 I'm Mark McCaffrey with the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California. My focus is on climate change education and also recruiting scientific organizations and professional societies to support our work in countering science denial. At the National Center for Science Education, we have been working around science denial issues for many years and we work very closely with what we call the skeptic community. It's a really interesting group of people who some of them are scientists, some of them are just science aficionados or advocates, enthusiasts who just love science. They might have seen cosmos as a kid or they had a great teacher who inspired them to pay attention to science even though they didn't necessarily pursue a science career. They call themselves skeptics because they like the skeptical nature of true science, of being able to investigate claims to see if they're legitimate or not. It's interesting there was a poll conducted recently here in the United States by some religious organizations and they use the term skeptics to describe people who essentially are denying or dismissing climate science and we felt like that was very unfortunate because true skepticism is really the lifeblood of science and yet it has been kind of hijacked in a certain way by people who say well we don't believe in climate science because we're skeptical of some of these claims that are made and in some way I think skeptical science has done a great job of reclaiming that word for the for science and that's really important. I think that there's in terms of using the word denialist or denier it's kind of a tricky thing because the sociology community talks about how there is like a spectrum or continuum of denial and some of it some of it is literal denial and in the case of climate change we still occasionally run into people who's saying climate change isn't happening at all it's a hoax etc there's a handful of folks who are out there and they're very vocal and it makes they make enough noise that it sounds like there's a lot of them but surveys indicate that they're actually relatively small group and then there's others who are more interpretive denialists if you will and they may say well climate change is happening but it's volcanoes or it's solar variability or something like that it's nothing we can do anything about but one of the trickiest things in denial is what sociologist Stanley Cohen calls implicatory denial which is kind of a strange word but what he is trying to point to is people who accept the science but deny the implications and deny the responsibility so those would be people he is actually not looked at climate change he studied more issues of atrocities and genocide and so forth and so what he has found is that people may accept that these there's these atrocities happening a lot of people here in the United States actually do accept that climate change is happening and humans have something to do with it but they're denying a new responsibility you know they'll say well it's the Chinese fault or the Indians fault there's nothing we can do about it we come up with all sorts of excuses for not taking our own responsibility for our contribution in our historic role and also our responsibility to helping others in the world to deal with the challenge of how do we become more resilient how do we deal with the fact that some of this change that is already happening is unavoidable so I think if when we talk about denial it's important to realize that it's not just the literal denial or the people who say it's volcanoes not humans that we also need to look at the fact that there's a sort of shadow denial if you will that has to do with more of our everyday experiences that we accept climate change is happening but it's also unthinkable in a way and the idea of actually doing something about it seems impossible in our everyday lives the science is obviously very complex it crosses many disciplines and historically in the United States it has tended to fall through the cracks and there's a couple of reasons behind that one is that we had national science education standards developed in the mid-1990s that did not include climate change and very little about climate in general as a result a lot of the states when they developed their own state standards didn't include climate change and then of course you know it crosses so many disciplines that even if it is in like an earth science course it may not reach a lot of students because earth science might be a class that only a handful of students who are going on to college actually take so it's there's a lot of reasons behind why climate change has not been taught or not been taught well here in the United States and in other countries it may be a very different dynamic because some countries have national curriculum and climate change is in that there was a study done recently about Chinese college students versus American college students and low and behold Chinese college students know about climate change and many U.S. college students don't and that's just a reflection of the fact that we have a very different system here in the U.S. and as a result way too many students graduate from high school and even college without ever learning the basics. Personally I think that education is a major driver. There was a study done by Tony Lizerwitz back in 2010 it's one of the few studies that's really looked in depth that people's knowledge about climate change and what he saw at that point was that fewer than one in five students say that they're learning a great deal about climate change in the U.S. and then he those of you familiar with the six America's framework they have these six audience segments ranging from alarmed at one end to disengaged and dismissive on the other end and that he found that the more people know about climate change the better they do on these knowledge quizzes and at the same time a lot of the alarmed failed to get all the answers right themselves and in a few cases there were instances where people who were dismissive of climate science and didn't take climate change seriously knew a little bit more about some aspect of the greenhouse effect or something like that but by and large if you know more you're going to be more alarmed was what he found. I think in public attitudes it's enormous there's a lot of the research around cultural cognition and so forth and there's obviously a lot of truth to the fact that especially if you don't if you've never learned the basics yourself and you're forced to piece together your understanding of climate change from bits and pieces of information from the media from you know people that you trust locally your uncle or whatever then you end up with a very kind of chaotic understanding of climate change and whether or not it's a serious issue so when it comes to ideological and cultural frames especially when there's such a lack of understanding of the basics to begin with the cultural frame often wins out over ignorance or over shallow understanding shall we say. The public really needs to have some basic understanding of climate literacy in order to make informed decisions and obviously not everybody has to be a climatologist or a renewable energy expert but to understand that climate change is happening this time around it's caused by humans that it's actually very serious especially on the trajectory we're going right now and there's very practical things that we can do to minimize the impacts and prepare for the changes that are already well underway when people understand the basics then they can make informed choices whether it's in the voting booth or in their everyday lives or in their careers that can really make a difference so climate literacy is enormously important it's been overlooked or treated as an afterthought for far far too long you know we've tried to use political persuasion and we've tried to find shortcuts so that we can you know put money behind a particular campaign and therefore whoever wins that campaign might have a better climate policy down the line why don't we invest some of that money into making sure that people especially young people have the understanding and get the tools and talent that they need to be able to not only make informed choices but pursue careers that will make a real difference in the long term 1992 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified by the nations in the world and in that Article 6 of the convention talks about education training and public awareness and we've essentially done nothing but particularly in the United States you know the or we've been done very little so Article 6 talks about every nation needs to develop their own strategy for informing people for providing public access to information and really importantly for helping them participate in developing adequate responses to climate change that was over 20 years ago and we've done very very little the one thing that the United States has done probably in a very exemplary way is provide a public access to climate information but if you don't know where to find it or how to use it if you're not learning about it in school and making use of data in school as part of a science class or mathematics class then it's really not gonna make sense to you and you know that's contributed we've lost 20 years from from my point of view by dilly-dallying and trying to find these other shortcuts so why not as a sort of a all hands on deck all the above strategy try a little education for a change because it's been overlooked for two decades when teachers come to us and ask us you know I'm hearing this kind of excuse about why it's just natural cycles or this or that we point them to a skeptical science because that's really the go to place where you've got the simple answer to the question you've got a super well organized and for those who want to drill more into the actual data behind it and the actual science papers skeptical science provides access to that as well which is just an incredible resource but you know I think there's a lot that can be done just to help build people's capacity to make sense of different types of information if it's your uncle who just has a strong opinion about climate change as a hoax because blah blah blah you know is there anything behind that and you know understandably people have to be making decisions about the battles that they fight whether it's on the home front around the kitchen table or around family gathering do you really want to pick an argument with your uncle about whether climate change is a hoax or not or do we want to try to make sure that young people are learning in school about the basics of climate the basics of energy the next generation science standards here in the United States have set up a really kind of ideal situation where even starting in kindergarten young people are learning about the basics of climate and weather and how do we try to minimize our impact on the environment in general and then by the time they get to middle school six seventh eighth grade they learn more about climate change due to greenhouse gases you know before that they don't really have a firm enough understanding of the earth system carbon cycle and so forth to really fully grasp climate change you know at the same time a lot of times they'll have heard about it from their relatives or from the media and to be planting the seeds with them that that there's unanswered questions in science that we still are wrestling with there's career paths that are really exciting that don't exist today that if they can start to think about how can we move towards a low-carbon society there's just well-nigh infinite opportunities for young people to carve out entrepreneurial opportunities for themselves one of the characteristics that we see of people that deny for instance evolution is they will use sort of a pseudo scientific approach to nitpick things to death we see the same thing in climate science and they don't like being called deniers because the word is sometimes associated with Holocaust deniers or or flat earth people or whatever so when they use that argument I think it's just to try to distract from the real issue and sometimes it's a successful distraction what we have seen historically with people who deny evolution and here in the United States it's mainly been focused on wanting to have a alternative version like creationism or more recently intelligent design taught side-by-side with evolution in public schools and the courts in this country have to deem that that to be unconstitutional that you can't do that in because of the separation of church and state in the United States but the similarities are that the techniques are often to say that the science is bad in other words what they'll say is Darwinism evolution is bad science it's flawed and therefore our more robust alternative theory should be taught because there's all these other other unanswered questions so we see similarities with climate change where people will say that it's solar variability or cosmic rays or volcanoes are the problem and so attacking the science and also saying that the consequence consequences will be bad with evolution they'll say that if people think they come from monkeys that's going to have all sorts of terrible implications on the morale of society or the morality of society and in the case of climate change the implications of the science are that it's anti-capitalistic to suggest alternatives it's going to destroy the economy or one of the more clever ones is to say that it's going to take money away from fighting poverty that global poverty is really the big issue we should focus on climate change is not such a big deal and therefore if we're putting money into climate change it'll take away money from dealing with poverty so that's in a way that's a very clever gimmick to try to distract from the implications of the science and so there's those type of similarities there's a little bit of overlap in some of the cast of characters so for instance there's one particular fundamentalist Christian group in the United States that has ties to some politically left or right wing organizations and so they make that case that that climate change is a hoax and spending money on climate change will take money away from poverty efforts but by and large in this country and I suspect in Australia and other parts of the world where denial of the climate science arises the profile seems to be that the people that make the argument that the climate science is bad tend to be free market adherents who see the climate science as a threat to their ideology and I think that that has as I say a little bit of overlap with some of the religious groups but there's actually to the credit of many religious organizations around the world many take the climate change very seriously whether it's certain evangelical groups in this country certainly the Catholic Church and most world religions take stewardship of the environment and addressing climate change and poverty as core issues so there have been some interesting efforts in the United States to try to infiltrate climate denial into classrooms through developing curriculum not too many of them have made headway so for instance a couple years ago the Heartland Institute announced that they were going to develop curriculum that would be alternative curriculum that middle and high school students could benefit from in their in their view to show sort of the other side of what was being taught I think the more insidious issue in many schools is the fact that it's not being taught at all in many instances we're actually in the middle of a survey of middle and high school teachers here in the United States to determine whether they're teaching climate change how they're teaching it where they're teaching it and we'll know much more in a couple months about sort of the overall landscape but what we have seen as I mentioned there's a Lizarowitz study from 2010 that found one in five students have learned much about climate change in school it's probably gone up a little bit since then but we won't know until we get this survey completed to see how much of an increase there has been but the big concern for us is that all too many teachers are teaching both sides of what's really a phony controversy so they'll have students debate whether climate change is happening or not they'll encourage them to go visit different websites maybe point them to the Heartland Institute website where they can find out some of these spurious claims about the validity of the science in you know the base the best-case scenario when they do that type of activity is that the students will realize quickly that this the science on climate change that's peer-reviewed is really robust and the pseudo science is very thin and incredible but you can't guarantee that students in a middle school classroom are going to be able to know the difference and if the teachers themselves don't have the background then we've got a problem and you know we've heard recently that teachers in Oklahoma for instance are teaching both sides of this phony controversy on a very regular basis and it's hard to counter that because in the United States there's this notion of fairness and balance that is very ingrained in American society and epitomized on Fox News they're all about being balanced and fair supposedly and you decide there's some huge problems with that if people don't understand the basic science to begin with if they've never learned you know how climate and weather are related but different and so forth so being able to make informed choices and understand the science does require that literacy be an integral part you know starting ideally in elementary school when it comes to this teaching the controversy notion we discourage it very strongly in a science classroom in particular there may be classes where you can use debate and rhetoric you know having somebody make a case for their particular point of view in a civics class in a writing and rhetoric class for instance social studies perhaps where you can talk about the political landscape and so forth but in a science classroom in particular young people are there to learn about the science and all too often climate change has been missing hopefully we can remedy that quickly with the next generation science standards and so forth but there's a push to include argumentation as a part of a science class and again this is very tricky territory because argumentation can also be translated as debate and in fact argumentation really just means making a strong case and presenting it in a way where you've got strong evidence to back your claim and that you're able to you're able to present that to your peers and of course that's how science works through peer-reviewed journals and so forth and it's a good skill for young people to learn at the same time if you're going to be using argumentation slash debate in a science classroom it's really vital that the science be authentic that the science be current that you're not coming up with something that's a 20 year old debate about whether or not scientists believe this or that we have all these maps from the various models that show different parts of the planet heating up you know the 8 watts per meter squared looks like 10 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit average warming in a lot of the United States by the end of the century so forget about the two degrees global mean whatever you know that that's from my point of view as an educator that's a useless number and and four is no better frankly we really need to start making the connection between climate and energy both in terms of the earth system but also in terms of how energy in our lives and how we consume energy today is going to have a huge influence on climate in the future humans are a force of nature and we are causing more soil to a road than all the natural processes on the earth combined we have been clever enough to figure out how to fix nitrogen for fertilizers and we now fix more nitrogen than all the bacteria on the planet we are a force of nature and we have also discovered how to take buried solar energy from the ground we call it fossil fuels and dig it up pump it up and then burn it to generate energy for our lives and this has transformed the world in enormous ways it's given us this standard of living that we enjoy and are sometimes frustrated by because it's so hectic and chaotic sometimes but there's been many benefits that we have to acknowledge have come out of this reliance on fossil fuels the problem is when we're burning that buried solar energy we're also releasing carbon dioxide you know fossil fuels are essentially formed through photosynthesis from millions of years ago where sunlight is combined by plants and other creatures to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with water and turn it into a fuel and then it's transformed over time into fossil fuels and when we burn that fossil fuel for energy it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that is adding to the imbalance of the earth's climate system and rather than talking about temperature I you know we talk about two degrees warming in this country that really doesn't mean much because two degrees is actually they're talking about Celsius in this country it's Fahrenheit that rules and two degrees Fahrenheit doesn't seem like very much but rather than talking about temperature I have found it much more I think accurate and helpful to talk about the amount of energy that we're adding to the earth's climate system since 1750 when the industrial revolution started we've increased the amount of energy in the earth system about three watts per meter squared or less than that actually if we continue burning fossil fuels as if there were no tomorrow sort of this burn baby burn scenario we will by the end of the century reach over eight watts per meter squared and by the year 2200 that'll go up to over 12 watts per meter squared and so we're not talking about just a little bit of warming global warming we're talking about a heating that is really unprecedented and we're currently on that trajectory we're heading towards eight watts per meter squared by the end of this century 12 watts per meter squared by 2200 and that is the reality so we have altered the earth's climate climate system and other environmental systems in profound ways and we should be smart enough theoretically through education to be able to really transform society so that we can minimize those changes we can turn schools into living laboratories where there's solar panels and energy efficiency throughout the buildings where we're able to infuse all the sciences not just the earth science but the physics and the chemistry and the biology with the social studies with the mathematics with the civics with art and so forth so this is happening it's not just pie in the sky schools are actually doing that here in there and many more can and should do that in the coming years and decades because that's what it'll take for us to not head towards over eight watts per meter squared and we should be smart enough theoretically