Public Schools Are Teaching Man-made Global Warming as a Fact

Public Schools Are Teaching Climate Change as a Fact, Not as a Theory Developed by Government-Funded Scientists Who Are Paid to Back the Elitists' Agenda for a New World Order

A nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif., the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE), sends speakers — armed with an original video produced by ACE — to schools to talk a little 'basic science.'

November 19, 2010

TIME - Vernard Williams is about to drop some knowledge on the kids of Food and Finance High School in New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. He's not facing the easiest audience. It's a Friday afternoon in early October, the school year is still settling in, and the teenagers filing into the auditorium look less than engaged. Making things even less promising is the subject matter of today's assembly: climate change.

Williams is a senior educator for the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE), a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif., that sends speakers — armed with an original video produced by ACE — to schools to talk a little basic science. They're prepared for an uphill struggle.

"We do this in a way you've never seen it," says Williams, a Brooklyn native and lawyer. "We know you have to engage them from the beginning."

And against the odds, that's what Williams does. As a video illustrating the impact of climate change plays behind him, Williams breaks down global warming, making it clear how the buildup of carbon dioxide leads to higher temperatures — and how we're responsible for that CO2.

Greenhouse-gas footprints, methane, parts per million, carbon sinks — Williams runs through topics that would make most kids nod off, but the students in his audience begin to creep forward in their seats and pay attention. The ACE way makes climate change meaningful to young people because it makes them understand how their lifestyles contribute to global warming — and how they can help stop it.

"We need to understand the power that youth have on this issue," Williams says. "And we need to harness it."

That's what ACE was launched to do. Al Gore opened the door on climate education with his venerable slideshow, and later with the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But while Gore's cerebral, stat-heavy style might work for science wonks, there was also a need for something that had what Williams calls "the cool factor."

Most school science curricula still have relatively little room for climate change, despite the subject's importance, never mind a presentation that was going to engage kids anyway. With money from the wind-power entrepreneur Michael Haas, ACE set out to fix all that.

"This is a niche we can fill," says Pic Walker, the executive director for ACE. "Climate literacy is pretty haphazard in the U.S."

Walker's right — Americans as a whole don't even know what they don't know about climate change. A sobering report released last month by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that Americans lack an understanding of even the basics of climate science. Just 57% of Americans can explain what the greenhouse effect is, and only 45% understand that carbon dioxide traps heat from the earth's surface. Ever heard of coral bleaching or ocean acidification? If yes, then you're in rare company — just 1 in 4 Americans has.

"Without that basic understanding, how can we make the choices we need on global warming?" asks Walker.

So far, ACE has reached more than 1,000 schools around the country and more than half a million students. And they seem to be having an impact: a recent study found that an ACE assembly contributed to a 58% improvement in climate-science understanding among high school students.

For the really motivated kids, ACE provides a structure to act on global warming as well: helping students establish green clubs that support carbon-cutting projects at home and at school.

"They can all be leaders in this area," Williams says.

ACE isn't without controversy. Given how politically charged climate change remains, some skeptics have attacked the group for spreading global-warming alarmism. But ACE isn't an arm of the Green Party — most of the presentation is focused on the science of climate change, not on cap and trade or any of the other legislative solutions being kicked around Congress.

At its best, an ACE presentation not only can educate kids about one of the most important issues of our time, but it can also get them viscerally excited about science and the world around them.

"Youth right now are ready to explode!" Williams exclaims as he ends his presentation with a little freestyle rap.

It's not something you'll likely ever see Al Gore do, but it could be the way to energize the next generation on energy.

Climate Change: Study Says Dire Warnings Fuel Skepticism

November 22, 2010

TIME - While researching a feature for TIME.com recently, I had the chance to sift through TIME's decades of environment coverage. I came to two conclusions: First, we were writing stories about virtually the same subjects 40 years ago as we do now. (Air pollution, endangered species, the polluted oceans, dwindling natural resources.) Second, our coverage of climate change has been really scary — by which I mean, we've emphasized the catastrophic threats of global warming in dire language. That reached a height in 2006, when we titled our cover story on climate change, crowned with a photo of a lonely polar bear on an ice floe, "Be Worried. Be Very Worried." And since it was published, I've seen that cover image pop up in countless PowerPoint presentations on climate change, always used to underscore just how catastrophic warming would be.

I was part of the team that put that issue together, and I know why we used the language we did. Scientists were telling us that global warming really had the potential to wreck the future of the planet, and we wanted to get that message across to readers — even if it meant scaring the hell out of them. (See TIME's photo essay "Fragile Planet.")

But if a new study is to be believed, we might have been making the situation worse, not better. According to forthcoming research by the Berkeley psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg, when people are shown scientific evidence or news stories on climate change that emphasize the most negative aspects of warming — extinguished species, melting ice caps, serial natural disasters — they are actually more likely to dismiss or deny what they're seeing. Far from scaring people into taking action on climate change, such messages seem to scare them straight into denial.

Here's how the study worked. Willer and Feinberg tested participants' belief in global warming, and then their belief in what's called the just-world theory, which holds that life is generally fair and predictable. The subjects were then randomly assigned to read one of two newspaper-style articles. Both pieces were identical through the first four paragraphs, providing basic scientific information about climate change, but they differed in their conclusions, with one article detailing the possibly apocalyptic consequences of climate change, and the other ending with a more upbeat message about potential solutions to global warming. (Read about how climate change is becoming cool in the classroom - see next story.)

Willer and Feinberg found that participants given the doomsday articles came out more skeptical of climate change, while those who read the bright-side pieces came out less skeptical. The increase in skepticism was especially acute among subjects who'd scored high on the just-world scale, perhaps because the worst victims of global warming — the poor of the developing world, future generations, blameless polar bears — are the ones least responsible for it. Such unjust things couldn't possibly occur, and so the predictions can't be true.

The results, Willer and Feinberg wrote, "demonstrate how dire messages warning of the severity of global warming and its presumed dangers can backfire ... by contradicting individuals' deeply held beliefs that the world is fundamentally just."

Now a climate scientist armed with data might argue that worldviews should be trumped by facts. But there's no denying that climate skepticism is on the rise: a new report from the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the earth is warming because of human activity has fallen from 50% in 2006 to 34%. The numbers are even lower for conservatives — just 16% of Republicans surveyed believe in manmade global warming, compared with 53% of Democrats. (See how environmentalists got green during the California elections.)

Poor messaging isn't the only possible cause for the increase in denial: politicians — mostly on the right — have aggressively pushed the climate-change-is-a-hoax trope. The Climategate controversy of a year ago certainly might have played a role, too, though the steady decline in belief began well before those hacked e-mails were published. Still, the fact remains that if the point of the frightening images in global-warming documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth was to push audiences to act on climate change, they've been a failure theoretically and practically.

Some environmental advocates want to double down on the current communication strategy. A group of prominent climate scientists published a letter in Science this week arguing for an initiative that will "actively and effectively share information about climate-change risk and potential solutions with the public." It's good to have scientists out and engaged with the public; but if the messaging doesn't change, neither will the results. What may be needed instead is what the science-media expert Matthew Nisbet calls a "postpartisan plan" for climate-change communication, one that ratchets down the catastrophe and focuses on the immediate benefits that energy action can have for Americans.

For many environmentalists, convinced that we truly are facing an existential threat, that might seem like surrender. The writer and activist Bill McKibben has a saying: "You can't negotiate with the planet." That's true — but you have to negotiate with the public. Scaring them out of their wits will produce little beyond fear. Increasingly, the war over climate change won't just be fought in scientific journals and international summits, but also between our ears.

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