BOOK REVIEW: ‘Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America’

OPINION:

Apparently, not enough students are getting the message of an impending global climate disaster, or if they are offered the message, not enough of them are buying it. This essentially is the conclusion of the book “Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America” by Katie Worth. Miseducation blames a usual suspect, of course, Big Oil. Ill-informed parents are also to blame. And conservatives, especially conservative Christians, are culpable.

It seems left-wing ideology that permeates and controls much of the climate science narrative and that constantly broadcasts the earth’s dire future via media, higher education, entertainment, environmentalist literature including pedagogic material, and non-stop activism is not working to enlighten the masses to an ostensive obvious truth.

So, failing to adequately convince adults of a climate crisis, the sky-is-falling tale is targeting school children.

But more must be done. Children, who have a limited perspective and are more prone than most adults to think with their emotions, are the clear target for the nasty-climate narrative.

Yet, the issue is how science is viewed today and then shown to students as a settled fact to be believed and acted upon. In a still free society, sensing indoctrination rather than education, parents all the more want to be in charge of their children’s education. So, society has a lot to say about what goes into textbooks and what is taught in class.

When it comes to educating American children, Miseducation seems to lean to the “experts know best” mindset, whether the experts are in science, education, or politics. So, unquestionable “settled science,” professional education opinion, and leftist government policy should dictate what parents’ children learn.

Miseducation covers many in-school observations of climate-change education, from interviews with teachers who are skeptical or hesitant about teaching the climate issue to those who are champions of final-form climate science. The book provides a wide-ranging analysis of climate content in textbooks and curriculums. Noted is the well-known fact that the teacher’s attitude and depth of knowledge are exceptionally important to the intake of information, especially by younger students.  

Miseducation admits, “research shows that even teachers who accept the science often do a subpar job of teaching it, particularly if they don’t have a good grasp of it themselves.” This is an important finding since the less a teacher knows about a topic, the more they need to trust leftist-sanctioned experts and simply disseminate facts that may be saturated with ideology. Such teachers are ill-equipped to evaluate and develop the climate information being taught.

Nevertheless, in the end, it all apparently comes down to time and money. Miseducation supports the idea that decades-long assault from Big Industry has infiltrated what should be common knowledge. Ostensible common knowledge consists of “five big facts”: the climate crisis is real, humans cause it, it’s bad, all agreeable scientists agree, but there’s hope. Okay, I made up that “all agreeable scientists agree” point. The book identifies that “fact” as “Experts agree.”

Nuance on the “facts” seems to be disallowed along with independent thinking. “You’re in, or you’re out” on this climate disaster thing.

Many of us “subject-matter experts” who have some qualms about climate hysteria know that the climate has warmed, fossil-fuel burning has likely contributed substantially to the warming, climate modeling is a helpful but imperfect tool to project future climate conditions, and mitigation of and preparation for future effects are warranted.

Holding advanced degrees in science and education and retired from a 40-year career in atmospheric science, I have a personal interest in the attacks on settled-science challengers tendered in Miseducation. The book seems to imply that those who are skeptical of the climate change consensus are shills for big money interests.

For the record, I have never been funded by Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Environment, Big Grant Money, or Big Anything Else. However, I may have some culpability concerning Big Government since the largest portion of my career involved working for a local government agency partially funded by the federal government. (Oh, and I occasionally enjoy a cigar, but that’s my closest affiliation with Big Tobacco.)

Regardless, like practically all scientists — and yes, even those who work for the industry — I have maintained the highly cherished characteristic of integrity.

Of course, it’s integrity that activists and their organizations, referenced in Miseducation, imply is lacking in those who challenge the status quo on climate change.

That reflexive denigrating of veracious atmospheric scientists who challenge the established narrative of calamitous climate change is perhaps the most disturbing action of leftist activists.

• Anthony J. Sadar, a Certified Consulting Meteorologist, is the author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail (Stairway Press, 2016).

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Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America
By Katie Worth
Columbia Global Reports, November 16, 2021, 184 pages, $12.70