Talking of publicly funded political activism in universities, Talking Climate, an activist blog that receives funds from the University of Nottingham, has issued a response to the Climate Control report on green education in schools, authored by a biology teacher named Luke Sinnick. I can't say I'm very impressed. Take this, for example:
[Montford and Shade] start with the suggestion that promoting environmental awareness entails “the corruption of the curriculum in schools in support of a radical worldview that is almost certainly at odds with the majority view in our society”. However, there are repeated polls showing that the ‘majority view’ is that human activity is affecting the climate and that levels of concern about the effects of climate change remain high.
The problem with this critique is that the lines from our report that Mr Sinnick cites are about environmentalism rather than climate change, so unfortunately he has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. But I'm nevertheless amused that he thinks that anthropogenic climate change might be a worldview rather than a scientific hypothesis. Isn't this what "bad people" like me are supposed to believe?
Then there's this:
In Part 2, Montford and Shade criticise the Geography Association’s suggestion “to encourage children to think about issues such as the alleged imminent exhaustion of fossil fuels”. However, depletion of oil reserves in 40 years is a reality suggested by groups not normally considered promoters of ‘radical worldviews’ such as Institute for Mechanical Engineers.
The link at the end takes you to a blog post which discusses the peak oil theory, but there are two problems with it. Firstly, an article about peak oil is of limited assistance in refuting an claim about fossil fuels - there are of course lots of fossil fuels other than oil, most notably gas and in the future no doubt clathrates too. Perhaps more importantly though, the article dates back to 2010, thus predating the widespread understanding of the shale revolution, which has killed off the peak oil theory in fairly impressive style.
John Shade and I are also taken to task for our discussion of the bias in textbooks - readers will recall that we noted the use of manipulated graphs, activist materials, and the appearance of climate change material in almost every part of the curriculum. Several egregious instances of this kind of thing came from revision guides published by CGP and Mr Sinnick seems most agitated by these. He takes us to task because, it seems that CGP guides are known for their jokes:
CGP are known for their ‘informal’ style and inclusion of (bad) jokes. For example, one guide suggests that “methane is a stinky problem but an important one”. We could analyse this statement for its factual accuracy (considering methane is actually odourless) but that would not be a fruitful exercise when writing a serious policy paper.
The particular criticisms we made of CGP texts were the uncritical promotion of biofuels and the appearance of global warming materials in English courses. If Mr Sinnick is correct and these were done as jokes then I have to say it is lost on me. "Luckily there are some biofuels out there that we can use, which are carbon neutral" was how the biofuels issue was put in the book. Is that funny?
When it comes to the section on teachers' opinions, we noted the comments on a thread on the Times Educational Supplement website in response to a researcher's requests for teachers to complete a survey about green education. Mr Sinnick's criticism is in two parts. Firstly:
They only use a tiny selection of comments at the bottom of a TES survey as an example of ‘what teachers think’
This is pretty gobsmacking stuff - at least, that is, until you remember that we are at the Talking Climate blog. Let me explain why. Across the two threads on the survey,* there were eleven comments, four of which were from the researcher who was making the request. That leaves seven comments. We quoted from six of them. The one that we didn't quote was from someone having technical problems with the survey. So far from using "a tiny selection of comments" we actually quoted 100% of the ones that offered up an opinion. Like I said, it's Talking Climate.
The second part of the critique is that we should have cited a Guardian article in which four teachers offered up opinions on the subject of climate change education. Interestingly, I had come across this article during my research and had noticed that one of those interviewed was John Rutter, the deputy head of North Berwick High School. This was a familiar name because Rutter was the author of one of the textbooks that I had criticised for including a graph that had somehow managed to avoid showing any pause in temperature rises after 2000.
We know that there are teachers who are happy with children having a dark green education. In our report we bemoaned the lack of any systematic review of opinion. But I think it's fair to say that the comments thread at the TES is likely to be more representative than a group handpicked by the Guardian to offer a critique of Michael Gove.
*There is a missing reference in the report - we only gave the URL for one of the threads from which we quoted. For the avoidance of doubt the two URLs are:
http://community.tes.co.uk/tes_science/f/42/t/598323.aspx
http://community.tes.co.uk/tes_science/f/42/p/639219/7961117.aspx