Climate Education

Last week, on May 23, the Louisville Courier-Journal ran a provocative op-ed piece by Kentucky state Senator Mike Wilson, identified as the chair of "both the Senate Education Committee and the General Assembly’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee."

In the piece, Wilson quotes from the Next Generation Science Standards, which were released in April and apparently based on the Framework for K-12 Science Education, developed by the National Research Council. As Wilson rightfully says:

Standards should encourage teachers to create and foster an environment that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of multiple theories.

That's all great, right? Scientists, whether in the social or natural sciences, are in favor of critical thinking, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of various theories. Of course, I hope that everyone would agree that some theories are better supported by the available evidence and should be emphasized when teaching youngsters the state of current scientific knowledge. Right?

Wilson notes that the new standards emphasize climate change, something of great interest to me (often on this blog):

The standards place substantial emphasis on teaching climate change and there is considerable discussion describing human activities as major factors in global warming....The National Research Council appears to be carving out positions and expressing the beliefs of U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

To support his point, Wilson quotes directly from the NGSS. The first claim is from the middle school section on "Weather and Climate": 

Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature

The second quote is from the high school section on "Human Sustainability"

 ...outcomes predicted by global climate models strongly depend on the amounts of human-generated greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere each year...

Note: The C-J online version has "depend of" (sic) rather than "depend on." 

So far, so good, right? A state political leader on education is quoting directly from national science standards that clearly recognize the latest information on climate change, the human role in global warming, and the importance of scientific models.

But Wilson (did I mention that he is a Republican?) is apparently a climate skeptic. He lives in a coal state and does not even make much attempt to argue against the standards. He seemingly presumes that he can challenge the standards merely by pointing out that they support teaching about climate change.

Specifically, in his analytic section, Wilson makes just two arguments against climate change. I'll address each in turn. First:

There are those in the scientific field who question the beliefs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A statement signed by 16 scientists listed several stubborn scientific facts contradicting the Intergovernmental Panel’s beliefs. 

Wow, 16 scientists doubt the IPCC. While Wilson refers to their findings as "beliefs," which is odd for someone interested in science, he didn't mention the fact that "Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC." Nor does Wilson note that the overwhelming majority of scientists (a clear "consensus") agree about the core science behind climate change. A recent survey of peer-reviewed journal articles found that of 4000 that took a position on the cause of ongoing climate change,  97.2% "endorsed human-caused global warming."

Second, Wilson writes:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over a decade and the smaller-than-predicted amount of warming over the 22 years since the Intergovernmental Panel began issuing projections.

These claims are often repeated by climate skeptics, but they are false. As NASA recently reported, "January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record." NASA and NOAA also found that "2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record, rising above the long-term average for the 36th year in a row." Any lower than expected warming is readily explained by recent volcanic eruptions, which temporarily cools surface temperatures. Look at the long-term data and the trends are clear:

Source: NASA

There is some year-to-year natural variation, but the long-term trend is obvious -- even in the last 22 years. Indeed, before closing, I should note that Wilson omitted a second clause in the second quote above (highlighted here). It is directly pertinent to the natural variation point:

...outcomes predicted by global climate models strongly depend on the amounts of human-generated greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere each year and by the ways in which these gases are absorbed by the ocean and biosphere. 

Wilson also criticizes the NGSS for its section on evolution. I won't bother to contest this section extensively since this is the entirety of his critique: "There is no factual evidence that this has ever occurred and to suppose that it happens is counter to the beliefs of many Kentuckians."

As for the evidence for evolution, start on the Smithsonian Institute's page. Then, visit a good university library.

When it comes down to it, the education and science senator apparently  wants to challenge evolution and climate change because these are not ideas that people in Kentucky believe.

Isn't science education meant to challenge false beliefs? What happened to Wilson's concerns for critical thinking, objectivity, and logic?


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The Costs of Privatization

For all those people who believe the private sector is always superior to government, keep this information in mind (from the Project on Government Oversight):

POGO’s review of DoD [Department of Defense] service contracting budget and spending data found that contractor employees cost 2.94 times more than an average DoD civilian employee performing the same job. In fact, although the number of employees in both workforces is relatively balanced, spending on the workforces is not: DoD service contracts cost $253.8 billion and DoD’s civilian workforce cost $72 billion (base) or $108 (base plus overhead) in FY 2010.

Just in this area alone, privatization of the military creates about $150 billion in annual additional spending -- or corporate payoffs, if that's how you want to think of it. And this is merely the civilian force.

Some reports suggest another $30 to $60 billion annually "lost to waste and fraud by military contractors." And then there's the issue of soldier versus private contractor pay -- for doing the same job:

Incredibly, while base pay for an American soldier hovers somewhere around $19,000 per year, contractors are reportedly pulling in between $150,000 - $250,000 per year.

This is all somewhat disheartening in the context of ongoing budget debates in the  U.S.


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TV Zombies?

Should parents allow their young children to watch television or play around on the internet?

Hanna Rosin described fears of the so-called "zombie effect" in her recent Atlantic article about the "touch screen generation":

Most parents can sympathize with the disturbing sight of a toddler, who five minutes earlier had been jumping off the couch, now subdued and staring at a screen, seemingly hypnotized. In the somewhat alarmist Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think—and What We Can Do About It, author Jane Healy even gives the phenomenon a name, the “ ‘zombie’ effect,” and raises the possibility that television might “suppress mental activity by putting viewers in a trance.”

Should parents be worried? Rosin offers this reassuring info:

These findings have been largely discarded by the scientific community, but the myth persists that watching television is the mental equivalent of, as one Web site put it, “staring at a blank wall.” These common metaphors are misleading, argues Heather Kirkorian, who studies media and attention at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A more accurate point of comparison for a TV viewer’s physiological state would be that of someone deep in a book, says Kirkorian, because during both activities we are still, undistracted, and mentally active... 

By now, “there is universal agreement that by at least age 2 and a half, children are very cognitively active when they are watching TV,” says Dan Anderson, a children’s-media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Hoorah! We didn't ruin our children. TV is like reading a book!


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Congratulations Nayef Samhat (update)

I learned last night that my (sometimes) coauthor Nayef Samhat is departing Kenyon College, where he has served as Provost since 2009, to become President of Wofford College.

Congratulations, Nayef!

Here's a video interview from Wofford:


And this is the press release.


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Could Google Rig an Election?

Research psychologist Robert Epstein, a former editor of Psychology Today, has coauthored a study with Dr. Ronald E.  Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, on this question called “Democracy at Risk.” It is slated for presentation at this year’s meeting of the Association for Psychological Science:

In a double-blind, controlled experiment, web pages and search engine results from an actual election were presented to three groups of eligible voters. In two of the groups, rankings favored one candidate or the other. Preferences shifted dramatically toward favored candidates, with 75% of subjects showing no awareness of the manipulation. In a second experiment, voter preferences again shifted in the predicted direction, and the proportion of people who were unaware of the manipulation was increased by slightly altering the rankings to mask the favoritism. In a third experiment, a more aggressive mask was used to hide the manipulation, and no subjects appeared to be aware of it, even though voter preferences still shifted in the predicted directions. We conclude (1) that the outcomes of real elections—especially tight races—could conceivably be determined by the strategic manipulation of search engine rankings and (2) that the manipulation could be accomplished without people being aware of it.

Based on his reading of the work, Evan Leatherwood (Associate Director for Communications at Fordham University’s Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, & Education) concluded in the May 6, 2013 edition of The Nation: "insiders at a dominant search engine (at the moment, Google) could, if they chose, covertly pick members of Congress and even the president. What’s more, says Epstein, it is perfectly legal for a search engine to behave this way."

Michael Fischer, a professor of computer science at Yale, agrees that there is cause for concern. “To the extent that somebody wants to build a politically biased search engine, they are certainly capable of doing that,” Fischer says. “We don’t have any way of knowing what biases, if any, the search engines we currently use have, and this is a concern not just for elections, but for all areas of our democracy.”

Much of the rest of the article discusses the First Amendment implications of regulating search engines. Leatherwood favors a public and transparent search engine that does not take advertising dollars.


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Inequality Watch: China's Billionaires

Peter Kwong, professor of Asian-American studies at Hunter College, had an interesting piece about corruption and economic inequality in China in The Nation, April 22, 2013. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall. In any case, this is the most striking data referenced by Kwong:

Party officials and their family members have reaped the spoils of China’s prosperity and amassed unbelievable riches, creating a deeply polarized China. There are 251 billionaires in the country today, compared with only fifteen six years ago; 0.4 percent of China’s families own over 70 percent of its wealth.

In China, the economic elite are also the political elite. While political elites are wealthy in many nation-states -- even in democracies -- the concentration of wealth by Chinese national leaders is striking:

In 2012, there were more than 500 corporate CEOs in the National People’s Congress out of a total of 2,987 delegates. The top seventy members of this body are worth $89.8 billion. In contrast, the worth of all 535 members of the US Congress, the president, his cabinet and the nine Supreme Court Justices is only $7.5 billion.

As Kwong notes, the twin problems of inequality and corruption in China could prove destabilizing:

The mere fact that the Chinese are discussing their problems in terms of the French Revolution is momentous: it seems to imply that they see China today as resembling France in 1789, when public disgust with the regime’s corruption and decay led to revolution. Chinese people from all walks of life—intellectuals, professionals, laborers and farmers—have been agitating for political reform and demanding, at the very least, a constitutional government and the rule of law. Yet this is exactly what the one-party system cannot accede to, even though without real reform, the Communist Party’s future looks bleak. If it eventually collapses—which now seems a real possibility—China faces a daunting challenge: without a viable opposition group, trained and ready to take power and govern, the country will almost certainly slip into anarchy. 

I've previously noted that China's political legitimacy is built upon its sustained record of economic growth. That success has brought hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. However, as China becomes wealthier and more overtly corrupt, more-and-more people are likely to notice the misbegotten concentration of political and economic power at the very top. And that could be explosive.


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