US college-level biology textbooks miss the mark on offering solutions to the climate crisis, according to a new analysis of books over the last 50 years.
Fewer than three pages in a typical 1,000-page biology textbook from recent decades address climate change, according to the new study, despite experts warning it is humankind’s biggest problem.
How about the idea that climate change is a subject for climate change? Or even economics, if we want to talk solutions. Not actually a part of biology…..
In the UK, English departments are already revising texts to reflect urgent social problems, as in
Ah yes… Introductory books providing an overview of the complete field…
Of which Oecology is about 10%, of which Ecology ( which actually deals, amongst others, with climates) is about 5%. Of which climate change ( in both archeological and current sense) is a specialist subject, hanging out in the place where geography meets some pretty damn hard physics and statistics.
So yes… a couple of pages sounds about right. They point to the significant stack of books you need to Git Gud at that particular subject. Including the math and physics books that a lot of Climate Scientists obviously failed to comprehend, if they haven’t avoided them with a vengeance to begin with.
despite experts warning it is humankind’s biggest problem
A lion for every ‘expert’.
If the survey is of textbooks over the last 50 years, then that takes us back to 1972 when the pause (whether or not it was purely an artifact of aerosol cooling) still had nearly another decade to run. In so far as textbooks at that time took on the issue, it was most likely to say Anthropogenic CO2 is a purely theoretical problem; don’t be fooled by nuclear industry lobbyists propagandizing about it.
I’ve always been amazed how such a soppy belief became established as an obvious fact.
I suppose its quasi religious trappings should have given me clue. But the fact that a gigantic nuclear explosion lasting billions of years nearby had less to do with warming the planet than my Ford Cortina was very, very strange.
Thank God I discovered Dr Judith Curry and Dr John Christy, who restored my sanity.
Sorry, I got distracted by R Peakall’s comment. The NHS has to be abolished and replaced by a healthcare system. But I suppose that will happen shortly after Greta says “Oops”…
i.e. NEVER
Maybe it was Thatcherite opposition to the Miners that was the political initiator to the whole Warble Gloaming crisis? After all, Maggie did open the Hadley Climate Centre on the 25th May 1990 and we all know what kind of data fraud went on there.
What ‘solutions’ are biologists supposed to offer? Natural selection and genetic modification?
There’s a lot of re-purposing to be done in libraries: Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Diversity, P.G.Wodehouse’s Summer Extreme Weather Event are only two quick examples while Herman Melville’s Moby Non-gender-specific Appendage will additionally need a plain dust-cover.
“Humankind”. That language isn’t very inclusive. What about the furries and others at the tail of the LGBTQXYZ+ Spectrum?
“some experts” – TFTFY
Is it a mistake through over-confident belief in dodgy physics? Or is it just a fucking lie? Either way it just is not humanity’s biggest problem, or even a problem at all.
@TMB: Don’t forget Conrad’s The Person whose Skin Colour is Absolutely Unnoticed and Irrelevant of the “Narcissus”.
I’m pretty sure they still teach the carbon cycle in introductory biology. Which would be roughly those three pages. What else is there to know?
“Is it a mistake through over-confident belief in dodgy physics? Or is it just a fucking lie?”
It may have started as a mistake: the first chaps were clearly a bunch of duds. (I’ve read a selection of their early papers.)
Then lots of careerists crooks joined in so now it is indeed a fucking lie.
You may charge me with not reading more recent papers but there’s no need. For ages they’ve said “the science is settled”.
Rhoda Klapp: I would argue that it is becoming a really major problem but with this I refer to the proposed solutions
JG: The Thatcher-Miners thing turned into a personal battle between her & Arthur Scargill, as he was intent on using the dispute to bring down the government and then try to do a Lenin. The coal industry was bust – expensive to mine whereas foreign open-cast pits could produce it much more cheaply. I think Thatcher was quite happy to carry on running the big coal-fired plants but on imported coal. She was a chemist, so presumably she could have brought a bit of scientific inquiry to the Gerbil Worming stuff just taking off then.
I don’t know. There are lots of people with time on their hands on both sides of the Warble Gloaming debate and having spent lots of time sifting through it, mostly they find the results inconclusive.
Politicians, including St. Margaret of Thatcher need pretty definitive “Do this or we lose the next election” things like Warble Gloaming are so nebulous and what-if’y that only the corrupt would us them as the basis for anything.
Cue Al Gore et al. Pedo Joe doesn’t give a crap about all the greenery, he just wants money flowing so that he and his family can dip their fingers in the graft.
BiS : “I’m pretty sure they still teach the carbon cycle in introductory biology. Which would be roughly those three pages. What else is there to know?”
The clue is in the “introductory” bit. Lies To Children to get them familiar with a concept. Not the Thing and the Whole of the Thing.
If you’re talking cycles, and only considering the significant ones without which we’d cease lifesigns pretty quick-like, you’re looking at C, N, P, Na, K, Ca, Fe/Mg, S, coupled to O/H/Cl ( a purty little complex there..), in a rather intimate embrace. C, N, P, S, O/H/Cl having a significant atmospheric component.
There’s crucial trace elements (Zn, Mn, Pb, As, Zr, Hg, F/Br/I, etc..) but those aren’t as much a cycle as more like random pickup from the huge pile hanging around.
What you get in the introductory courses/highschool regarding biology is at the same level as toying around with a battery and a lightbulb, and possibly a transistor or two, in those toy/school kits.
Those may explain the basic concepts, but they don’t make you an electronic engineer.
@JK277 Biologists, actual biologists, do plenty in the offering of solutions. You just don’t generally find them working as “biologists”, but as (research) engineers in various industries making our lives better.
They also, in general, do not buy into the whole Worbal Gloaming Apocalypse.
They know how resilient the planet, nature and humans as a species are.
And aware of the utter insignificance of the individual when it comes to Nature and her jolly little ways.
We are also outnumbered 50:1 ( if not worse) by the shouty “Ecologists”, “Climate Scientists” and Journalists/Politicians/Activists with an Opinion, so our voices regarding this kind of stuff are hardly ever heard, or published.
Even my high school Environmental Science class didn’t really cover climate change much. Mostly learned about alfisols and silt and different types of coal and stuff. I think I did a group project about the overpopulation of white-tailed deer in Western PA.
It was the early ‘00s but still. What our school taught was actual information.
Dbfhgjf, those deer in western PA ( and elsewhere ) are a classic example of what happens when you remove the predators from a prey species.
Do you also remember the Screaming the two obvious solutions: “Eat More Deer”, and “re-introduce wolves, and they will sort the problem by eating the deer.” solicited ?
*thinks* Technically you could do it with any of the puma variants as well, as they’re orginially indiginous like the wolves.
But whereas wolves see us mostly as dangerous competition and not as food, the big cats most definitely do see us, being merely mid-sized monkeys in their eyes, as food. Which makes that option rather tricky.
if you take a cursory look at “experts warning it is humankind’s biggest problem” you very quickly realise that all of them together are incapable of changing a light bulb!