Climate science in Australia schools: 'Not teaching, but abusing'

Andrew Bolt reports from Australia(article shown below):

'Geophysicist Michael Asten is astonished that climate science is taught in schools as an exercise in groupthink, with sceptics not disproved but abused:

  Climate Nonconformist, who is also in Australia, adds some recollections from his own school days:

'I remember my year nine science text-book doing a similar thing with the moon landing conspiracies; giving the conspiratorial argument alongside a scientific reply. The difference is that - to my knowledge anyway – there is no scientific reply by the conspiracy theorists. This hatchet job on Ashby makes a mockery of science by excluding one side of the argument and forgetting that science is defined by debate. Students are being sucked into this fallacy that science is unquestionably authoritative and one-sided.
In my Environmental Science classes, only one lesson was devoted to the other side of the debate. Our teacher merely informed us that there was another point of view, and showed us a video featuring Andrew Bolt. A token gesture. The rest of the course was dedicated to renewable energy, greenhouse theory, energy efficiency and alarmist outcomes, while ignoring the key parts of the debate; namely the hockey stick controversy and climate sensitivity.
We were uncritically shown Al Gore’s now debunked movie, forcing us to sit through the hysteria and self-adulation the former vice-president engaged in. We were told that the film contained errors, but none were specified. This is unfortunate, considering the deception surrounding the Vostok ice cores. For high school students, it is difficult to critically evaluate what appears to be irrefutable evidence of man-made global warming, especially when we’re dissuaded from questioning “the science”. The concept of causation did not occur to anyone. For us, this was proof.
The precautionary principle was taught as though it was scientific idea, rather than as the flawed approach to policy-making and environmental propaganda that it is. We learned about the potential beneficial uses of organisms, something which I now realise provides environmentalists the excuse the preserve every possible species, justified on the off-chance they might hold the cure to cancer or something like that. Together, these two ideas provide the green crowd with a potent tool to prevent industrial development. Of course, I couldn’t see through that at the time.
On the plus side, I did have one science teacher who was dismissive of global warming alarmism.'

The comments on the Andrew Bolt article are overwhelmingly from readers outraged by this reported abuse of education, and/or adding experiences of their own or their children's.  For example here is a selection scattered over the three (currently) pages of readers' comments:

Sadly this travesty has been endorsed by a large swag of science education gatekeepers in a wide range of education jurisdictions including the national curriculum.

Of course, Australia is now a post-modern post-scientific culture as witnessed by the failure to sack Tim Flannery over his blatant failure to accept responsibility for misleading statements about AGW.

Fair Go (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (08:26am)

My son encountered this first-hand when his class had to study ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. When he challenged some of the claims made in the film, he was threatened with detention.
When he produced a printout of British High Court judge Mr. Justice Burton’s ruling on scientific errors and political activism in the film, it was thrown in the bin.

Clownfish of Launceston (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (09:39am)

When you have children leaving school who are barely literate, who can hardly speak English but some sort of modern pidgin and who couldn’t care less about school in general we see that the educators have done their work well. You can’t control people who can think.
Where is the Victorian Premier in all this? Is he unaware of what his education department is incorporating into the syllabus? Where does the responsibility for factual science being taught lie? This is an outrageous highjacking of the education system. In future years those same children will be wearing the consequences of this scam against the people and will know who to thank for it.

mags of Queensland (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (10:01am) 

Indoctrination - designed to close minds down and instill “unquestionable beliefs”.
This is simply an abuse of children.

ExWarmist (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (10:03am)

Having just finished high school and studied physics, i have to say this is pretty spot on, sceptics in my class were told either “you’re wrong” or “the argument isn’t so much whether we can afford to believe it but can we afford not to?” in other words this might be totally wrong but we should believe it so the world might not end. Sigh.

Pat of Sydney (Reply)
Tue 08 May 12 (12:23pm) 

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Poor old Australia, once known as a land of free and independently minded people.  I hope they are mostly still like that, and will start clearing the poison out of their climate curricula just as soon as they can get rid of their current government. 

 (hat-tip: Tom Nelson)


Note added 10 May 2012.  That article by Michael Asten on climate education is available in full here: http://www.climaterealists.org.nz/node/885  Extract: 'The interested student, however, will discover material that may illustrate larger problems in science education. Perusal of the resources for secondary school physics students provided by the Australian Institute of Physics (Vic) Education Committee suggests some of our science educators have indeed lost the ability to teach objective and open-minded scientific inquiry.'

Climate Education in High Schools - What it could be like

I've been musing for a while on what decent curricula on climate might contain for schools, at both primary and secondary (high school) levels.  I have not got much further than thinking that a glass of water would make a good starting point for discussion time at some stage, linking as it does to the water cycle which is such an important part of the dynamics of the troposphere.  The water cycle would be a big feature of my ideal curricula, and could be treated at simple, familiar levels of observing clouds and precipitation, and later at a more advanced level looking at energy transfers and the major features of circulation in the troposphere.  The exciting theories of Svensmark and Shaviv would also permit a link between the glass of water and the cosmos itself.  Speculating about how events in our galaxy, and within the solar system, could affect the rate of formation of water droplets in the air, and hence clouds, would provide a gloriously grand perspective that any teacher would surely enjoy presenting on.

Anyway, I have just stumbled on a site today which is much further down that road than I am.  Here is a video by one of the site owners, Kristie Pelletier:

Link to video

 They have developed curricula materials, and publish a DVD containing materials divided into three lessons:

Lesson 1 15:37 minutes 
Overview of emerging science, past climate, temperature data errors, CO₂/ temperature relationships, and the huge effect of water vapor and clouds. View  6 min Highlights (You will need Adobe Flash Player to play this trailer) (Allow 5-10 seconds for high speed internet for the program to buffer and play)
Lesson 2 17:39 minutes
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate model CO₂ warming fingerprint does not match reality, violent storms and hurricanes. View  8 min Highlights (You will need Adobe Flash Player to play this trailer) (Allow 5-10 seconds for high speed internet for the program to buffer and play)
Lesson 3 17:48 minutes
Melting icecaps & flooding, the role of the sun, the importance of CO2 for life and other benefits, and the true nature of science. View  8 min Highlights (You will need Adobe Flash Player to play this trailer) (Allow 5-10 seconds for high speed internet for the program to buffer and play)

I find this site to be very encouraging, and I look forward to studying it more carefully.  In the meantime, let us rejoice that it exists, and that they have made much progress in producing materials for schools.  There will surely be an increasing demand for enlightened materials on climate as more and more people come to realise the weak foundations, and gross irresponsibility, of the scaremongering proposed, and used, in other materials on and around climate shown to their children.  Well done Kristie Pelletier and Michael Coffman, creators of the Global Warming Classroom !