Climate Change Education

Knowing, doing and being

Chang Chew Hung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317685883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement des sciences sociales

Climate change is a controversial topic; some people assert that climate change is not occurring, and others believe that reports are inaccurate, that whilst climate change is happening, it may not be caused by human activity. There are also climate alarmists who use IPCC reports to support their claims that erratic weather patterns are a result of climate change caused by human activity. Regardless of these different viewpoints, one fact can be agreed upon; climate change is a complex subject and there is a need to educate future generations, enabling them to deal with the plethora of information and views that they will experience in their lives.

This book explores what education for climate change entails, discussing the concept of Climate Change Education (CCE) itself, how it can be taught in schools and how public education can be carried out. It instructs what specific subject matter to teach for CCE, and how to evaluate the student learning on the subject. Chapters include:

• CCE in the Formal Curriculum

• 
  
  

• Teacher readiness for CCE

• 
  
  

• Assessment for and of CCE

• 
  
  

• Lessons from CCE for Public Education

• 
  
  

Climate Change Education is an extremely useful resource for anyone involved in educating students on climate change and also for those interested in climate change itself.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315774923-1

There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.

(David Attenborough, quoted in Harding, 2012)

What do we mean when we say we have learnt about climate change? Although perhaps one of the most relevant and contemporary socio-scientific issues of our times (Special Eurobarometer, 2009), climate change has been shrouded in controversy, at least in the way the issue has been portrayed by the mass media. Despite its importance in political, economic and social discourses, public interest has not yet been translated into sufficient pervasive, collective and sustainable action to mitigate the impact of climate change. According to Miller (2012), people’s reluctance to alter their current lifestyles has been a key contributor to this apparent disengagement. Indeed, the issue is regarded as secondary when compared with more immediate and personal concerns, which unsurprisingly include issues of employment and inflation. Sadly, climate change is perceived to be a distant threat (Chang & Pascua, 2012). O’Connor, Bord, Yarnal and Wiefek (2002) have suggested that years of exposure to campaigns that invoke anxiety and fear have made the public insensitive or even resilient to alarmist discourse. Unless people consider that not acting on climate change directly threatens their immediate concerns of job security, personal freedom and the overall state of the economy, it is unlikely, if at all, that any change to their lifestyle is possible. This phenomenon is perhaps grounded in the public’s lack of an accurate understanding about the issue, exacerbated by the proliferation of an apparent debate that confuses people’s understanding of climate change.

My purpose in writing this book was to further our understanding about what it means to teach and learn about climate change. By clarifying knowledge about the subject matter, students and teachers can meaningfully engage in climate change discourse. Educators will also be provided with a framework within which to teach climate change education (CCE) topics, which are often infused within existing subjects in formal school curricula. Policies can be informed on developing effective public education that offers the public ways to engage in climate change discourse. This book, while written primarily for the climate change educator, can be used as a reference resource for teachers, education policymakers and public education agencies.

This chapter will open a discussion on the issue of climate change with particular emphasis on the evolution of the debate, how pervasive it has become as a global concern and the related responses of world bodies and governments to the issue. Different angles to the argument will be presented over the dispute of ideas between alarmists, contrarians and a socially circumscribed, but ambivalent, public. Critical points in the historical development of the discourse will be highlighted to illustrate how the status of climate change has been catapulted into a legitimate crisis based on the evidence of the anthropogenic influence on the increasing temperatures on Earth.

To provide authentic examples for discussion, the content of this book is largely collected from a research study on CCE in Singapore. The purpose of this study is to inform and contextualize and, by drawing on published examples of similar studies around the world, to compare and suggest a way forward for teaching and learning about climate change. As the bulk of the examples used in this book are drawn from the Singapore context, this chapter will also offer a glimpse into the current state of climate change discourse in Singapore and discuss how this informs CCE.

To begin with, some people assert that climate change may not be happening. Others believe that, although climate change is occurring, it may not be entirely a result of human activity. Official sources such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports become fodder for climate change alarmists in supporting their claims that erratic weather patterns are a consequence of anthropogenic climate change.

Is there a climate change debate?

The enhanced greenhouse effect is “arguably one of the greatest environmental challenges facing humankind in the 21st century” (Schreiner, Henriksen & Hansen, 2005, p. 3). The terms alarmists and skeptics come to mind when this kind of statement is made. Interestingly, there are several key discourses of climate change, which can be broadly categorized as the scientific, economic, political and ethical discourses of climate change. The complexity of the science of climate change, however, proves to be a deterrent for an informed understanding of its causes, impacts and what can be done to manage it. Although concerns are mounting about its long-term repercussions, short-term effects are not easily observable, creating impediments to the retention of awareness and decreasing the sense of urgency. The analysis by Ungar (1992) of global warming suggests that, much like many environmental claims, the issue has to be associated with dramatic real-world events to gain notice. It also suffers from losing its “celebrity status” once media coverage ebbs. Over time, weak manifestations of, and long lags between, observable effects (Bord, O’Connor & Fisher, 2000) give way to ambivalence as the issue is replaced by other environmental concerns. Most notably, the climate change issue has become redirected from a scientific discourse to an international political and economic dispute (Ungar, 1992).

The prevailing themes in the scientific discourse of climate change are uncertainty, complexity, vulnerability and, ultimately, the authority and validity of science-based policymaking. The climate change issue is discoursed in economics through the concepts of costs and benefits of mitigation versus adaptation, and interventionist approaches are compared with free market approaches. Issues of cooperation and conflict between states often plague the political discourse. Finally, there is the ethical discourse of climate change where the concept of rights and responsibilities and accountability are key to discussing climate change.

Historically, climate change discourse is not an exclusive twenty-first century occurrence. The Little Ice Age describes a period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries when average temperatures in Europe were at least 1–2°C cooler than the preceding period (Matthes, 1939). The greenhouse effect was introduced as a concept in the nineteenth century when the Earth was described as a “hothouse” (Fourier, 1827), probably inspired by the rising temperatures at the end of the Little Ice Age. With the end of the Little Ice Age, the rising temperatures were welcomed as positive prospects, with some scholars writing about doubling carbon dioxide concentrations and their relationship with rising temperatures (Arrhenius, 1896). The discourse of how greenhouse gases can contribute to a warming Earth was deemed desirable until about the middle of the twentieth century, when researchers found that atmospheric carbon dioxide was not easily absorbed by oceans (Revelle & Suess, 1957), fuelling fears that the Earth was indeed warming beyond control.

By the early 1980s the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization had established the IPCC to improve our understanding of climate science, to study the impacts of, adaptation to and vulnerability from climate change, as well as to consider options for mitigation. Since then, the IPCC has produced four assessment reports in these three areas, roughly once every five years, with the latest publication of the Assessment Report Four (AR4) in 2007 (IPCC, 2007).

The key findings in the AR4 are focused on the following central ideas. The first is that global warming is happening and is “unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level” (IPCC, 2007, p. 30). Most of this warming in the last 50 years is “very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (IPCC, 2007, p. 39) and these changes have “likely had a discernible influence at the global scale on observed changes in many physical and biological systems” (IPCC, 2007, p. 41). In consequence, “anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change” (IPCC, 2007, p. 53). In turn, humans can respond to climate change by “adapting to its impacts and by reducing GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions (mitigation), thereby reducing the rate and magnitude of change” (IPCC, 2007, p. 56). While adaptation reduces the vulnerabilities of society to climate change, together with mitigation strategies, adaptation and mitigation can “complement each other and together can significantly reduce the risks of climate change” (IPCC, 2007, p. 65).

Despite the more affirmative statements made compared with the Third Assessment Report (TAR) (Watson & the Core Writing Team, 2001), AR4’s concluding chapter included key uncertainties and complexities in the causes and effects of climate change, drivers of future climate change and their effects, as well as the responses to these changes (IPCC, 2007, p. 73). Indeed uncertainty and complexity are the two key concepts that best describe the scientific discourse on climate change. Although we know a great deal about how the climate system works, such as how rain is formed when moist air is forced to rise up the side of a mountain, we do not know how probable it is that this will occur at any given time. In fact, we are unable to determine the probability distribution of rainfall on the slope of a mountain or to assign probabilistic values for the purposes of modeling climate. We are thus unable to reduce risk because we do not know the probabilistic values. Indeed, the uncertainty in our understanding of the climate system is a function of the complexity of the climate system.

Given this “epistemological constraint,” it is unreasonable to expect that a consensus could easily be reached on the probable changes to weather phenomena and their associated impact on humans. Consequently, two epistemological views of the normal and post-normal science of climate change have dominated the discourse (Davidson, 2003). The former is entrenched in the traditional objectivist and positivistic perspectives, whereas the latter adopts a relativist position that recognizes multiple valid perspectives for a given issue rather than a “single objective narrative.” However, both normal and post-normal climate science are not in competition with each other, but should be used in tandem to address the issues of climate change. When complex climate change issues require urgent resolution, multiple perspectives, such as observations from “farmers, fishermen, aboriginal peoples, and others who have an intimate knowledge of local climatic conditions and wildlife” (Davidson, 2003, p. 15) should be considered in combination with the predicted impact from climate models. These stakeholders represent an extended peer community which contributes to the multiple perspectives that are a distinctive hallmark of post-normal science.

The reports produced by the IPCC should be lauded for their foresight in including a large panel of authors in each of the working groups; in essence, constituting an extended peer community, which renders some degree of legitimacy to the resultant discourse in the post-normal perspective. One key concern arising out of the contrasting rhetoric between normal and post-normal climate science is to distinguish the range of impact that climate change brings to humans and society (Davidson, 2003). In particular, the economic discourse on climate change focuses on the costs and benefits arising from the effects of changing weather patterns and rising temperatures.

The early debates about climate change centered on the scientific aspects of the issue in that the science was inconclusive about the threats to the environment and to humankind; however, by the time that the TAR was published, there was a general acceptance that climate change was occurring, perhaps except for the then US Bush Administration (Davidson, 2003). Once the debate on whether climate change was real started to subside, the discourse shifted to the economic ramifications of the Kyoto Protocol. Named after where it was adopted, in Kyoto, Japan on 11 December 1997, the international agreement commits its member countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to targets in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In December 2012, the Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, in which countries aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least “18 percent below 1990 levels in the eight-year period from 2013 to 2020” (UNFCCC, 2013). The Parties with commitments under the Kyoto Protocol (Annex B Parties) have accepted targets for limiting or reducing emissions. These targets are expressed as levels of permissible emissions, or “assigned amounts,” over the 2008–2012 commitment period. The allowed emissions are divided into “assigned amount units.” A direct consequence of this strategy to mitigate climate change has resulted in a new market for trading emissions. Emissions trading, as set out in Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol, allows countries that have spare capacity of assigned amount units to sell this excess capacity to countries that have exceeded their targets (UNFCCC, 2013).

Although the early economic discourses following the Kyoto Protocol were concerned with the l...