Global Warming as the Overarching Focus
of Sustainability Curriculum
Students Must Learn About Climate Change
and Renewable Energy Technologies and Possibilities
Preparing students for global warming and their zero-carbon future means focusing now on helping them mitigate global warming, adapt to climate change, and develop the renewable energy technologies that must replace fossil fuels ... if we're to save the future.
Global warming is now an essential integrating theme because it has so very quickly become the greatest, most urgent problem ever to face humanity. It is now a survival issue that will have to be solved by the current generation of students, using knowledge and skills in energy conservation and renewable energy technologies that we will have to learn along with them. Time is of the essence. Our students must start this learning now.
“We are risking the ability of the human race to survive.” –Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
So dire are the consequences of continuing our lives and lifestyles "business as usual" that the umbrella under which all else must happen in schools is understanding of the science and economics of global warming and the social and environmental impacts of climate change.Everything we now do as educators — indeed, as human beings — is under the shadow of climate change. As Al Gore and others have said, it is the moral issue of our time. Millions of people have already died or been otherwise impacted by climate change, especially in Africa, the Arctic, and island nations. (This is where ethics and compassion come in.) When people say "global warming," they are actually talking about: - global heating of the atmosphere, land and oceans
- global climate change
- global climate variation (unpredictability)
- extreme weather events all over the world
- global ocean acidification
- an increase in stratospheric ozone depletion.
So global warming is about a lot more than the melting of the Greenland ice sheet (which seems to get all the attention). In 2001, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report clearly stated that the risks associated with climate change also include: - land degradation
- water shortages and degraded water quality
- food supply disruptions and hunger
- the spread of diseases and diminished human health.
That was in 2001. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report came out in 2007. Nothing has improved since in that time. A lot has worsened. Why? It is taking us educators a long time to realize that everything else we teach pales in comparison to the urgency, significance and consequence of global warming and climate change. Everything else we teach will become moot — superfluous and irrelevant — if we don’t educate in a way that ensures a future.
Global warming is like a lit fuse burning towards a continually growing bomb.
It is more dire than the threat of nuclear war, which is always just a potential (until someone actually presses the button). Our collective finger is constantly on the global warming button.Since RISK = PROBABILITY x MAGNITUDE, we are now gambling with the future of life on Earth — and the odds are stacking up against us.
What's the role for teachers in all this? We must ensure that - our students learn the science of
global environmental change
- our students find out that developed nations adopted
international laws and treaties
that commit them to sharing their renewable energy (carbon-reducing) technologies (and the financial aid to develop them) with less privileged countries
- our students learn the
economics of climate change
adaptation and mitigation, and have some say in what’s being done to ensure their prospects for a viable planet
- our students come to understand how global climate change has become the greatest
social injustice
ever
- our students leave our schools knowing how to conserve energy, reduce carbon emissions, live a
post-carbon
life, and install and use (perhaps even invent) renewable energy technologies.
Global warming is a compelling emergency, and one that must inform all that we do as teachers and as people who care about our students, the Earth, and the future.
The best hope for today's generation of children and youth — and all future generations — is making global warming the overarching focus of our whole curriculum.
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