New guidelines on the school curriculum for key stages 1 through to 3 don’t contain any information or subject matter in relation to the issue of climate change and sustainableGlobal Warming living. This comes as a shock to many scientists and environmental groups all across the country. With pressure being put on a number of industries across the globe to reduce carbon emissions to slow down the damage being caused to our environment it is somewhat strange that there is no mention of these issues in the school curriculum.

Both geography and the sciences don’t contain any mentions of the processes involved in global warming with only a small part dedicated to the efficacy of recycling as part of the chemistry curriculum. As we are offered incentives such as free road tax for hybrid and electric cars as a way to reduce carbon emissions it makes very little sense to leave this out of our children’s education.  The young people in question will one day grow up and become the people running and working in this country who need to know this information. Leaving it too late could cause significant problems in our efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the nation.

Another issue which has been highlighted is that teaching of global warming will be a subject which will be covered under the banner of GCSE Geography. One big issue is that Geography at GCSE is an optional subject which a majority of students will decide not to continue at GCSE level. This will leave a large proportion of students in Britain without sufficient knowledge of the damage being caused in our environment.

Do you thing global warming should be taught in schools from a young age or saved until GCSE level? Share your views with a comment down below.


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Chris Brown
Christopher Brown is Consett Magazine's lead journalist. Chris enjoys meeting with a whole host of different people to report on what's happening in Consett, Co.Durham.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Global warming shouldn’t be taught in schools AT ANY AGE, since the entire concept of man-caused global warming has been well and truly discredited. For God’s sake, man, step away from the Kool-Aid bowl!

    Meet the New Climate Deniers

    By Rich Lowry – April 2, 2013

    There are few things sadder than the “climate denier.” He ignores the data and neglects the latest science. His rhetoric and policy proposals are dangerously disconnected from reality. He can’t recalibrate to take account of the latest evidence because, well, he’s a denier.

    The new climate deniers are the liberals who, despite their obsession with climate change, have managed to miss the biggest story in climate science, which is that there hasn’t been any global warming for about a decade and a half.

    “Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,” The Economist writes. “The world added roughly 100 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, no more warming.

    The Economist has been decidedly alarmist on global warming through the years, so it deserves credit for pausing to consider why the warming trend it expected to continue has mysteriously stalled out.

    The deniers feel no such compunction. They speak as if it is still the late 1990s, when measurements of global temperature had been rising for two decades. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.” In a passage devoted to global warming, though, he didn’t mention the latest trend in global warming.

    A denier feels the same righteous sense of certitude now, when warming has stopped, as he did a decade ago. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently opined that “sensible people accept the fact of warming” — but apparently not the fact of no-warming. He scorned those “who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course.” Does he include James Hansen, the famous NASA scientist, among these dastardly manipulators? No one this side of Al Gore has warned as persistently about global warming as Hansen. He nonetheless admits that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

    None of this means that the Earth didn’t get hotter in the 20th century, or that carbon emissions don’t tend to create a warmer planet, or that warming won’t necessarily begin again. It does mean that we know less about the fantastically complex global climate system than global-warming alarmists have been willing to admit. The Economist notes the work of Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Britain. He has found that if global temperatures stay the same for a few more years, they will fall below the range of 20 climate models. In other words, the scientific “consensus” will have been proven wrong.

    Why the stall in warming? According to The Economist, maybe we’ve overestimated the warming impact of clouds. Or maybe some clouds cool instead of warm the planet. Or maybe the oceans are absorbing heat from the atmosphere. Although the surface temperature of the oceans hasn’t been rising, perhaps the warming is happening deep down. James Hansen thinks new coal-fired plants in China and India, releasing so-called aerosols into the atmosphere that act to suppress warming, may be partly responsible for the stasis in temperatures.

    Hansen writes that knowing more about the effect of aerosols on the climate “requires accurate knowledge of changes in aerosol amount, size distribution, absorption and vertical distribution on a global basis — as well as simultaneous data on changes in cloud properties to allow inference of the indirect aerosol forcing via induced cloud changes.” Is that all? He ruefully notes that the launch of a satellite with a sensor to measure all of this failed, with no follow-up mission planned.

    Hey, but don’t worry. The science is all “settled.”

    What is beginning to seem more likely is that the “sensitivity” of the global climate to carbon emissions has been overestimated. If so, the deniers will be the last to admit it.

  2. Global warming should not be taught in schools, period. If the planet is warming at all, which is debatable, then the warming is cyclical and neither caused by nor controllable by man.

    Perhaps the schools should be preparing students for global cooling, though:

    Cold Spring Pummels People, Animals from Russia to Florida
    April 5, 2013
    James M. Taylor, J.D.

    A remarkably frigid spring is putting the freeze on global warming from Russia to the UK and from Alaska to Florida.

    People Freezing in Russian Streets
    Sky News reported frigid temperatures this spring will go down in the Russian record books.

    “Large stretches of the Moscow River remain frozen, the streets are still packed with ice and snow. The state weather service says the country is experiencing its coldest March for more than half a century. Last week, temperatures dropped to -25C overnight,” Sky News reported on March 31.

    “The unusually cold spring is having serious consequences for the capital’s homeless,” Sky News observed.

    “Around 30 homeless people freeze every month—those are official statistics. When it gets warmer and the snow piles melt, there will be many bodies found,” Dr. Elizaveta Glinka told Sky News.

    Russian Birds Reverse Migration
    The frigid spring is creating equally harsh conditions for Russian wildlife. Russia’s annual bird migration was stopped cold in its tracks, as birds migrating from the south halted their flights north. Some even turned around and went further south.

    “The [bird] migration in the European part of Russia has stalled, except for the rooks,” the Russian International News Agency (RIA) reported.

    “Strong northern winds and -30 degree Celsius temperatures have also stopped the migration of birds to Russia’s Far East, in particular the Amur region,” RIA added.

    Thousands of UK Lambs Die
    The UK Guardian reported frigid spring conditions killed thousands of newborn lambs throughout the British Isles.

    “Fears for the UK’s already embattled upland sheep-farmers have been raised by the return of winter to hill country, which has cost thousands of newborn lambs their lives,” the UK Guardian reported on March 26.

    “In Northern Ireland, helicopters have been deployed to carry out food drops to animals in isolated rural areas cut off by the snow,” the Guardian reported.

    “Malcolm Roberts, a farmer in Oswestry, Shropshire, had been expecting 600 lambs before the end of the month but is now having to pile up small victims of the snow while rescuing his 200 ewes,” the Guardian noted.

    Unaccustomed to such cold conditions, Roberts’ farm “lacks room for indoor lambing, a problem widely shared by small sheep-breeders,” the Guardian observed.

    Alaska’s Record Cold Continues
    The Alaska Dispatch ironically saluted residents on March 26 with “Welcome to Spring!” while reporting temperatures remained below zero and threatened longtime records.

    “Record cold temps could follow Anchorage’s record snowfall for this year,” the Dispatch reported.

    The cold spring continues an extended run of unusually cold conditions in Alaska.

    “Forget global warming, Alaska is headed for an ice age,” the Dispatch reported last December 23.

    “In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit,” the Dispatch observed.

    Not even summer provided a break from Alaska’s ongoing record cold last year.

    “After a record-breaking winter, we are now headed for one of the coldest months of July on record. And it has some Alaskans thinking it may be time to leave the great land,” Alaska television station KTVA reported last July16.

    “The 90-day period from May 1 to July 29 saw the lowest daily high temperatures on average in Juneau since officials began keeping records in 1943, according to National Weather Service data,” the Juneau Empire reported last July 31.

    Cold Threatens Florida Manatees
    The cold spring threatened people and wildlife in the farthest reaches of the southern United States.

    “A manatee calf apparently suffering from cold stress was rescued by state biologists Wednesday when it surfaced in Bayboro Harbor near the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus. It was taken to the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa for rehabilitation,” the Tampa Bay Times reported on March 27.

    “Manatees, particularly young ones, are susceptible to stress when the water temperature dips below about 65 degrees. They develop lesions on their bodies and they surface rapidly, trying to catch a breath. The calf found Wednesday was popping up about every 15 seconds rather than every five minutes,” the Times reported.

    James M. Taylor (jtaylor@heartland.org ) is managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

  3. No it should not be taught in schools but should be an option, Global Warming was dreamt up in the 1970s “in 50 years the UK will have temperatures equal to Tenerife and Tenerife will be unbearable” well 40 years on and it’s just as cold as ever, so should we expect a rapid change within the next 10 years? Nope, when today’s babies are old and grey the British weather will be famously the same as it ever was cold and damp. Don’t expect Global warming to go away though as a lot of taxes and other revenue is raised in the name of Global Warming, the term will slowly disappear as it becomes blatantly obvious it aint getting any warmer and Climate Change will take its place. Why should it be an option? Well there is a lot of cash thrown into research for pro global warming and no cash given to show otherwise, so it goes without saying you can make a great career out of the research into the effects and causes of Climate change, it will be interesting but don’t expect results.
    How much Carbon dioxide (CO2) do you think is in the atmosphere, 10% or perhaps 5% what about 1% or even a ½ % nope not even that, 99.3% of the earth’s atmosphere is Oxygen (O2) 20.946% and Nitrogen (N2) 78.084% and the remaining 0.7% is made up with trace gasses one of them being Carbon dioxide (CO2) at a measly 0.0383 %. When Carbon dioxide (CO2) is mentioned in the media it is ramped up to deliberately mislead, as 0.0383% sounds such an insignificant figure it is reported as its percentage within some of the 0.7% of trace gases usually something on the lines of “72% of the totally emitted greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide”.
    Did you know the earths surface is 71% water and the oceans are the biggest producer of Carbon dioxide (CO2)?
    Did you know the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is not Carbon dioxide (CO2) but water vapour (H2O)?
    Carbon dioxide (CO2) is only measured at a few tiny places on the globe and no one knows the size of the atmosphere never mind its temperature.

  4. Young kids don’t understand that weather forecasting and Global warming is not an exact science and they believe what they are told which frightens them like when they are told we are all going to die if we use the heating too much as they were a couple of years ago, when kids realise this is not the fact they feel stupid and lose some faith in science. It has been reported quite widely that the earth has been in a cooling phase since around 2000 we have seen record low temperatures since then. You have to remember the basic global warming concept, the earth is a ball and it is surrounded by ‘greenhouse gases’ these gases allow the suns heat in and keep it in (like the glass in a greenhouse) we all know the equator is closest to the sun and receives the most heat and the north and south polls are the furthest away and are the coldest hence the ice caps, what we are being told now by some is that heat from the equator is pushing up and disrupting the gulf stream, others say heat in the troposphere is pushing down and disrupting the gulf stream and the latest the melting ice caps are taking all the energy out of the gulf stream and slowing it down, there is a twist on this though, the melting ice in the arctic is going to flood the UK and we are all going to die if we don’t pay more taxes to stop it, If they put a little thought into this they would realise that if all the ice in the oceans melted the level would drop as ice is less dense than water. I think the first question you first have to ask is, in this greenhouse why is it getting cooler next to the fire yet warmer when you are so far away it normally has little effect. Any real scientist will tell you to read the Milankovitch theory it explains the ever changing climate without mentioning a farting cow!

  5. I think it’s unwise to take it off the curriculum, the controversy around climate change makes it an incredibly interesting subject to study. It doesn’t matter what our opinion is on the matter it gets people reading/researching and learning more about the issues involved be it greenhouse gas chemistry or atmospheric physics. By removing it from the curriculum you’re removing one of the pull factors towards technical subjects like maths and science, a potentially unwise move in a society ripe with unemployment but still lacking technically skilled labour.

    FYI ^^^
    +Milakovitch theory is about long scale non-anthropogenic climate forcing. The last paper I read on the matter (which to be fair was back in 2010) suggested that by looking at past cycles (or isotope stages) we’re actually warmer than we should be…

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