegoodGroupThink.
“Politics today are the result of political correctness and the hate of the white working male that was taught in all levels of these indoctrination centers...from public school through college.”
My white male children have a healthy distrust of public education. I’ve made it clear to them that global warming, and the larger environmental movement, are simply pagan replacements of the Christianity many Americans abandoned. Once Americans steered away from breeding, many had to find a cause to fill their time. It is no accident that many of the older people in the movement still dress and appear as they did when they were protesting against the Vietnam War...
Whatever mush they are trying to fill these kids’ heads with isn;t working very well; I still hear kids tell the same racist jokes from my childhood (and many new ones), and I have yet to meet a kid who gave a hoot about the environment. For my part I proudly point out all of the things invented and/or made by white men around them (to prevent them from suffering the self-perception issues associated with ghetto people).
A good teacher points her students to many facts and allows them to draw their conclusions. My class, with many misgivings on my part, had a presentation they prepared on AGW. I needn’t have worried. Half of the class presented Algore and the other half refuted it. Truth always will win.
The consensus opinion is always correct.
As a teacher, I am forced to correct you - it is not just "was" it is "is".
You can't tell them that explicitly, since the data connecting human activity and global climate change just isn't there. In fact, the data supporting the hypothesis that carbon dioxide is a driver (not a responder) of global temperature just isn't there.
The hypothesis is based in the fact that carbon dioxide has a wide fluorescent band in the infrared frequencies. Most substances have fairly narrow fluorescence bands in comparison. (You might see fluorescence referred to as "absorbance." Absorbance is only half of the picture--all substances that absorb photons of light also emit them; absorbance + emission = fluorescence.) When a photon is absorbed, it is almost immediately emitted at a lower energy, and the extra energy becomes kinetic energy of the molecule. While that kinetic energy is equivalent to heat, there is a limit on how much of this process can go on. Eventually, the energy of the photons is too low, making the wavelength too long for the CO2 to absorb it--so no further absorption occurs, and no feedback loops exist. As this blog post points out, the limiting factor on how much energy can enter the atmosphere in this way is the amount of IR radiation entering the atmosphere, not the quantity of CO2. And the quantity of IR radiation is nothing that anyone can control.
“As a teacher, I am forced to correct you - it is not just “was” it is “is”.”
As a FReeper I am forced to direct you to the original poster; I was including their quote before my response.
FRegards!
What an irony it would be if world governments spent gazillions to fix something that doesn’t exist and by doing so devastated these ‘educator’s’ budgets. Imagine the howls and screams.
Sigh...
Yep, and FReepers would be well-served to be able to recite the process that this 97% was derived.
A poll was conducted of 11,000 people, asking on video ‘Who's you're favorite football team?’
Then their answers were reviewed, but the only responses considered were the 79 people who wore Pittsburgh Steelers jerseys. Turns out, 77 of those 79 claim the Steelers are the best!
(The other two were people who admitted they didn't have any other clean clothes that day)
And that's how you get a 97% consensus.
Oh, the horrors!!
I've been saying for years that this period of time in our history will be looked at as the Dark Ages Part Deux.
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