Guest Commentary by Eugenie Scott, National Center for Science Education
Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class.
Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up.
“Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!”
Or you come to school one morning and the principal wants to see you because a parent of one of your students has accused you of political bias because you taught what scientists agree about: that the Earth is getting warmer, and human actions have had an important role in this warming.
Or you pick up the newspaper and see that your state legislature is considering a bill that declares that accepted sciences like global warming (and evolution, of course) are “controversial issues” that require “alternatives” to be taught.
Incidents like these have happened in one or more states, and they are likely to continue to happen. Teachers are encountering pushback from many directions as they try to teach global warming and other climate science topics.
The importance of climate change education is, to the RealClimate community, a no-brainer. Numerous professional science organizations, from the American Chemical Society to the American Geophysical Union to the Geological Society of America have stressed the imperative of climate science being an integral part of science education.
So What’s a Teacher to Do?
Long a defender of the teaching of evolution, the National Center for Science Education has recently launched an initiative to support and defend the teaching of climate change science.
The “support” part has challenges all its own. Unlike evolution, which easily fits into biology and other life science courses, climate science spans multiple disciplines and can fall through disciplinary cracks in biology, chemistry and physics, or appear briefly in more specialized disciplines like ecology or Earth sciences. Moreover, climate science is complex and often non-intuitive, and students (and all too often teachers) stumble over misinformation and misconceptions that are hard to overcome. Many educational institutions are wrestling with how to support climate science in the K-12 curriculum.
But the “defend” part is where NCSE will make a unique contribution. Our experience over the decades helping teachers and school boards resolve the problems that have arisen over the teaching of evolution should stand us in good stead in helping them deal with this newer “controversial science”. Of course, there are many perspectives affecting the objections to climate science education, and each requires its own response.
Some of the denial is literal (It’s not happening! The science is bad!), some of it may be interpretive (it’s maybe happening but people aren’t to blame), and some of it stems more from the implications of climate change (it’s happening and maybe humans are responsible, but someone else is to blame and/or there’s nothing I can do about it). We’re going to help teachers understand where pressure against climate science education comes from, as the first step in helping them construct a response. From the evolution education controversy we learned long ago that one does not solve these problems merely by piling on more or better science: the underlying, motivating issues must be addressed. The science is essential, but not sufficient.
Climate change education should be an integral part of science education. Students should graduate from high school and certainly college with at least a basic understanding of the foundational concepts of climate science so they can understand human activities and how they are impacting climate and other aspects of the earth system.
This is no small task, and obviously NCSE as a relatively small non-profit can only do so much. We need your help.
We have been successful because we marshal allies, like scientists, teachers, parents, and other citizens, at the grassroots. NCSE’s success over recent decades in defending the teaching of evolution has been due in large measure to scientists and others who are willing to support good science education locally and at the state level. We also need scientists to provide us with their scientific expertise.
If you are a climate scientist, please give us your contact information so we can consult with you. Also, your contact information will be helpful to us if something occurs in your region or state where we need a scientist to write a letter, testify before a committee, support a teacher, or help in some other way.
Of course, an obvious way you can help is to join NCSE, but even if you don’t, your expertise will be helpful to us.
Visit our website, and contact our new Programs and Policy Director, Mark McCaffrey, who will be helping spearhead the new initiative, to let us know you support our effort. Teachers will thank you.
Nice collection Susan,
I particularly liked the peer-review gauntlet.
This is short, sweet, accurate and entertaining:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XQIxr4gRQM&feature=player_embedded
“The Ultimate Roller Coaster Ride: A brief history of fossil fuels”
Dennis @#138 asks “when my daughters elementary school science teacher tells her that turning on the lights kills polar bears (this actually happened), what should I do?”
The first thing I do when considering that question is to apply some appropriate skepticism. Did the teacher say the words “turning on the lights kills polar bears”, full stop, no context? Did the teacher specify how many polar bears are killed per kWh? I’m skeptical. Is there videotape of the incident? Failing that, were you present for the alleged discussion, and have dated notes taken at that moment, with a careful transcription of the exact words in context?
Failing that, and here we may well be getting closer to the truth, did the teacher say something about our daily activities, including use of electricity and other energy, and make a reasonable connection between that, changes in the Arctic climate, and polar bear habitat, which your daughter (how old?) said something about and you are now passing on as hearsay, condensing and distorting, without any context, no names, no dates, no details, not even your own full name?
Gimme a break.
I don’t know if this has already been covered, but I think one response that teachers might want to consider is acknowledging the controversy surrounding climate science, and using it as an opportunity to review the fundamentals of the scientific method, i.e., what are the scientifically valid ways in which theories can be confirmed or disproven, and what are not scientifically valid ways. For example, Newton’s theory of motion was not superceded until people had conducted and published repeatable experiments, which could be duplicated by others, that produced results that Newton’s theory couldn’t expain. It did not happen as a result of anyone claiming that Newton’s theory was a “hoax” or that its adherents had political or financial motivations for supporting it. Examples could also be given of what it would take to disprove AGW theory in a scientifically valid way, thus educating students on the concept of falsifiability.
I think it is important to distinguish the teaching of evolution from climate science, particularly the science of global warming. Evolution via natural selection is observable, it is testable in a petrie dish, it is reproducible, it can be used to make predictions that are then verified and it is supported by decades of EXPERIMENTAL science and hundreds of years of observations. It is not based on theoretical constructs or projections. The only assumptions that are needed are the principals of the scientific method themselves.
The same can not be said of climate change and global warming. It is a theoretical science that is untestable on a level with comparable constraints to the system that scientists are attempting to describe. It is a science of observation but not experimentation. There is no ‘control earth’ that looks like our earth but for the fact that they have stable CO2 emissions that can be used to test our grand hypothesis man made global warming hypothesis against. All we know about are the properties of CO2 and that those properties should cause the trapping of energy within our system. However, the manner in which the other variables that effect energy balance will be effected is highly uncertain and completely untestable. So the science becomes one of ‘make a theory’ and create a prediction based on that theory. However, given the level of uncertainty and the number of other variables weighing on the system it may take decades to reflect on what the direction let alone the individual contributions of these ‘sensitivities’ and ‘forcings’ will be.
To compare this process, that is underpinned by solid theory and observations but has no proven causal relations, with evolution is a stretch.
There is a reason it is unteachable – it is because we don’t yet understand it.
[Response: I would suggest that you take a refresher course in climate physics – and possibly evolution as well. The links are much closer than you think – each works with single system (the biosphere, or the climate) which has tremendous variation over the last few billion years, dealing with processes that are slow on average, but that in certain ‘lab’ conditions can occur faster (fruit flies, El Nino teleconnections/response to volcanoes), and which make testable predictions, not just for the future, but in hindcasts of not-yet-discovered paleo-information. Indeed, climate has the edge on evolution for explaining past changes because things like orbital forcing are more predictable than the evolution of specific species or genera which are contingent on random mutations as well as environmental pressures. – gavin]
#155–More specifically, basically the entire science of meteorology is relevant to the problem of climate.
(I hate to bring this up, because people love to hate weather forecasts–but those of us old enough to remember to days before numerical prediction became the norm right down to media outlet level, know how much better forecasting is today. My take on it is that forecasts are rarely qualitatively wrong anymore. Error is usually quantitative–not as much rain falls, or the front comes through a bit earlier than called for.)
Which means that atmospheric circulation is now pretty darn well understood–including the bits of it that relate to the physics of greenhouse gases. Every 24-hour weather prediction involves calculating radiative cooling and heating. In fact, it’s interesting that Walter Elsasser was hired in the 40s to create a tool for doing just this. At the time, observational techniques didn’t exist to verify his work, but they seemed to work well enough in practice. Nearly 2 decades later they were experimentally validated.
That story, and others on this point, can be read here:
http://doc-snow.hubpages.com/hub/Fire-From-Heaven-Climate-Science-And-The-Element-Of-Life-Part-Two-The-Cloud-By-Night
Jeffrey@155
What absolute, irredeemable horsecrap! Dude, you would negate all of geology, astronomy, ecology, much of biology, and for that matter, much of subatomic physics, since we cannot actually observe subatomic particles and they’re all identical and so cannot be followed in any case.
Have you ever even cracked a science textbook? Do you really think science can only be done in a test tube?
The test of any scientific theory is the verification of its predictions. By those standards, climate science is doing quite well.
YOU, sir, may not yet understand climate science, but I suspect that is because you haven’t bothered to undertake the task.
Gavin, maybe you should head the advice that you so often give to argumentative posters and ease up on the condescension. While I could certainly use a course in climate science you seem to need a refresher on the scientific method and the notion of control. The only way to concretely determine causal relationships is through controlled experimentation. It is the reason why we don’t know for certain that recent warming periods were caused by rising CO2 levels and not some alternative phenomenon. It is what enables the solar activity theory to exist and is what prevents models from having impressive ‘skill’. The fact is, you can take yeast in a two petrie dishes and add one variable into one dish and observe that colony mutate verses the control. You can then quantify this mutation at a genetic level. You can then confidently say that your interventions caused the effect.
You can even do this in a high school classroom as you teach the theory. If you try to teach the notion that a doubling of CO2 will cause a 3 degree increase in global temperatures you will be doing so based on a entirely different type of science – one that is not testable via the EXPERIMENTAL METHOD.
That is the controversial part of teaching high school students about certain elements of climate science. High school teachers already do a decent job of teaching the greenhouse gas effect.
[Response: You are not comparing like with like, and you are wrong in any case. I can put air in a spectrometer at any pressure/temperature/composition and measure the radiative transfer and the absorption at any frequency – experimental, reproducible, science. I can use satellite remote sensing to see how changes in composition in the real world are affecting radiative transfer through the real atmosphere. I can do basic maths and work how emissions are changing, and I can measure concentrations of CO2 anywhere in the free atmosphere and see basically the same trends. I can collate temperatures, ice extent, ocean heat content, solar insolation, volcanic aerosols etc. etc. There is in fact no end to the laboratory or real world observations related to the climate that are exactly equivalent to fruit fly or nematode or yeast analogs. The science that comes out of that has implications for climate change on all sorts of time scales, just as your yeast experiment has implications for the evolution of the dinosaurs and mammals – issues that are similarly not resolvable in a simple lab experiment. But they are nonetheless amenable to science. – gavin]
Tietjanberelul @ 134
The answer depends on whether that’s a rhetorical question or a serious one.
If serious, it’s a very good one, though the answer seems obvious. Follow Gavin’s leads. Stay involved. Set aside fear and honestly investigate the subject. Start on any point you find suspect. For the most part actual scientists will lead you deeper into the science. On the other hand, bull slingers will swamp you with rhetorical tricks and debate tactics. You’ve made a good start by coming to Real Climate. Another good place is Skeptical Science which lays it all out like notes on a piano keyboard. Don’t be distracted by what characters like Dan H. say. As near as I can tell he’s just a shmoo the moderators let run around the site for entertainment value.
If your question is just a rhetorical, thought-stopping device, and the implication is that there is no way to prevent the menace of liberalism from creeping into the classroom without right-wing imposition of draconian bans on the topic, then the question is just mean and idiotic.
Yet, in the unlikely event that you honestly can’t tell the difference between science and rhetoric, then please forgive me for pointing out that perhaps you have more pressing and immediate problems to address than how climate change should be covered.
OK, Jeffrey, put up or shut up time: What is your scientific background? Degrees? Publications? Invitations to speak at international scientific conferences?
I ask this because your cartoon idea of science–that it cannot be done outside of a laboratory inhabited by white-coated boffins–is simply risible. Do you reject the Big Bang because we cannot create the Universe in a beaker? Do you similarly reject “macro-evolution” because we haven’t seen a crocodile turn into a duck? Do you realize that the very same arguments you employ are used nearly verbatim by those at the Discovery Institute to reject evolution?
Look, Dude, science works. We can even tell you with pretty good accuracy what the weather will be in 4-5 days time. We can tell you when a volcano is likely to erupt. We can tell you how a neutron star forms. Your ideas of science are simply ridiculous. No response other than ridicule is appropriate.
[edit – please can everyone stick to substantive comments rather than opinions about other commenters? thanks]
Gotta love Jeffrey for complaining Gavin uses a condescending tone, after he himself proclaims climate science “unteachable”.
Jeffrey sounds very much like a tone troll, but I would not be surprised if he seriously is not aware how condescending it is to claim climate science is “unteachable”, whereas evolution is fully teachable (and you may want to tell your fellow Americans that, for about half evolution stops when humans come into the equation).
Jeffrey,
Your version of “science” is quite shallow, and rules out virtually all the Earth and planetary sciences, astronomy, and even parts of evolution as “science.” I’m not quite sure you have even thought out the implications of your philosophy clearly.
I suggest you think carefully about gavin’s comments, regardless of whether you like his tone or not. Try to supplement that with thinking more clearly about how knowledge of star evolution, black holes, ecological changes, long-term evolutionary patterns, plate tectonics, etc is obtained. Or, for example, how criminal scientists use fingerprint patterns to diagnose who did a particular crime.
We can go on forever with countless examples that do not fit nicely into a nice beaker experiment featuring a guy in a white coat adding and subtracting chemicals. Sometimes Ray Ladbury is a bit harsh in his tone, but in this case he is right, your ideas are just ridiculous. I certainly hope you aren’t teaching kids about the scientific method.
It should come as no surprise when those suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect will mistake it as “condescension” when what they don’t even know they don’t know is pointed out to them.
While Jeffrey has managed to provide us with a few chuckles, I think he also provides a teachable moment. Jeffrey epitomizes the sort of fetishization of narrow concepts and methodologies that we sometimes see in the denialospher–even among real scientists who ought to know better. Much to my chagrin as a physicist, some of my fellows are among the most egregious offenders.
What we need to realize is that scientific methodology–regardless of the science–is basically an exercise in controlling error. Jeffrey stresses control of variables as if that were an end in itself. It is not. Control of variables is a means for isolating cause for an effect. One can accomplish the same thing by establishing both correlation with a putative cause and the mechanism by which it operates. Correlation doesn’t establish causation–on that we agree. However, correlation plus a credible and verified mechanism can establish cause, which can subsequently be verified by successful predictions.
Likewise, repeatability, independent replication, double-blind trials, random sampling and on and on…they are all strategies for controlling various types of error. People have been extremely creative in adapting the scientific method to areas never imagined by early practitioners. The important thing is to understand the goal and understand the sorts of errors we must negotiate for any subfield or investigation.
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2012/02/three-simple-facts-about-carbon-dioxide/
“… you can use them as litmus tests to determine whether the person you are listening to is honest and knowledgeable…. somebody contradicting these facts may be dishonest or ignorant or both, but it’s usually not possible to tell which…. correctly assessing the reliability of your knowledge source is critical.”
I’m sure these experiences are real and problematic. But so much of what needs to be taught is in fact uncontrovertble. I teach the science of climate change as part of a Sustainable Energy Law course at a law school in coal conutry. While I understand the pressures for K-12 education are not directly analogous, we do have a healthy skeptical student body and donor base. So I need to and do teach it in a “balanced” way. How that should translate for K-12 science classes:
— Teach the five temp keepers’ actual data, and the leading temp reconstructions for our paleoclimatic history
— Teach the Mauna Lao and other stations’ CO2 data, and the leading paleoclimatic assessments of past CO2 levels
— Teach blackbody sensitivity and its bases (which even the Spencers and Lindzens agree with)
— Teach other known and possible forcings, like the Milankovich Cycles, ocean and atmospheric cycles, solar irradiance levels and natural GHG and volcanic releasesl, and aeresol levels
— Teach the concept of feedbacks, and discuss those we know that are positive (water vapor, albedo, permafrost, warmer oceans, soil activity, etc.), and those for which there is legitimate uncertainty (clouds)
— Teach that projections as to how fast the changes could come and how severe the effects will be are just that, and make clear that these projections are based “only” on extrpolation of imperfect paleoclimatic observations and there is much legit scientific discussion on this point
— Teach those things that some fear will be negative consequences, and those that some say will be beneficial consequences, of AGW
I guess, in other words, just teach the facts. Don’t succomb to the politicization of the science, don’t shy from legitimate uncertainties, and don’t overstate the “consensus” that the consequences will be dire. Give them the names of skeptical scientists and the web addresses of skeptical sites (along with, obviously, the names of Hansen et al as well as this site and climateprogress). There are facts that can be taught that NO ONE should have a problem with, and resources to which inquiring minds ahould be directed.
Buzz,
I have no problem with your stated curriculum. I would just add that we need to teach them to be critical thinkers also. That should generate some good scientists.
My point is about understanding the nature of how scientific evidence is gathered and to highlight the difference between presenting causal relations and presenting plausible or even probable explanations for observed phenomenon. I am not questioning whether or not the later is or isn’t science, I am not even questioning the importance of this science. I am questioning the notion that there is no room for debate or alternative theories in a high school classroom when in comes to quantifying anthropogenic contributions to global warming. Moreover, I am questioning the comparison between teaching quantified contributions of anthropogenic global warming (what I understand to be the source of the debate) to the fight to properly teach evolution and the theory of natural selection.
If I am a high school teacher and a student wants to debate whether consciousness is a property that evolved through random mutations to a neural network that did not enable subjective experience then I should be able to have a forum to do so. However, if, as a high school student, I stake the claim that evolution via natural selection is only a theory and that there is no causal evidence for it then I need to be better educated.
In the same vein, if as a high school student I want stake the claim the solar variance may explain a significant part of late 20th century warming I should be given a forum. Alternatively, if as a high school student I deny that CO2 has radiative forcing properties I need to be better educated.
When the theory of natural selection is used to explain speciation of californian lizards it is easy to quantify what is meant by the statement. First one can examine how their DNA has changed. Furthermore, in knowing their DNA repair mechanisms and having evidence from control driven studies on similar mechanisms it is easy to infer how environmental pressures would select for lizards that fit different niches.
In my opinion some of the inferences made in climate science lack as solid a foundation of evidence, and lack the same tools for verification and comparison. Once again I am not claiming that this makes the science less worth while, I think that at this point in time it is simply younger and the system it is trying to explain is larger and less reducible.
So, if a high school student wants to challenge the notion that the warming period in the last half of the century was driven mostly via man made CO2 emissions I think there is still room to do so. Sure, they will have to challenge a weight of evidence that is agreed upon by the vast majority of scientists but they are not wrong from the start. The reason they are not wrong is due to the nature of the evidence.
Science was founded on the principals of skepticism and those should be encouraged through learning science. So teach high school students about the green house gas effect, show them the latest tools we have to quantify the net radiation entering our planet and show them the evidence for CO2 driven warming. Just don’t forget to tell them that there are other variables that effect radiative forcing and that while we have theories and some evidence to support them, we don’t yet understand all the ways in which they interact and we have very weak ‘skill’ in making future predictions to this point.
Let’s enable the budding young future scientists to be skeptical of the claim that for a doubling of CO2 the earths temperature will rise 3-5 degrees. Because as much as we would like to have that sown up – we don’t.
For the record, I have a very rudimentary understanding of climate science that is gleaned mostly from this site and its links. Nor am I an experienced scientist. I do, however, have a degree in philosophy in which I focused on the notion of ‘the nature of knowledge’ and ‘causation’, I have a masters in neurosciences – my first paper coming out this Wednesday in The Journal of Neuroscience, and I am a few short months away from becoming an MD.
So, in my opinion, I have earned the write to comment on how my children are taught science in schools.
Also, as someone who believes in the significant contribution on CO2 to recent and future warming but is still skeptical about the amplitude of modelled climate sensitivity I think there is a lot for me to learn from this forum. After all, it gets pretty boring when its just post after post of kool aid drinkers.
When I go around and ask graduate students in sciences unrelated to climate science if they believe in anthropogenic global warming I get a 100% yes response. When I ask them on what bases, 90% of the time the only reason they can come up with is ‘that most scientists agree’. I don’t think we are failing to teach the ‘conclusion’ I think we fail to teach the rational.
Gavin – “I can use satellite remote sensing to see how changes in composition in the real world are affecting radiative transfer through the real atmosphere.”
What you can do is correlate changes in composition in the real world to changes in radiative transfer yet you still inappropriately use the word “affecting” as if these are causal discoveries.
The lab experiment that you mention is a valid way to determine the radiative forcing effects of CO2 but it does not control for all the variables at play in the atmosphere…cloud cover, water vapour ect… and thus it can not be used to explain changes to our atmosphere it can only be used to support hypothesis about the reasons for climate change. I agree that this is a valid line of reasoning which can be very convincing but it is not the same as claiming for instance that HIV is difficult to cure because of evolution via natural selection. This claim is supported by evidence derived from experiments on the system it is attempting to describe.
It is true that the vast majority of claims about natural selection in action are made without direct experimentation. They are made via inferences just as in climate science. However, our understanding of genetics enables us to make meaningful comparisons between species that simply can’t be made be made between your climate box and the atmosphere.
It would be like taking the CERN experiments as evidence that solar variance causes climate forcing. As you point out tirelessly – this is beyond the scope of the experiment.
[Response: I’m not sure what point you are making. I raised these examples to demonstrate that climate science has experimental and observational aspects completely analogous to your “yeast in petrie dish” example that you claimed gave evolution by natural selection some unique status. Yeast does not explain the Cambrian explosion, the role of epi-genetics in mammalian evolution, or any specific case of ecosystem evolution as a function of external pressures. Likewise, high-resolution spectrography does not – on it’s own – determine climate sensitivity or the rate of sea level rise over the next 50 years. How these are inferred and constrained are more complicated, as we have tried to demonstrate here many time. Are you now claiming that no inferred conclusions can ever be presented in a science class? That would be a radical notion. – gavin]
Jeffrey,
I love the way you dragged solar influence in. Is your medical specialty homeopathy?
What I would teach basic skills for calculating climate change. Limited of course to established science. I would not be filling the minds of budding scientists with your list of prognostications.
Now if you provided me an engineering schematic of how all this worked and a long list of studies that supports the causes, and observation databases. I would have something to teach from. But it seems most of climate science these days is too worried somebody is going to find something wrong with such details.
I might even teach the modeling theory. Something close to my own experience. My best advice on modeling is don’t believe too much what models tell you until they have been shown to be very skillful.
We have astrologists that use a technique of hindcasting to do forecasting with. But that is just curve fitting. You need successful forecasting to claim skill.
“The lab experiment that you mention is a valid way to determine the radiative forcing effects of CO2 but it does not control for all the variables at play in the atmosphere…cloud cover, water vapour ect… and thus it can not be used to explain changes to our atmosphere”
The only way the CO2 absorption we see in the lab, or calculate using Hitran and line byline models can NOT explain the differences caused by increasing CO2 from 280 ppmv to 390 ppmv in the atmosphere is if “cloud cover, water vapor ect” EXACTLY cancel those effects. CO2 isn’t going to magically behave differently in the atmosphere from what we see in the lab, and water vapor, clouds, etc aren’t going to simultaneously mimic the radiative effects of increased CO2, so that what we measure by satellite looks like what we expect from increased CO2, but is actually the result of “natural variability” or some other non anthropogenic cause.
“In my opinion some of the inferences made in climate science lack as solid a foundation of evidence…..For the record, I have a very rudimentary understanding of climate science….”
I suspect that it’s not actually your opinion, but rather the opinions of some other sources that you trust – Heartland, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Idso, Pielke, the 30,000 signers of the Oregon Petition, the 600 dissenters claimed by Inhofe, or some unnamed “scientist” quoted by Rush Limbaugh – especially since you didn’t specify which inferences you find lacking.
If you were to be more specific about those inferences, I think that any number of the regular contributors here could disabuse you of your mis-, dis-, or lack of information; but deep down you probably already know that, and want to cling to cherished beliefs and the necessary rudimentary understanding little longer.
“…if as a high school student I want stake the claim the solar variance may explain a significant part of late 20th century warming I should be given a forum.”
No, you need to be better educated.
I’d recommend this for teaching high school kids a bit about probability, as reading along with Robert Grumbine on detecting trends.
An Epistemologist Looks at the Hot Hand in Sports
Gavin – “I’m not sure what point you are making. I raised these examples to demonstrate that climate science has experimental and observational aspects completely analogous to your “yeast in petrie dish” example that you claimed gave evolution by natural selection some unique status.”
I will try to be more clear on why these examples are not comparable to the debate. The concern from creationists was about whether or not the concept of natural selection and evolution would be taught as a theory or a fact. Clearly we have evidence from species that replicate quickly that natural selection does in fact occur and thus it is incorrect to claim that it is just a theory – it is not.
The debate about how climate change should be taught does not concern whether CO2 causes radiative forcing, it rather concerns what we teach are children about the quantified contribution of anthropogenic CO2 to any past or future warming. Should we tell our kids that a doubling of CO2 will cause a 3-5 degree rise in earths temperature? Should we tell them that unless we curb CO2 emissions that Florida will be under water in 30 years? Should we say that the cause of late 20th century warming was solely CO2? I say we should be a little more careful with this type of knowledge, because the experiment to demonstrate the radiative forcing effects of CO2 does not specifically comment on how all the factors that come into play contributed individually to 20th century warming.
[Response: Where are you getting this stuff from? It neither resembles anything the mainstream science or I have ever said, nor any syllabus I have ever seen. It appears you are protesting a completely imaginary creation. This might indeed be the problem here. – gavin]
In response to Brain:
Despite the fact that he loves making unfounded and untrue assumptions about me, Brian has a reasonable point in his second paragraph of post 173. I agree that ignoring the fact that CO2 has a net warming effect when its concentration increases in the atmosphere would be just has irresponsible as making specific statements of attribution for any specific period of warming. I agree – other climate ‘forcers’ don’t act in an equal and opposite direction to the influence of CO2 – but can we really say that we have a very good idea yet about how they do respond. Theories of climate sensitivity are very difficult to prove and considering how young they are and how difficult it is to reduce them to controlled lab experiments I think it wont be until we garner skillful models that we can stake the claim that we know what is going on.
In relation to Gavins other points…
I never said that attributing the Cambrian explosion to natural selection doesn’t involve significant inferences. That is why it is just the best theory we have and we don’t have the ability to claim for certain that this was the mechanism at play. I agree that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the best theory we have for global warming – it certainly is a better supported theory than solar variance for instance. However, the supportive evidence for not experimental evolutionary claims are better supported than future predictions for climate change.
The fact that all species share a common set of developmental and genetic processes makes observations about one species reducible to others.
I think that for this reason basic statements about human evolution have a weight of evidence that I find more convincing than the evidence for climate sensitivity. Granted I don’t understand the later as well. If someone actually wants to do what this site is meant for – educating folks like me – please provide me with a laymans explanation of equally supportive evidence for the fact that the IPCC predicts that the climate will cause 3-7 times the effect of CO2 alone on global warming. I don’t think it exists.
[Response: We have discussed constraints on climate sensitivity many times – and low estimates (less than 1.5 deg C for 2xCO2) are extremely difficult to reconcile with paleo-climate history – specifically the LGM, ice-age cycles or the Eocene, the PETM etc. The factors that influence sensitivity – predominantly water vapor and ice albedo feedbacks – are well observed phenomena on all sorts of scales, so while cloud feedbacks are more uncertain, there is no substantive body of evidence that they so large and negative that they outweigh the amplifying feedbacks. – gavin]
In reference to mammalian epi-genetics I don’t think that the theory of natural selection is sufficient. Lamarckian theories of environmental influences on epi-genetic patterns is coming back in vogue.
This is a perfect example of extending knowledge beyond its proper realm can be limiting or shot sighted.
[Response: This is off-topic, but epi-genetics is not a Lamarckian theory. – gavin]
So let’s make it clear: you claim to understand evolutionary theory, therefore you are able to accept it.
You admit you don’t understand the physics underlying scientific evidence for climate sensitivity in the range of say 2.5-4C per doubling of CO2.
Since you don’t understand it, you reject it.
You’ve convinced me! Obviously I’ll accept your argument from ignorance over science, since after all you’ve admitted ignorance!
(NOT!)
[edit – no personal attacks on other commenters please]
Nor is epi-genetics a theory at all. However, some epi-genetic phenomenon are better explained by Lammark’s original theory of environmental influence within instead of between generations. It would be fair to wonder whether these new discoveries were hindered or helped by the single mindedness of the view that natural selection is the only selective process for change within a genetic pool.
[Response:It’s hard to figure out where you’re going with your arguments. You’re mixing up concepts in the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarck), phenotypic plasticity, genetic diversity and epigenetics. Epigenetic discoveries are not new in any sense–they’ve long been known, and they are not synonymous with, nor exemplary of, Lamarck’s central ideas. And characterizing the current view of evolutionary theory as a “single minded view that natural selection is the only selective process for change within a genetic pool” is just wrong, as Kimura’s neutral theory and concepts of random drift and fixation, in conjunction with molecular evidence obtained over the last 40 years, have completely blown the doors off of any such dogmatism that might have existed. However, the biggest point in all of this is pretty much what Gavin and Chris have said–that there are many similarities between evolution and climate science in the sense that experimentally obtained evidence has tremendous power of explanation for higher level, non-experimental phenomena. That’s the main point here. Evolution may have a stronger evidence base from controlled experimentation–and I believe it does–but there are still vast scales of time across which no experimentation is possible and for which the microevolutionary processes that we understand from that experimentation, provide only the very broadest outlines regarding why evolution took the particular course that it did. It also does not mean that climate science does not have its own set of experimentally determined evidence that functions similarly. Indeed, pretty much all complex sciences are characterized by this synthesis of evidence across big jumps in hierarchical organization or system complexity.–Jim]
Gavin – I will take another look at those climate sensitivity posts – thanks for the responses – I do have an earnest interest in furthering my understanding. I have looked at that stuff before and understand that there are reasons for the amplifications included in models. I just think that the evidence is hypothesis generating and not conclusive in its nature. Would you not agree that the merit of a feedback hypothesis should be derived from future predictive power not solely from explaining past phenomenon? Moreover, would you agree that even future predictions are limited by the uncertainty inherent in multi-factorial system making attribution a difficult task?
[Response: of course. But whoever said otherwise? We have discussed model challenges and attribution issues. – gavin]
These are different challenges than the theory of evolution faces.
Jeffrey: “In my opinion some of the inferences made in climate science lack as solid a foundation of evidence, and lack the same tools for verification and comparison.”
Absolute, utter [edit]
Jeffrey: “I do, however, have a degree in philosophy in which I focused on the notion of ‘the nature of knowledge’ and ‘causation’”
Anybody surprised?
Jeffrey: “I have a masters in neurosciences – my first paper coming out this Wednesday in The Journal of Neuroscience, and I am a few short months away from becoming an MD.”
[edit – please stay polite – disagree by all means, but just tone it down]
you don’t understand the first thing about scientific evidence–to wit, the strongest evidence for a scientific theory is a strong record of confirmed predictions. Climate models meet that criterion.
http://bartonpaullevenson.com/ModelsReliable.html
The models also have tremendous explanatory power. And here is where you fail to grasp the second basic tenet of scientific evidence: you have to consider ALL the evidence. If you do so, the current consensus theory of Earth’s climate presents a coherent picture of what is going on. There are uncertainties. There are puzzles. However the basic picture makes sense. There is NO alternative framework that even comes close to this. NONE! In that sense, the theory is precisely like the theory of evolution. And here is where you fail to comprehend yet a third basic tenet of scientific evidence–the measures for strength of evidence are comparative. The compare the power of one theory compared to that of another. When there is no alternative theory, we cannot fully comprehend how good the current theory is, because we do not see how badly it demolishes the opposition. The result is pseudoscientists sniping at it from the Discovery Institute or the Heartland Institute.
Jeffrey, if you are going to be a doctor, there is one aspect of science you had better learn quick: The experts know best. The experts are those who publish regularly on the subject and who are cited by their peers. If you ever reach a level of consensus where 97% of experts agree on a treatment, and where not one professional society of related practitioners dissents, and where every national scientific/medical honorific society agrees explicitly, then you had better [edit] consider their advice VERY seriously. The experiences of people who DO science trump your [edit] philosophy degree.
[Response: Ray, please tone it down. ]
For those bemused about Lamarck, and who don’t mind going a bit OT, background is here:
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/lamarck.html
When someone resorts to nothing more than straw man examples such as “a doubling of CO2 will cause a 3-5 degree rise in earths temperature” or “Florida will be under water in 30 years” or “the cause of late 20th century warming was solely CO2” it is a tacit admission that they have no cogent coherent argument.
Jeffrey-
You have to keep in mind here that there are a number of distinct issues with regards to the relative confidence we have in the mechanisms of climate change. Furthermore, to the extent we are interested in its application to teaching high school, only a small number of those topics are suitable for students with virtually no physics or calculus background. Trying to get such students with no background to “think critically” about the water vapor feedback or what the true value of climate sensitivity is makes little sense. The fact is that there is not really an easy, adequate, and all-encompassing theory to explain why the upper atmosphere moistens in a warming world. There is no simple theoretical basis to distinguish whether sensitivity should be 4 degrees or 1 degree, and certainly it is not intuitive to “think through” what the closer answer should be.
In the same way, a number of indirect methods such as fossil evidence or DNA matching must be used to assess likely evolutionary transitions in the deep past. Simply observing mutations in the lab is evidence of evolution, but is not a unifying theory of paleontology or evolutionary transition.
Simple stuff like the greenhouse effect is well established (although teaching it the right way depends on your audience), and in the same way a number of issues are simple textbook material. However, the whole reason people still bother to do research (like any field) is that a lot of these questions all involve substantial work at the interface of modeling and observations. Constraining the true sensitivity is also aided by looking at climates during various time intervals in the past, and using a number of distinct methodologies.
I am an no advocating for indoctrinating students into a single worldview, but it is simply not compelling to think climate change topics should be treated any differently than gravity, black holes, evolution, cell theory, the evolution of stars, plate tectonics, etc. All of these topics have well-established facts, and it would do an injustice to the student to pretend that every WUWT article or ‘pet theory’ had merit that we should let the kids decide for themselves. We don’t let them make up their mind on whether the moon is made of blue cheese. But we can also communicate uncertainties that are worth researching, not just in climate, but in any discipline.
Heartland has the answer
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/14/425649/heartland-documents-denial-group-koch-money-dupe-children-cultivate-revkin/
Getting back to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). You remember, the original post. Science teaching is done where the “rubber meets the road,” i.e., in the classroom. I am sure that the NCSE would help any teacher find appropriate scientific information for teaching evolutionary theory or climate science but, in my opinion, where the NCSE really shines is mobilizing resources when a school board, or a county, or a state decides to mandate teaching the science of both sides when there is only one scientific side.
You can yack on all you want about how you might teach climate science in a particular grade, but what do you do if you are required to teach conservative religion or Ayn Rand libertarianism in a science course? Steve
Jeffery makes some excellent points here.
One might equate the numerous projections of impending cataclysm some ( Ray for example) derive from the data to be the equivalent of Jeffery predicting that lizards will soon evolve into dragons which will devour us all!
More realistically, I cannot imagine Jeffery predicting how many species will inhabit the earth in 1000 years, when we don’t even know how many exist today.
[Response:Improper analogy, given that species number is driven by a vastly larger and fundamentally different set of drivers. In addition, even if we did know how many existed today, that wouldn’t matter much.–Jim]
Of course, in a comment above, Gavin denies predicting any such adverse affects, apparently labeling Jeffery’s examples of them strawmen.
Meanwhile, this site passively allows a renowned (yet anonymous) and regular contributing physicist make such outlandish predictions as though they were proven science, without any objection or correction. Those wild claims then become part of the narrative. That’s how the game seems to work, and it’s no wonder that more and more folks are skeptical.
A man’s gotta know his limitations, and it seems many here do not.
Ray your level of civility has denigrated past the point where you deserve a response. However, your comment about medical knowledge not only speaks to your ignorance but helps me make my original point.
In medicine we have a nice rating scale for our evidence that accompanies all of our guidelines. Note that expert opinion is at the BOTTOM of the list. Note also that without CONTROLLED experimentation we recognize that the evidence lacks rigour and take that into account when making recommendations.
Level I: Evidence obtained from at least one properly designed randomized controlled trial.
Level II-1: Evidence obtained from well-designed controlled trials without randomization.
Level II-2: Evidence obtained from well-designed cohort or case-control analytic studies, preferably from more than one center or research group.
Level II-3: Evidence obtained from multiple time series with or without the intervention. Dramatic results in uncontrolled trials might also be regarded as this type of evidence.
Level III: Opinions of respected authorities, based on clinical experience, descriptive studies, or reports of expert committees.
[Response:That’s medicine, not environmental science. Different beasts entirely.–Jim]
Am I blocked?
Jeffrey appears to think the correlational studies the medical profession bases its phar-macol-ogical treatments on demonstrate causation, as if the human body was less complex than the planetary climate system. It is to laugh, to put it politely.
> without any objection or correction
Er, no.
Watch the right sidebar for inline responses, which may take a while.
Every time I see a comment like #184, I wonder whether the writer ever gets outside. Crazy weather, melting ice, earlier Spring, acidifying oceans, species migrating poleward…and all this resulting from a fraction of the temperature increase we’re going to see.
[Response:A very important point Walter. Lots of people talking about things they neither know, nor particularly care, about.–Jim]
David,
I bowed out of this discussion a while ago, but continued to read the responses. IMO, yours was the best, as it seemed to capture the essence of this thread (and to some degree, the scientific field as a whole). Hopefully, people will take it to heart.
Jeffrey, I’ll cop to incivility, and I am sorry. However, do you have any idea how tired I am of having Dunning-Krugerites claim their bachelors in philosophy trumps real-world experience doing science. And thank you for making my point for me. Your fetishization of evidence standards in your chosen profession illustrates that your understanding of science lacks breadth as well as depth. What matters are the errors that one is trying to control, not the particular procedures by which this is done. Indeed, medical science is rife with examples of randomized, double blind, controlled trials that failed to yield good results.
You are not alone in fetishizing particular standards. A certain string theorist whose name must not be spoken claims that because particle physics enshrines a 5 standard deviation of significance as the gold standard for a publishable result, that no result should be trusted if its significance is less than this amount. Pure, unadulterated crap!
Evidence standards and procedures do not automatically convey form one subfield of science to another. Indeed, they may be neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee good results. Over-reliance on procedure without understanding the underlying errors is a virtual guarantee that those errors will eventually bite you. If I were going to a doctor, I would want to make sure he understood that.
The other thing that you had better learn quickly is that expertise matters. If you have 97% of the experts in a field agreeing on a proposition, you can pretty well take it to the bank. If, in addition, you have every professional society of related scientific fields endorsing that consensus, you are a fool as an outsider to challenge it. And if nearly every national and regional academy of science considers the result sufficiently trustworthy and important to weigh in, your foolishness is correspondingly magnified.
Now in the case of the consensus model of Earth’s climate and its implication that anthropogenic climate change poses a threat, all of these things are true. What is more, anthropogenic warming was predicted 116 years ago. We are talking about something that was established science when Einstein posited the theory of special relativity. How smart do you think it is for someone with no understanding of Earth science to come in and challenge that result?
David Wright,
I do not think we will have to wait on evolutionary timescales to see the effects of climate change. Already, 27% more of Earth’s land surface is in drought than in the 1970s–as predicted by the models. Of course, if you had the least familiarity with the science, you’d already know that.
Well, well, and along comes a development that is very much on topic:
Internal Heartland Documents Expose Climate Denial Funding Network
From the Heartland Institute’s Strategy Memo comes this about teaching the science of climate change:
“We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science.”
“His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.”
From the horse’s mouth, as it were.
and from the Recaptcha oracle: unclean rallmdb
Speaking of the Iron Curtain:
Leaked documents reveal Heartland Institute’s assault on climate science: ‘Dissuading teachers from teaching science’
[moved]
Dan H. says:
I was not referring to “mainstream” issues as indoctrination, but rather those that exist on one extreme or the other (yes, both exist). Both extremes appear to deny or rationalize away that which is inconvenient to their cause. A clear examples is the BEST data, where one group highlighted that portion of the reports which showed rising temperatures during the 20th century, while the other focused on the lack of warming in the 21st century. Additionally, one group trumpeted the urban heat island paper, while the other the AMO paper. In psychology, this is called selective abstraction. …
By your standards, which presentation of the last thirteen years in this graph is mainstream?
One thing I tell my students (in college classes) is that scientists don’t have PR firms, don’t do focus groups to find which buzz words will resonate with the emotions of the public. We deal with the data. If the data is telling us something, we follow the data. Sometimes we don’t like what the data tells us. We run through different hypotheses to see if we can explain the data another way. We make testable predictions and unfortunately for the planet, many have come true.
I also run through how the industry “manufactures doubt.” Pointing to local variations in the weather and ignoring the rest of the planet, predicting dire economic consequences, ignore the cost benefits, use non-peer review science, use discredited scientific studies and myth as science fact, imply there is a global conspiracy, cheaper to live with the effects. These same tactics have been used for smoking and CFCs. And ask them to think about what they’ve heard, and if they recognize some of the methods used.
The analogy with evolutionary theory is apt. Evolution on a small scale can be demonstrated in the lab, with bacteria and varied nutrients on agar plates, or fruit flies and varied diets in screened cages. All you need for divergence to become so great that speciation occurs is time. If rain causes gullies, why not, given enough time, the Grand Canyon? Given enough time, you’d need some Divine Authority to prevent speciation and canyons. Believers of any faith are better off if science teachers present one view dogmatically. It’s easy, then, to dismiss the teacher as a dogmatic jerk. It’s the presentation of a range of purported explanations that’s most destructive of faiith. If you really want to teach science, present alternative theories without the ridicule.
Lab experiments do not similarly demonstrate anthropogenic global warming. The Earth system has too many feedbacks (ocean heat sinks, geochemical interactions with the atmosphere, cloud cover, snow over, biological uptake, etc.) that do not occur in a class jar.
Teachers, your students are not your children. The bond between children and parents is crucial to the life prospects of each child. Tread carefully when you propose to fray that bond.
Malcolm Kirkpatrick wrote: “Evolution on a small scale can be demonstrated in the lab, with bacteria and varied nutrients on agar plates, or fruit flies and varied diets in screened cage … Lab experiments do not similarly demonstrate anthropogenic global warming. The Earth system has too many feedbacks …”
With all due respect, your small scale demonstration of biological evolution does in fact sound comparable to a similarly small scale demonstration of the “greenhouse effect” of CO2, using glass vessels containing air with varying concentrations of CO2.
Yes, it’s true that while such a simplified demonstration of the basic “greenhouse effect” of CO2 demonstrates the underlying mechanism, it does leave out all the feedbacks and complexities that come into play in real-world anthropogenic global warming.
But, the simplified demonstration of evolution that you describe — with a single species subjected to a single environmental variable — likewise demonstrates the underlying mechanisms of mutation and natural selection, but also leaves out all the complexities that come into play in real-world biological evolution.
Malcolm Kirkpatrick wrote: “The bond between children and parents is crucial to the life prospects of each child. Tread carefully when you propose to fray that bond.”
I’m not sure what this means.
If you are a science teacher, teaching biological evolution as you describe, and a student says “My mommy and daddy say that evolution is a secular humanist fraud and the Earth is 6000 years old and God created dinosaurs and humans on the same day”, do you just say “Oh, OK. Fine” so as not to “fray the bond” between that student and his parents? Do you really think that doing so helps that student’s “life prospects”?
“If you really want to teach science, present alternative theories without the ridicule.”
If they are workable “alternates”, then yes. But if they are politically-mandated nonsense, lacking in any scientific basis?