This week’s focus:
What is/should be the goal of climate science education at the high school or college level? Should it include “belief in” human caused climate change in addition to comprehension of the best available scientific evidence?
I started off thinking I had not changed my mind since writing my evolution education post two weeks ago. I planned to contend that, as with evolution, there is a reason that we are not satisfied for students to simply acquire knowledge about climate change. If they were to cogently describe what the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) entails, but flat-out deny the truth of the theory, that would leave us unsatisfied – not just because global warming is a pressing issue which requires political will and thus voter backing to tackle (though that’s certainly true) but because we’d be left with the feeling that on some level the student still doesn’t “get it.”
Unpacking my argument from last week – which proposed that we should aim for students to believe the following…
(proposition p) Evolution, which says x, is the best supported scientific way of understanding the origins of various species, the way species adapt to their environment, etc etc.
… I can identify three reasons for this to be our aim:
- First, because science *is* the best scientific explanation for these phenomena, and thus by knowing this, students know a true fact about the world;
- Second, because armed with that knowledge, they are better equipped to apply the theory of evolution to scientific and other real-world problems; and
- Third, (as I outlined in my comment to Cortlandt on the next post) because we wish students to understand the scientific justification for the theory of evolution, and if they understand that, then belief in proposition (p) necessarily follows. (It occurs to me now, however, that this is not the most terrific argument, because necessity does not flow in the other direction. Believing that p does not necessarily mean the student understands the scientific justification for evolutionary theory; he could take (p) on faith.)
The consensus problem
The climate equivalent of proposition (p) might be something like:
(q) The theory of anthropogenic climate change is the best scientific explanation we have for observed increases in the mean global temperature, and the theory predicts that if man continues to produce greenhouse gases at a similar rate, the temperature will continue to rise.
Proposition (p) could have included a stipulation about predictive power – indeed, to be a valid scientific theory, the theory of evolution must have predictive power. But while I didn’t think that needed to be spelled out for (p), I have done so for (q), because climate change is a subject whose vital importance – and whose controversy – truly rests on its predictions.
But there’s a problem here, and maybe a mismatch. In proposing that we aim for student belief in proposition (p), I figured we were disentangling identity from knowledge. Any student, taught well enough, could come to see that proposition (p) is true – and still choose not to believe in evolution, because their identity causes them to choose religious explanations over scientific ones.
For climate change, however, we may not get that far. There seems to be mixed evidence for the effectiveness of communicating scientific consensus on AGW.
As previously discussed, Lewandowsky et al found that subjects told about the 97 percent scientific consensus expressed a higher certainty that CO2 emissions cause climate change. Dan Kahan counters that this finding seems to bear little external validity, since these are not the results we’ve seen in the real world. From 2003 to 2013, the proportion of the US public who said human activities were the main cause of global warming declined from 61 to 57 percent.
In Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus, Kahan finds that ideology, ie “who people are,” drives perceptions of the climate change consensus. While 68% of egalitarian communitarians in the study said that most expert scientists agree that global warming is man-made, only 12% of hierarchical individualists said so.
On the other hand, as Kahan said in a lecture at the University of Colorado last week (which I live-streamed here – unfortunately I don’t think they’ve posted the recording), most people who dismiss AGW nonetheless recognize that there is a scientific consensus on the issue. At least on the surface this seems at odds with Kahan’s previous findings, so I’d like to look further into these results. (I think the difference may come down to what Kahan describes, in Climate-Science Communication and the Measurement Problem, as the difference between questions that genuinely ask about what people know and those that trigger people to answer in a way that aligns with their identity. Why one of Kahan’s consensus questions fell in the former camp and one in the latter, I do not yet know.)
How is it possible that someone can recognize the scientific consensus on AGW, but still dismiss the truth of AGW? The most natural answer is that such people can readily dismiss the scientific consensus, perhaps arguing the scientists are biased and untrustworthy. This, by the way, points strongly that we should have always expected consensus messaging to fail!
So, if the aim is not consensus…?
Returning to education, I think this warning about consensus messaging points to the importance of creating a personal understanding of the science – i.e., exposing students to the reasoning and evidence behind climate change theory, and walking them through some of the discovery processes that scientists themselves have used. There may be serious limits to what this can achieve, because smart students may perceive that the arguments being used in the classroom have been developed by the scientists that they distrust. But undecided students may be persuaded by the fundamental soundness of the scientific arguments.
There is another danger: conservative students (especially the smart ones) may also reject the scientific arguments advanced in class because they will perceive that at a certain point they must taking things on authority; that the processes involved are too complex and the amount of data too large for a non-specialist to come to a solid independent judgment on. Furthermore, the students can entertain the idea that there is a viable alternative scientific theory because there are many prominent voices that back up this view.
Again looking back at last week, I realize now that the same problem exists for evolution. The genius of “intelligent design” and “creation science” is that they allow an exit from the scientific-religious conflict in what many of us would call the wrong direction. Students can use this “out” to accept the science they like, reject that they don’t, and view it all as a “scientific theory.” Rather than accept (p) and then be forced to either choose religion over science, or somehow partition these parts of themselves (which Hermann, as well as Everhart, indicate is how many people cope), students may use religion *as* science and reject (p) altogether.
So now I’m beginning to doubt whether my aim in that essay really was achievable. It’s probably still a good idea to aim for beliefs of type (p), because this is a means of encouraging scientific literacy and nature of science understanding. But religious students with a good grasp of the nature of science will probably still find that “out” and will not agree with the evolution proposition. And other, less scientifically oriented students will simply say, “OK, this is the best science, but I trust religion over science.”