Learning Opportunities

As an educator living and working in the United States, the current rapid climate change presents particular cultural  challenges. I work with adult learners who are subject to the incessant push me - pull you of our media landscape. Despite the existence of a real scientific concensus, the folks around me are divided on various climate change issues.
My antedotal take on it is about 1/4 of my local fellow citizens do believe that rapid climate change is occuring. About 55% (including that prior mentioned 1/4) do not accept the primary causality being anthropogenic. The majority of the remainder accept the science to one degree or another, if it is presented to them. But, climate change is on very few ordinary people's front burner. It is just one aspect of the blizzard of life they walk through.

I started thinking about this again after reading Andrew Hoffman's News & Views piece in the July issue of the Nature journal Climate Change, ( Hoffman, Andrew J. The Growing Climate Divide, Nature Climate Change,  page 195 Vol. 1 July 2011). Hoffman briefly examines the research going on of why in the United States the "scientific concensus" has not given rise to a "social consensus". There are many studies and papers on this now.

The advent of the scientific concensus has resulted in an explosion of research in nearly all areas of the physical sciences. It has also increased the number of inter-disiplinary research, something so important for understanding rapid climate change. This has also brought about a renaissance of new exploration and data in many fields. Two "small" examples.

The ice cores, sedement cores and related methods have advanced relevant technology and inter-disiplinary work that is thrilling. Being able to construct climatic records going back thousands of years is enriching the work of historians and anthropologists. The record now moving back tens of millions of years is opening whole new data sets to paleotologists, paleobotanists, etc.

The necessity in climate modeling of developing ever finer detail in the model has driven new effort and work in solar physics. Our understanding of the important commercial topic of "Space Weather" is improving also because of this.

There is an opportunity in education for a renaissance of sorts for understanding more about adult learning. The growing amount of literature in psychology, sociology and anthropology about "climate change denial" is providing us with a golden opportunity to examine how we come to know, to believe. This has utility far beyond the area of climate change education.

To those of you who do not work in climate change education, look at the studies in psychology, sociology and anthropology about this topic. you may find out things you do not know regarding the adult mind and its relationship with information. If you do work in climate change education. The new studies in psychology, sociology and anthropology are important for how you teach.

Take advantage of this time. A good place to start is The American Psychology Association report http://www.apa.org/science/about/publications/climate-change-booklet.pdf

For other reports and studies, search this blog for links to them. Also, here is the quick and dirty tring for Google:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLG_enUS316US316&q=%22climate+change%22+psychology