California Lawmaker Seeks Climate Change as part of Public Education 313
Andrew Feinberg writes "A California State Senator is seeking to mandate climate change as part of the standard science curriculum. Other members of the legislative body seek to teach an opposing view. 'Simitian noted that his bill wouldn't dictate what to teach or in what grades, but rather would require the state Board of Education and state Department of Education to decide both. Although global warming is mentioned in high school classes about weather, it is currently not required to be covered in all textbooks, said the head of the California Science Teachers Association ... teachers would have plenty to discuss: rising levels of carbon dioxide, how temperatures are measured globally, and what is known and not known about global warming.'"
Bad Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Erm... (Score:4, Interesting)
In before global warming deniers (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously though, I never understood why, on slashdot or all places, there are so many of them. Heck, even if you thought global climate change were a complete scam, wouldn't you at least be in favor of technological advancement? Who wouldn't want to move beyond 19th century technology like internal combustion engines and coal-fired power plants?
I do, however, agree that politicans shouldn't be in the business of setting education curriculum--that's definitely a slippery slope.
the guy is a politician so .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not let scientists decide what should be taught in science?
Now there's a radical idea!
A rather silly law (Score:2, Interesting)
Like many people on Slashdot it seems, I think this law is rather pointless, but not necessarily for the same reasons. If you RTFA, anthropogenic global warming skeptics, then you would know that the bill does not mandate that any specifics of climate change be taught, i.e., no one is being told to teach that CO2 emissions are causing global warming. Rather it simply requires that climate change be taught as part of the California science curriculum. It's up to the state education board to determine specific standards as to what is being taught in specific grades.
I would think that even the skeptics (at least on Slashdot) would agree that the earth is getting warmer. Just teaching this in schools doesn't seem to be controversial in the slightest. But it seems rather silly to mandate this in a piece of legislation. It would be like mandating that algebra and geometry be taught to high school students. Any decent earth science curriculum (the focus of 6th grade science education in California) would already have this as part of its standards. Legislation is overkill.
Re:The slippery slope creationists help wet.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says [nationalgeographic.com]
Re:Aw shit... more of this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Public schools by-and-large are the last place you can expect worthwhile study of something controversial. One side or the other always receives more emphasis, depending on the political demographics of the school board in that area.
Re:Education (Score:3, Interesting)
The point of all this is that if a model reproduces "El Nino" it very likely was designed to. There are other effects which it will wildly mis characterize or miss entirely. The interesting option occurs when the model is designed to reproduce some other effect, and happens to reproduce "El Nino" as well. Then there is a lot of good work to be had determining if it offers real insight, or is just a fluke of the results.
Ensemble averaging is bullshit. You can't just take a series of specialized models and tie them together and expect to get anything out of it but the original assumptions. Especially true as many models are descendants of other models, which will interfere with your weighting even more. What you can do is apply several different models to different domains and link them together. But the problem there is that the complexity makes it more difficult to determine what's really going on.
Re:Correlation != Causation. (Score:1, Interesting)
This one is easy. Assume you have many temperature detectors over the world. At each measure, each detector measures true temperature + calibration error of the detector + instant additional error. The calibration error of the detector is constant over time for each detector. The instant additional error is just a random process with mean 0. Let write it i is an index representing which detector we are considering T(i) is the true temperature at place i. We assume that the detectors are not intentionally tempered. Therefore, we may suppose that the epsilon(i) are all independent (between themselves and between two measures with the same detector). For the same reason, we suppose that the calibration error follow a random law with 0 mean. For simplification, we suppose all the epsilon follow the same law.
Now, let's compute the esperancy of the square of the error made between the true mean temperature and the one computed with the measured data, we obtain (using independance) The second term goes to zero as the total number of measures increase because all the instant errors epsilon are independent of each other and the first one also goes to zero because over many detectors the mean calibration error should be close to zero (law of large numbers).
Conclusion, while each individual measure can have a big error, we have a much better certainty over the error of the global mean temperature. In fact to see that the temperature is rising (or not), we don't even care about the mean temperature being accurate, if we consider the difference between the measured mean temperature at T+1 year and T, all the calibration errors disappear as long as they are independent from time or even as long as the evolution over time of the calibration error follow a random law.
You may criticize this model but if you do, please come up with a better model. Don't just nitpick because this model doesn't take X into account if you can make a model that take X into account.
Re:Aw shit... more of this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Aw shit... more of this? (Score:0, Interesting)
that high school class sparked a interest in me that has stayed with me for for the rest of my life since, i am now a senior meteorologist in the US military and have been for 20 years. I earned my doctorate in atmospheric sciences in 2006 and hope one day that the garbage that the media/politicians/"scientists" gets exposed for what it is.
Re:Hostility to Science, and Avoiding Indoctrinati (Score:1, Interesting)
With that said, I believe climate change should be only a very minor part of the standard public education of science. The simple facts are, climate change is an extremely small part of science, has very little to do with the most critical basic foundations of the major areas of science, and studying it is unlikely to give unique insight into critical thinking or future careers in excess of other scientific topics. The only reason it is being considered in isolation is because the exaltation of climate change as extremely important is a political fad. It is, however, unwise to adjust scientific schooling to reflect political considerations.
The real goal being pursued is teaching students about climate change for the purpose of influencing their future political decisions. That, however, is not science, and does not belong in the science classroom. Climate change should at most be mentioned as a very small part of perhaps an Earth & Space science class, and could likely be covered in entirety in one or two class periods. Beyond that, further discussion probably belongs in a Government or Social Studies class, where the discussion of all the political complexities makes more sense.
Re:No, that was Intelligent Design (Score:2, Interesting)
Climate changes. Evolution happens. In the long run, stagnation would be much worse.
Civilization is a pretty thin veneer but losing it for a while is unlikely to extinct man.
As a species we're as tenacious as those rat riding cockroaches from Mars.
Re:Climate change is a fact; global warming is bul (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny how some people only feel alive during a crisis, so they feel the need to invent a crisis when none such exists.