Climate Change Confusion in the Classroom

Most students in the US are learning about climate change in schools, according to a new survey.

Warning of imminent danger from man-made climate change wasn’t enough for climate alarmists. Educational opportunities-including conferences held by the National Science Teachers Association or state-level associations-can help educators acquire the information and support they need to effectively and confidently impart climate change knowledge. Twelve percent said they didn’t emphasize human causes at all.

There are a number of reasons why teachers aren’t teaching their students that 97 percent of actively-publishing climate scientists agree that climate change is being caused by humans, and that the data overwhelmingly points to human-caused warming.

It shows that little time was devoted to teaching climate science; while almost three-quarters of the teachers devoted one or more lessons to recent global warming, the median amount of time they devoted to that was just an hour and a half, an amount, the authors write, that is “inconsistent with guidance from leading science and education bodies”.

Unlike other, more informal surveys, the researchers did not give much weight to the idea that the teachers faced political and parental pressure to avoid teaching the science.

“Indeed, teachers’ assessment of the scientific consensus is intertwined with their personal conclusions about global warming and its causes”, the study noted, later adding that for “political or cultural conservatives, simply offering teachers more traditional science education may not lead to better classroom practice”. Only 30 percent of middle school teachers and 45 percent of high school teachers agreed that the consensus was in the range of 81 to 100 percent. Around 31 per cent teach their students about both theories.

These findings appear in a landmark study that involved a comprehensive national survey of public school science teachers for the first time. Now, a new study has warned of 10,000 years of destruction or more if action isn’t taken against fossil fuels.

Our children will bear the brunt of the climate crisis, battling coastal inundation, the damage done by more extreme weather, increasingly withering droughts and devastating floods. Although more than 95% of climate scientists attribute recent global warming to human causes, only about half of US adults believe that human activity is the predominant cause – the lowest percentage among 20 nations polled in 2014. “It’s clear that the vast majority of surveyed teachers are hungry for additional professional development”.

Craig Whipkey, a high school science teacher in western Pennsylvania, said he devoted about two weeks of instruction to discussing climate change in each of his three courses.

How is climate change being taught in American schools?

“The science is moving forward in ways that the education system has not caught them up with”, Rosenau says, noting that the average teacher is 40 years old, and so probably went to college in the 1990s, when the role of humans in climate change was much more disputed in the scientific world than it is today.

For the most part, he emphasizes, it’s more about teachers conforming to what they feel are expectations within their communities, or themselves falling prey to rampant misinformation. While he occasionally receives pressure from parents, he said, he teaches from the perspective that evidence of human effects on climate change is compelling.