Climate Change Workshop, part 8.

Kevin Kloesel, the director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, began our final afternoon session. He noted a mismatch between what scientists know and what policy-makers are doing. The National Academies, as authorized by Congress, have published reports based on peer-reviewed research. Scientists criticize one another's work, Kloesel noted, more severely than even the climate deniers, so these reports are reliable.

There are four reports. The Science Panel report shows the evidence that global climate change is real and humans are causing a lot of it. And continued data gathering is essential to improve our predictions. Pilots, for example, need weather data in order to fly their planes. Senator Inhofe, a pilot, knows this, but chooses to ignore the role of data in climate science. He would crash if he flew his plane the same way he is trying to fly the country. The science panel indicated that we pretty much know what the average results of global warming will be, but it is difficult to predict the extreme events. Also, predictions have different consequences for different people, just as a 40 percent chance of rain might mean different things to someone taking a short walk and to someone planning an outdoor wedding.

The Limiting Panel report recommended prompt and sustained research efforts. Their recommendation is important because of course the scientists on the Science Panel are going to say "give us more money for research." But the Limiting Panel examined how much research and development money we will need in order to meet emissions reductions targets. Greatly reducing emissions will cost a lot of money, but we might be able to afford a more limited goal. This panel recommended setting an economy-wide cost of carbon. This recommendation has already been rejected by politicians. But this panel pointed out that every day that we wait to take action, the more drastic and expensive the solution will have to be. Also, there are always tradeoffs. For example, do we use the land for growing biofuels or food? In Oklahoma, competing interests include tribal hegemony. Even international relations could involve tradeoffs. If we put big mirrors in outer space to shade the Earth, what will China think? What would we think if they did it?

The Adapting panel report dealt with what we can do to adapt to whatever amount of global warming will prove to be inevitable. We already have is a warning system for tornadoes, but we have nothing like this for long-term climate events. What contingency plans should we make in case our predictions are wrong, especially for high-impact low-probability events? Will this require planetary cooperation, or perhaps even global governance structures? Some politicians, especially from cowboy states, would rather take any chance at global catastrophe rather than to take advice from the United Nations.

The Informing panel report dealt with how to make masses of information available in a useful form.

There is no getting around the fact that rich Americans will have to reduce our carbon emissions, rather than encouraging the poor of the world to increase, in order to achieve fairness and sustainability. Right now, the carbon footprint of people in developing nations is increasing. For example, we cannot tell the people of India, "We will keep using air conditioning but you should not."

Prospicience is the art of looking ahead, said Kloesel. We have, he said, barely begun to ask what we are on Earth to do. Why should we send missions to Mars while ignoring the monitoring of our own planet? How can we leave a good world for our grandchildren? In his book Senator Inhofe talks a lot about the world his grandchildren will live in, despite the fact that he ignores the truth about global warming which will make the world a disrupted and chaotic world for those grandchildren. What can we do when our leaders only pretend to care about their grandchildren's world? (Dr. Kloesel did not say that Inhofe was only pretending to care.) If our leaders think, "what has posterity ever done for me?" We all left the workshop with this question unanswered.

Climate Change Workshop, part 7.

The global climate change workshop for teachers in Oklahoma and Texas, sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education (OESE) and the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, continues. This time our topic was global warming education. On the second half of the Sunday morning session, our first speaker was Bob Melton, who works on science curriculum for the Putnam City public schools in Oklahoma. He is also a national officer in the National Association of Biology Teachers.

Bob began by explaining that teaching about climate change is a political act. Apparently his experiences have been different from those of the participants, which I reported yesterday: some parents have actually told Bob that teaching about global warming undermines students' faith in God. And of course there are also the infamous statements by Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who considers global warming science to be a deliberate hoax perpetrated by scientists. We watched a television interview of Inhofe in which he said this very thing. This interview made quite a number of us a little upset as we watched it. Scientists such as Lara Souza and myself know certainly that we are not hoax perpetrators, and we feel personally libeled by Inhofe. Bob also showed us a video of some federal politicians who are willing to investigate UFOs but will not even consider global warming.

Then Bob showed us the Next Generation Science Standards, which will soon be the national standards for science education, except in states like Oklahoma and Texas that declare that the laws of nature are different in our states than in the rest of the world. In Texas, carbon dioxide does not absorb long-wave radiation. In Oklahoma, global warming cannot happen; we just ain't-a-gonna permit it. But most states will probably accept the new standards. These standards say little directly and openly about global warming, but all the major components of global warming science are integrated into it, including the expectation that students will get to participate in scientific inquiry about climate processes. Each state makes its own decision; and all politics are local; therefore if a majority of citizens in a state believe that global warming is equivalent to atheism, global warming will not be taught. Bob's energetic presentation got all of us educators excited to continue our work.

Danny Mattox, a middle school educator, introduced the teachers to a hands-on classroom activity to simulate the effects of sea level rise. The participants used trays, modeling clay, and rocks to create continents. Danny poured in colored water to create "oceans" and poured "snow" (sodium polyacrylate) on the continents. When the participants sprayed some of the water from the oceans onto the continents, gooey "glaciers" formed, and the sea level (visible against the side of the tray) fell. This is a student-friendly demonstration that glaciation causes sea levels to fall. Then participants scooped out the glaciers and dropped them into the oceans, which caused the sea levels to rise.

Then Danny explained how different proxies, such as carbon and oxygen isotopes, can be used to reconstruct past climate. Then he provided evidence, from his own research, that the Trail of Tears (in particular, the Choctaw Removal) occurred during an El Nino event, which caused a very cold winter and contributed to the massive deaths of Natives--weather making an already cruel act perpetrated by the U.S. government even worse. I encouraged him to continue and publish this research.