As a decades-long teacher I see education helping someone learn how to think, to be able to understand novel situations. In this, education is separate from training. For example,I might train a student how to do a particular calculation in physics.It would be something they could repeat later with other numbers, but it’s not transferable. They’ve not learned to evaluate or apply what they know in a new context.
Given the name, you might think that a recent Youth Climate Summit held in Carbondale (covered in both a Post Independent piece and later a Colorado Sun effort) would be about teaching youngsters about climate and climate change. You’d be close, but the point of this summit was not education, it was activist training, something readily apparent in the headline of the Sun article which loudly–and falsely– proclaims “Climate denial is fueling federal policy. But these Colorado kids still hope to save the planet.”
From that headline, to the event sponsors and backers, and even on down to some of the presentations, it’s obvious the “summit” was less about a thoughtful look at climate change and more about gathering up likely souls for conversion and missionary work.
Nurturing activism
A quick look at names involved shows a who’s who of activist incubators. Quoting the Sun: “The Lyra team and Johnson believe young people have power, too, but that they need direction on how to use it.”
Lyra was one of the sponsors of the summit, to the tune of about $77k, but their motives fit hand in glove with fellow summit backer Earth Force. Both are pushing what Earth Force labels “environmental action civics,” which they define as “…an educational approach where youth work in partnership with adults to identify a local environmental issue and engage with community members to take action by advocating for systemic changes to policies or practices.”
The “Johnson” in the Sun quote is Sarah Johnson, an environmental education specialist, and founder of Wild Rose Education, also pursuing environmental action civics, just by another name. They refer to their work as teaching people “…’how to see’, to become better observers, and how to take action in the world through our participant-centered learning experiences.”
What the young attendees are taught to see, and the policies they are taught to engage with, are of course the ones that Lyra, Earth Force, and Wild Rose Education want.
I couldn’t help but wonder, too, looking at some of the other groups mentioned, if the climate activism pushed here is intended to spill over into other left-wing causes as well.
One of the presenters profiled in the Post Independent leads a club in her Boulder high school which is part of the national Sunrise Movement, a group that lists its purpose as forcing government to “…end the era of fossil fuel elites, invest in Black, brown and working class communities, and create millions of good union jobs.” A look at their Denver chapter reveals that (at least this group) is working not only on climate change, but also joining with Denver Democratic Socialists on things like housing and ending “apartheid” for Palestinians.
Pushing the preferred model
Perhaps a little less obvious, though more disappointing, was to see what some of the supposedly less advocacy-driven presenters shared.
Colorado State University Climatologist Russ Schumacher was there, and we can get a look at his “Climate 101” presentation as a public record. Most of it is straightforward stuff; actually, it looks like it would be an interesting presentation to attend.
The part that I find concerning is a lack of context for climate prediction; an answer to the “how well do you know what you know?” question. Climate modeling can tell us general trends, and Schumacher’s presentation seems to allude to that, but it’s computer modeling, which is not at all the same as data.
Modeling cannot causally connect things; you can’t say that climate change is responsible for this much of a drought, or this many more wildfires. Our climate always has and will always have variability. Climate modeling is also not able to produce testable predictions, the hallmark of science.
Yet this doesn’t stop Schumacher from tying climate change, sometimes with “very high” confidence, to heat waves, droughts and wildfires.
Towards the end, he shows us predictions, in bold large font, of “Yet more warming; total of +2.5°F to +5.5°F by 2050” (a nod to the now mostly-debunked SSP5-8.5 extreme climate modeling scenario).
Then below that, and in smaller font, comes this: “Or +1°F to +4°F from now to 2050”.
Put aside the overlap of these two predictions–we have a giant swath here, with warming anywhere from 1°F up to 5.5°F. The large bold font being on the more dire prediction, plus the high confidence that we are causing more weather-related problems, makes the message clear.
This echoes what the sponsors wanted: a world-ending crisis is nigh, demanding no balancing of other, competing interests. This is a message which dovetails nicely with a taxpayer-funded climate change ad campaign aimed at Denver residents young and old. It’s right there in bright relief on the posters: “it’s the end of the world”.
Our youth deserve better. Wherever any particular individual kid lands on the issue of climate change matters less to me than that they make fully informed decisions.
A Youth Climate Summit, put on by groups intent on manufacturing the next generation of advocates, bolstered by climatologists who catastrophize instead of teaching how to evaluate, is not going to lead to fully informed young people.
It’s instead going to make pre-programmed machines that demand.
Cory Gaines teaches college physics and is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. He also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack
