22 July 2016
Science or advocacy? by Prof. David R. Legates
Science
or advocacy?
Students
are learning energy and climate change advocacy, not climate science
David
R. Legates
For
almost thirty years, I have taught climate science at three different
universities. What I have observed is that students are increasingly being fed
climate change advocacy as a surrogate for becoming climate science literate. This
makes them easy targets for the climate alarmism that pervades America today.
Earth’s climate probably is the
most complicated non-living system one can study, because it naturally integrates
astronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, hydrology, oceanography and
cryology, and also includes human behavior by both responding to and affecting
human activities. Current concerns over climate change have further pushed climate
science to the forefront of scientific inquiry.
What should we be teaching college
students?
At the very least, a student should
be able to identify and describe the basic processes that cause Earth’s climate
to vary from poles to equator, from coasts to the center of continents, from the
Dead Sea or Death Valley depression to the top of Mount Everest or Denali. A
still more literate student would understand how the oceans, biosphere,
cryosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere – driven by energy from the sun – all work
in constantly changing combinations to produce our very complicated climate.
Unfortunately, the U.S.
Global Change Research Program’s definition of climate science
literacy raises the question of whether climatology is even a science. It
defines climate science literacy as “an understanding of your influence on
climate and climate’s influence on you and society.”
How can students understand and put
into perspective their influence on the Earth’s climate if they don’t
understand the myriad of processes that affect our climate? If they don’t
understand the complexity of climate itself? If they are told only human
aspects matter? And if they don’t understand these processes, how can they
possibly comprehend how climate influences them and society in general?
Worse still, many of our colleges
are working against scientific literacy for students.
At the University of Delaware, the
Maryland and Delaware Climate Change Education Assessment and Research (MADE
CLEAR)
defines the distinction between weather and
climate by stating that “climate is
measured over hundreds or thousands of years,” and defining climate as “average
weather.” That presupposes that climate is static, or should be, and that
climate change is unordinary in our lifetime and, by implication,
undesirable.
Climate, however, is not static. It
is highly variable, on timescales from years to millennia – for reasons that
include, but certainly are not limited to, human activity.
This Delaware-Maryland program
identifies rising concentrations of greenhouse gases – most notably carbon
dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – as the only reason why temperatures have
risen about 0.6°C (1.1ยบ F) over the last century and will supposedly continue
to rise over the next century. Students are then instructed to save energy,
calculate their carbon footprint, and reduce,
reuse, recycle. Mastering these concepts, they are told, leads to “climate
science literacy.” It does not.
In the past, I have been invited to
speak at three different universities during their semester-long and
college-wide focus on climate science literacy. At all three, two movies were
required viewing by all students, to assist them in becoming climate science
literate: Al Gore’s biased version of climate science, An Inconvenient Truth, and the 2004 climate science fiction
disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow.
This past spring, the University of
Delaware sponsored an Environmental Film Festival featuring six films. Among
them only An Inconvenient Truth touched
at all on the science behind climate change, albeit in such a highly flawed way
that in Britain, students must be warned
about its bias.
The other films were activist-oriented and included movies that are admittedly
science fiction or focus on “climate change solutions.”
For these films, university faculty
members were selected to moderate discussions. We have a large College of Earth, Ocean and the Environment,
from which agreeable, scientifically knowledgeable faculty could have been
chosen. Instead, discussion of An
Inconvenient Truth was led by a professor of philosophy, and one movie – a
documentary on climate change “solutions” that argues solutions are pertinent
irrespective of the science – was moderated by a civil engineer.
Discussion of the remaining four
films was led by faculty from history, English and journalism. Clearly, there
was little interest in the substance of the science.
Many fundamentals of climate
science are absent from university
efforts to promote climate science literacy. For example, students seldom learn
that the most important chemical compound with respect to the Earth’s climate
is not carbon dioxide, but water. Water influences almost every aspect of the
Earth’s energy balance, because it is so prevalent, because it appears in
solid, liquid and gas form in substantial quantities, and because energy is
transferred by the water’s mobility and when it changes its physical state. Since
precipitation varies considerably from year to year, changes in water
availability substantially affect our climate every year.
Hearing about water, however,
doesn’t set off alarms like carbon dioxide does.
Contributing
to the increased focus on climate change advocacy is the pressure placed on
faculty members who do not sign on to the advocacy bandwagon. The University of
Delaware has played the role of activist and used FOIA requests to attempt to
intimidate me because I have spoken out about climate change alarmism. In my
article published in Academic Questions,
“The University vs. Academic Freedom,” I discuss the university’s
willingness to go along with Greenpeace in its quest for my documents and
emails pertaining to my research.
Much
grant money and fame, power and influence, are to be had for those who follow
the advocates’ game plan. By contrast, the penalties for not going along with
alarmist positions are quite severe.
For
example, one of the films shown at the University of Delaware’s film festival
presents those who disagree with climate change extremism as pundits for hire
who misrepresent themselves as a scientific authority. Young faculty members are
sent a very pointed message: adopt the advocacy position – or else.
Making
matters worse, consider Senate Bill 3074. Introduced into the U.S. Senate
on June 16 of this year, it authorizes the establishment of a national climate
change education program. Once again, the emphasis is on teaching energy and
climate advocacy, rather than teaching science and increasing scientific
knowledge and comprehension.
The
director of the National Center for Science Education commented that the bill was
designed to “[equip] students with the knowledge and knowhow required for them
to flourish in a warming world.” Unfortunately, it will do little to educate
them regarding climate science.
I fear that our climate science curriculum
has been co-opted, to satisfy the climate change fear-mongering agenda that
pervades our society today. Instead of teaching the science behind Earth’s
climate, advocates have taken the initiative to convert it to a social agenda
of environmental activism.
Climatology, unfortunately, has been
transformed into a social and political science. There is nothing wrong with either
of those “sciences,” of course. But the flaws underpinning climate science
advocacy are masked by “concern for the environment,” when climate is no longer
treated as a physical science.
Climate science must return to
being a real science and not simply a
vehicle to promote advocacy talking points. When that happens, students will
find that scientific facts are the real “inconvenient truths.”
David
R. Legates, PhD, CCM, is a Professor of Climatology at the University of
Delaware in Newark, Delaware. A version of this article appeared on the John
William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy website.
Posted at the request of Paul Driessen
Universities have largely lost sight of what it means to provide an education. They have become idea suppression institutions in many cases who present arguments from authority rather than by reason to inculcate an agenda in the minds of students. In other words, the activities of universities are to a great degree cult-forming activities. This is contrary to the legitimate mission of a university to promote rational thinking skills and a body of true knowledge among independent-minded students.
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