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There is a debate among those involved in social controversies surrounding climate change about how to refer to the positions that reject, and to people who doubt or deny, the scientific community’s consensus on the answers to the central questions of climate change. Many such people prefer to call themselves skeptics and describe their position as climate change skepticism. Their opponents, however, often prefer to call such people climate change deniers and to describe their position as climate change denial.
What can you do to support climate change education in your local community?
What can you do to defend climate change education when it is attacked in your local community?
Attacks on climate education are often encountered:
Climate affects the way that we live in a host of ways, and now our changing climate presents a significant challenge to our society.
Climate science is challenging, both for educators to teach and for students to learn. And the topic of climate change in particular poses distinctive pedagogical challenges:
Climate has changed in the past — sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly — but now it is changing because humans have
Although scientists are in broad agreement about the occurrence, causes, and consequences of climate change, the topic is socially controversial.
The Earth’s climate is changing rapidly. Scientists trying to find out what’s causing climate change work like detectives, gathering evidence to rule out some suspects and to ascertain just who is responsible. It’s clear, based on over a century of scientific investigation, that humans are responsible for most of the climate change we’ve seen over the last 150 years.
The Earth’s climate is constantly changing. Seasonal changes throughout the year are one form of climate change, and the climate changes over hundreds of thousands of years as the Earth’s orbit changes the amount and intensity of energy received from the Sun. As the National Center for Atmospheric Research explains, climate change is different from the changes in weather from day to day.
There is virtually unanimous scientific agreement about climate change. Yet due to both the inherent complexity of the topic and the social controversies surrounding it, confusion and doubt often persist.