Originally appears in the Fall 2011 issue
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Weathering Climate Confusion
Purpose: Clarifying the difference between climate and weather while alerting students to levels of public confusion about the two terms.
Grade level: 5-9
Time: 45-60 minutes (and 60 minutes for the extension activity)
Resources: A sheet of paper, a sheet of newsprint, three markers each of a different color, a paste stick, a copy of the Climate and Weather handout and a cut-up set of Weather or Climate? cards for each group of four students and masking tape.
Procedure
- Students form groups of four. Without any explanation from the teacher, they are asked to discuss the difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’, ending their discussion by writing one-sentence definitions of each term on their sheet of paper (and noting down the nature of disagreements if members of the group cannot agree). Each group reports back, with the teacher facilitating a whole class discussion of differences of opinion and of issues raised. At an appropriate moment, the handout is distributed and discussed, the teacher explaining that while the difference between weather and climate is not so difficult to understand, there seems to be frequent and widespread confusion among the general public often making for muddied debate on climate change.
- Groups consider each of the Weather or Climate? cards. They arrange them on the sheet of newsprint, pasting them down. They write ‘weather’ (using a marker of one color) against a statement that they think is describing weather, and ‘climate’ (using a marker of a second color) against a statement they think is describing climate. They use a marker of a third color to explain any misperceptions, misunderstandings or ambiguities they discern in the statements. Completed charts are hung on the classroom wall and groups visit each other’s chart, noting down queries or objections they want to raise in the ensuing classroom discussion.
Potential
This activity seeks to illuminate and clarify a fundamental misunderstanding that often clouds and distorts public responses to climate change warnings and subsequent debate, fuelling climate change denial. As such, it aims to provide a sound springboard for exploring climate change issues while alerting students to oft-expressed (and sometimes seemingly deliberate) misunderstandings in the media and everyday conversation.
Variation
The class begins with the Weather or Climate? exercise followed by a plenary discussion during which the handout is introduced and discussed. Groups then return to their Weather or Climate? charts and make any amendments they feel to be necessary before further class sharing and discussion.
Extension
Students are set the task of each asking four adult members of the public to write their definitions of climate and weather on separate sheets of paper, putting their chosen pseudonym for each adult against each definition. Back in classroom, the sheets are arranged on a pin board and used to analyze levels of misperception and misunderstanding in the sample, the teacher asking what implications the results might have for inclusive, informed public debate on climate change.
© Sustainability Frontiers, 2011
Climate and Weather
Weather
Weather is what we see when we get out of bed in the morning and say ‘what a lovely day!’ or ‘It’s very icy; the school bus won’t run this morning’.
It’s a brief moment in a long movie about the air conditions that surround us and that affect our lives. That moment can’t be relied upon to give you a sense of the whole movie.
When you listen to a ‘weather forecast’ on the television, the presenter will say what conditions people in different provinces, regions and local areas can expect based on satellite and other information collected by ‘meteorologists’ (weather scientists who study what is happening to the ‘atmosphere’, the air surrounding the earth). The forecast will say what temperature a place can expect; whether there will be rain, snow, freezing rain or hail (what is called ‘precipitation’ – that which falls to the ground from the skies); whether it will be cloudy or sunny; how windy it will be and from what direction (north, south, east, west or in between the compass points); how far you will be able to see (what is called ‘visibility’); likely levels of air pollution; and how much moisture there will be in the air (what is called ‘humidity’).
So, weather is the mix of conditions and events that we experience over a short period of time: a day, a week up to a few months. It is not the same everywhere. It might be hot, dry and sunny where you live, but fifty kilometers away wet and cold. Weather change happens quickly.
Climate
Climate is about weather patterns over a long period of time, usually 30 years. Meteorologists keep all the weather information – for example, daily temperature, rainfall and snowfall measurements, wind speeds and directions – they have collected for each day of each year in the 30-year period and work out, on averaged past evidence, what weather is likely in any period of time in any place.
So, climate is about long periods of time. It is about weather averages. Knowing the climate of a place leads us to expect a certain kind of weather in a certain place at a certain time of year, for example snow and sub-zero temperatures in Ontario in February. But remember we are talking averages – there are sometimes comfortably warm periods in Ontario in February!
Scientists also use the information they collect to see if the climate is changing. For example, they may look at the thirty years of information for, say, 1970-2000 and then at the thirty years of information for 1980-2010 to find out if there is a change in the average climate picture. Doing such exercises warned them that a rise in temperature was happening around the planet and especially so in certain regions. This is what we call ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ that, unlike weather, cannot be so easily experienced on a day-to-day basis, making some people question whether it is happening.
WEATHER OR CLIMATE? | |
Everybody agreed that the day was just right for a picnic and swim. What a bright, sunny morning! | Antarctica has been freezing cold, even in summer time, for tens of thousands of years. |
There is a cold front coming in from the west! | This ‘global warming’ idea is garbage; it’s been a wet, cold summer. |
‘Every winter there was so much more snow than there is now,’ said the old man. ‘It was piled up to our waists, when I was a young boy.’ | ‘In the past few years the swallows have started returning earlier,’ said the farmer. |
‘We are calling for a hot, hot week in Toronto, and there will be smog over the city,’ said the newscaster. | The sun was beating down on the desert landscape. |
A Snow Advisory was issued for southern Quebec. | The sweltering midsummer heat wave went on and on and on. ‘Wow,’ she said, ’this is really global warming!’ |
England has cooler summers and wetter, warmer winters. Spring starts much earlier than in most of Canada. | It was much cooler than usual that June in Alberta. |
© Sustainability Frontiers, 2011
Climate Change Denial
Purpose: Exploring the phenomenon of climate change denial, what lies behind it and the dangers it presents, and considering what might be done.
Grade level: 10-12
Time: 60 minutes for Stage 1; 60-75 minutes for each of Stages 2 and 3; ongoing short periods of time for Stage 3
Resources: A cut-up set of cards from the handout, newsprint, markers, a glue stick and a pile of blank cards for each group of four students; a Climate Change Denial pin-board
Procedure
- Class members sitting in a circle are asked to think about times when they have worried about something but put it ‘to the back of their minds’ or otherwise tried to forget about or reduce its significance — things like going out to play ball the evening before a big exam when as they play they feel uncomfortable not to be studying, or going through the motions with a boyfriend or girlfriend when they no longer feel good about the relationship but aren’t prepared to face up to the fact by telling them, or behaving in one way when part of them is telling them they should be behaving in another but not confronting the problem. They recount examples they are prepared to share and the feelings they had. The teacher introduces the idea of denial; that in big things and small things people use self deception to evade reality and to protect themselves from facing up to things. The class is asked if they can identify in their examples different forms of denial and give each form a descriptor.
- Students form groups of four. Each group receives a set of cards, newsprint, markers and a glue stick. They are asked to read and discuss the cards and determine the range of issues raised by each card and by the set of cards taken as a whole. Their task is to arrange the cards on the newsprint sheet, demonstrate connections between the cards by drawing one or two-way arrows, and write commentaries in explanation of issues raised and the nature of their arrangement.
During the work group members take time out to write on blank cards their own personal examples relating to or mirroring the examples in the card set. They do not share these at this stage.
Each group presents, with the teacher encouraging feedback and discussion of what is said. At an appropriate point towards the end of group-generated discussion, the teacher reveals the following explanations:
Climate change denial is the term used to describe attempts to downplay the extent of global warming, its significance, or its connection to human behavior, especially for financial interests, but also to protect individuals from facing the future and facing up to changes they would need to make in their behaviors to slow global warming
Cognitive dissonance, a term used in social psychology, describes an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas or behaving in two contradictory ways simultaneously, or when we know, but won’t acknowledge, that what we are saying or how we are behaving is contradicted by evidence and our own opinions but resist amending what we say or do.
Questions are then asked of the class:
- Do we see denial in the different cards and, if so, what forms does it take?
- Do you see examples of cognitive dissonance lurking behind or within what is written in the cards?
- Do you see any big ideas in any of the cards that would help explain denial and cognitive dissonance?
- Do you see any big ideas in any of the cards that would suggest how to deal with denial and cognitive dissonance?
- What examples of denial do you find most shocking?
- Should we distinguish climate change denial from climate change ignorance?
- Does denial of climate change add to the magnitude of the threat the planet faces?
- How should climate change denial best be faced up to?
Throughout the discussion following each question, students are encouraged to share examples of their personal climate change denial as they have written them up on the blank cards.
- Students are asked, ahead of the next class, to each conduct a brief three-question interview with five members of their community:
- How serious do you think climate change is?
- What are you doing personally to stop climate change?
- Is there anything more you think you should be doing?
During the second activity session, groups re-form and students analyze their twenty interview responses through the lenses of the concepts of denial and cognitive dissonance. They are specifically asked to identify different types of denial. Each group reports on its findings. Class discussion follows.
2. A Climate Change Denial pin board is made available in the classroom. Students are invited to bring examples of climate change denial they find in newspapers, magazines, and on the web, or overhear, and pin them on the board with their own note of explanation. The class reviews the board occasionally.
© Sustainability Frontiers, 2011
Climate Change Denial Cards[i]
Asking rich people in rich countries to act to prevent climate change means asking them to give up many of the things they value – their high performance cars, their flights to Hawaii and Mexico – for the benefit of other people. |
He watched the program on climate change. It really worried him. But then, he thought, ‘we’ve solved these sorts of problems before, and somebody will come up with something’.
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3. We must act now…
His speech on the dangers of climate change was really well received. ‘We must act … and act now!’ he had said. The audience of young people loved it and gave him a rousing ovation. Leaving late, he sped his SUV down the highway to get home in time.
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4. Urgent and vital…
Addressing climate change is an urgent and vital part of our election program,’ the politician said. ‘This is why we have a definite target of cutting carbon emissions by 60% by 2050.
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5. Deeply concerned…
I am deeply concerned, even horrified, about global heating,’ the Norwegian woman said. ‘But I live in a small country. The real blame lies with America and its gas-guzzling way of life and with China where they are building a new coal-fired power station every week.
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6. Reward for green behavior…
Research in the UK from 2008 found that ‘green idealists’ or ‘green activists’ – those most aware of climate change and environmental issues – took the longest and most frequent flights, often seeing them as a ‘reward’ for otherwise green behavior.
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7. Small window of opportunity…
The newspaper front page had a shocking piece about the melting of the Arctic ice. ‘We have only a small window of opportunity to stop this,’ the editorial said. On page 8 the newspaper was advertising its special world travel offers.
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8. That is why… ‘We have become the leading Canadian university for environmental protection and education,’ the university press release announced. ‘That is why forty of our academics representing several faculties are attending the world conference on climate change in Copenhagen.’
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9. Blue skies thinking…
For society to function well, it’s important to keep a climate of optimism that a better future lies ahead. It encourages the belief that we can all be successful and self-improve. We need blue skies thinking. The dark skies thinking of global warming doesn’t fit with the way our society works.
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10. Big business…
Huge corporations are funding scientists to dispute what the vast majority of scientists are saying: that human-made climate change is happening and is dangerous. These scientists don’t publish in the best journals. They write in popular magazines and appear on television offering punchy sound bites. These are the ‘climate change skeptics’ paid by corporations scared that action on global warming will cut their profits |
11. Failure to tell…
The biggest climate change denial is the failure of the wealthy nations to tell people that climate change is already having devastating effects for the people of the developing world with 300,000 dead each year and the lives of 325 million seriously affected.
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12. The story people want to hear…
Commentators denying climate change is happening get more than their fair share of airtime because the story they tell is one that people want to hear.
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13. Science will see us through…
New scientific breakthroughs will see us through the climate crisis,’ the teacher said. ‘Solar, wind and wave power are just the start. There will be means to extract and bury carbon in the atmosphere. Sun shields in space that will protect us and cool the earth. There will be a brave new world allowing us to continue with business as usual.
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14. What a huge problem…
The teacher talked about what a huge problem global warming is. ‘What shall we do?’ the student asked. ‘Recycle, wear things longer and have the family buy a smaller car,’ he suggested.
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© Sustainability Frontiers, 2011
Climate Change Despair and Empowerment Activity Sequence
Purpose: Encouraging students to share their anxieties about climate change futures; helping them discover that others share their fears; fostering their disposition and readiness to take action
Grade level: 9-12
Time: 60-90 minutes
Resources: A circle of chairs, well spread out; sufficient cards, crayons, pencils and sheets of paper laid out within the circle; a flip chart and marker.
Procedure
When students have become familiar with climate change issues and debates, the teacher takes the students, sitting in circle, through a series of stages each triggered by a question or instruction.
1. Feeling Powerful. Students are asked to think about times when they have had to do something really difficult or scary but where they came out feeling really powerful. After a few minutes’ reflection they pick up a card and write down images that capture the experience and feelings of those times. Students share their images round the circle. They store their card for future reference.
2. Thinking the Unthinkable. The teacher asks students to each pick up a card and write three sentences beginning:
- ‘The thing that worries me most about the heating of the climate is…’
- ‘The thing I prefer not to think about happening with climate change is…’
- ‘What scares me most about a hot planet is…’
Three to four minutes are given for writing (the teacher avoids giving examples and urges students to write what they wish). The cards are collected in, shuffled and given out again. Each student reads out the card they have received. All sentences are accepted without comment.
3. Climate Change Nightmares With eyes closed, students are asked to silently run a film in their heads about dangerous climate change inspired by their recall of a bad dream or of something they have read in a newspaper or book or seen on film. Without opening their eyes, they draw a picture on paper, not to be shown to anyone, of their feelings.
4. Something You Love Again with eyes closed, students are asked to think deeply about something they most value about life or the world. Volunteers are asked to share and describe things they thought of.
5. A Hopeful Future On a new card, students write three sentences beginning:
- ‘We really could face up to global warming by…’
- ‘Life could be good, even better, if…’
- ‘To transform things, a good way forward would be to…’
6. Brainstorming Students are asked to brainstorm things that people and whole societies might do to stave off dangerous climate change. All ideas are accepted and written on the flip chart by the teacher.
7. Revisiting Feeling Powerful Students are asked to go back to the images of themselves being powerful and look again at their cards (Stage 1). They are asked to quietly reflect on how those feelings of power might be drawn upon to help reduce climate change and, in particular, be used in realizing any of the ideas brainstormed. Everyone in the circle is encouraged to share their reflections; those who wish being encouraged to write ‘commitment to action’ cards to be shared or not shared with the class as the writer sees fit.
Potential
This activity sequence is designed to take students through a roller coaster of powerful experiences and emotions before demonstrating their potential for social action (blessed unrest). First, they recall feelings and moments of power (Stage 1) before encountering climate change dystopias in the face of which they may very well feel an acute sense of powerlessness (Stages 2, 3). The orientation then swings (Stages 4, 5) to focusing upon what they most value in life and to considering hopeful futures (something that is likely to be made more intense by just having considered what they love). The focus then turns (Stages 6, 7) to action to pre-empt or reduce dangerous climate change that segues into consideration of personal change agency potential by recalling the power students have been able to find in themselves in earlier seemingly disempowering circumstances[ii].
© Sustainability Frontiers, 2011
Guidebook for Survivors
Purpose: Having students work within an imagined dystopian climate change scenario to come up with a guidebook for climate change survivors and then transforming gloom into purposefulness and pro-activity by having them consider if they and others could act on their guidebook now to avoid the global warming threat and to what effect.
Grade level: 9-12
Time: 120 minutes
Resources: Newsprint, thick markers, paints, brushes, and water jars for each group of four students. Masking tape.
Procedure
1. Climate change writers such as James Lovelock and Mark Lynas[iii] have imagined a world in which humanity has lacked the willpower and resolve to prevent dangerous climate change and human society has shrunk to a remnant living close to the Arctic Circle and sub-polar areas in a few contracting ‘belts of habitability’.
Students deep breathe, relax, close their eyes and are taken through the following guided visualization, read slowly with pauses, that is based on the Lovelock and Lynas scenarios:
The world has become a hot place. Pictures in books of tall leafy trees, green meadows, cool lakes, markets full of fresh fruit, having fun in winter snow just don’t seem real. Nobody experiences ‘the joys of spring’ or ‘winter delights’ any more. Our parents brought us here. Their own parents had been the lucky – some would say unlucky – ones. They had escaped north as the big heating and big seas spread. They were pilgrims in search of any cool and fertile place. Millions moved north as the heat became intolerable, farms turned into desert, food became scarce, and there was nobody or nothing to contain the wild fires. The sea spread inland and the interiors of countries turned to hot desert islands surrounded by saltwater. Refugees were not always made welcome. They were often turned away violently. The local people whose land they had entered had themselves so little to live on and, before long, they in turn became north-fleeing refugees. The world had become chaotic and hostile. So first our grandparents and then our parents fled to what was once a place of ice and cold, a place where life was just about possible; where the few remaining humans could scavenge an existence in a hot Arctic desert mercifully scattered with oases of green. They were survivors first of the journey and then of the time when too many people came to a place that could only sustain a few and most perished.
The dawn breaks and the sun throws a piecing light across our camp; slanting light from close to the horizon that once glittered off breathtakingly beautiful snowfields. The cool freshness in the air lingers for a while but is swallowed up as the heat of the day takes over. The camels wake, blink, and slowly rise on their haunches. The tribe gets ready to move on to another oasis in search of food and water. We eat a meager breakfast. Food is always scarce. Such is our climate survivor civilization. Through the generations to come there is one thing we must never forget: to learn and pass on the lessons of what has happened so that when, in thousands of years time, the cooling begins and green re-appears on now barren land, we are ready to live in an earth-friendly, sustainable way, as our long-awaited southward return begins.
The visualization over, students maintain reflective silence for a few minutes before, again silently, they paint their felt response to what they have heard. Paintings are hung on the class wall. Class discussion is at this stage avoided.
The teacher introduces the idea of a Guidebook for Survivors as proposed by Lovelock:
One thing we can do to lessen the consequences of catastrophe is to write a guidebook for our survivors to help them rebuild civilization without repeating many of our mistakes[iv]:
Students, working in groups of four of five, are asked to think of themselves in the visualization scenario and to decide what would be the insights they would most want to pass on to generations of survivors of global heating, especially when, after many generations, the climate cooled and humans could move south again into a greening world. Each group prepares a one-sheet presentation. Groups report back. Class discussion follows.
- The teacher makes the point that the ‘belts of habitability’ scenario is preventable and asks groups to re-form and imagine that they have just received their own Guidebook and should consider what they and others could do in the present day to prevent the scenario ever becoming a reality. Groups are asked to prepare an action plan on a sheet of newsprint. Groups report back and class discussion follows.
Potential
This is a very powerful activity and may well engender a strong emotional response. It is best not to immediately discuss the painted responses to the visualization but to allow the emotional charge from the visualization and painting to inform the Guidebook work, engaging the class in discussion of the whole experience as groups report back on their insights. Students may wish to express shock, even, incredulity, at the scenario but they will equally express gloom, despondency and despair at the way the world is going. Here strategies such as those in the Despair and Empowerment in an Age of Climate Change activity may prove useful. The debriefing should begin at the emotional level using questions such as ‘what feelings did you have at various points in the activity?’ and ‘what in the visualization affected you most?’ At an appropriate moment, discussion should turn to students’ decisions about what future generations need to know to avoid the same thing happening again. Crucial to the whole activity is the teacher helping students train their guidebook insights on the current situation using group action plans as a stimulus and asking ‘what do your insights and action plans tell us about what we as individuals and societies should do now?’ The activity is intended to take students through gloom, despondency and despair into empowerment.
Extension
Students present their action plans to local community groups by way of finding common ground for school/community projects.
© Sustainability Frontiers, 2011
Resources
[i] The following sources were used in devising some of the eighteen cards: Hamilton, C. (2010). Requiem for a Species: How We Resist the Truth about Climate Change, London: Earthscan; Kagawa, F., & Selby, D. (2010). Education and Climate Change: Living and Learning in Interesting Times. New York: Routledge; Leiserowitz, A. (2006). ‘Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery and Values’, Climate Change, vol.77, 45-72. Lovelock, J. (2006). The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity. London: Allen Lane; Monbiot, G. (2006). Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. Toronto: Doubleday; Global Humanitarian Forum. (2009). The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis. Geneva: Global Humanitarian Forum Human Impact Report. Where an author is cited on a card, the quotation is verbatim.
[ii] Activity inspired by learning approaches described in Macy, J. (1983). Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. Philadelphia PA: New Society.
[iii] Lovelock, J., op.cit; Lynas, M. (2007). Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. London: Fourth Estate.
[iv] Lovelock, J., op.cit.
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