Trapped by Our Lack of Learning

Smoke was everywhere on Tuesday. The aroma was distinct, constant, and originated in Canadian wildfires. The haze was not bad, yet the smell filled the air. Smoke was a constant reminder of how little we progressed in our advocacy to do something about the climate crisis. Our lack of education, in the need to address the climate crisis, covers us like a shroud.

June was the hottest month on Earth since we began keeping records. July looks to be worse. I tried to function with outdoor ambient temperatures in the low nineties. Functioning meant using air conditioning to mitigate the heat most of the day.

The world just sweltered through its hottest June in the 174-year global climate record. 

Additionally, Earth’s ocean surface temperature anomaly — which indicates how much warmer or cooler temperatures are from the long-term average — were the highest ever recorded, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 13, 2023.

I don’t mean to slight the efforts of teachers, many of whom I know to be decent people. Yet, the fact is too many young people arriving to power in the 2020s don’t understand the reasoned need to act on our deteriorating climate. While we recognize a long procession of extreme weather events and conditions, we view them as a live blog of the end times over which we have no control. How did we get to this place?

In part, with electronic communications and social media, we are more aware of the pockets of culture that reject common sense to pursue tribal interests. They receive undue amplification. A reader of history knows this segment of the population has been present for multiple millennia. More than “pocket,” though, the amplification in social media presents an idea there is an organized movement. I’d call it the “know-nothing movement” yet that term has already been used. It’s not that people are dumb. It’s that they don’t know how uneducated they are. There is a name for this: the Dunning Kruger effect.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge.

Wikipedia

I am part of the Climate Reality Project whose mission includes:

We train and mobilize people worldwide with four global campaigns to unlock transformational change this decade and help us reach true net-zero by 2050 – the point where global warming can stop in as little as three-to-five years and the Earth begins to heal.

The Climate Reality Project website.

The Climate Reality plan is to reduce emissions, call out greenwashing, end financial support for using fossil fuels, and support international cooperation using the Conference of the Parties framework that brought us the Paris Agreement on climate. There is hope these things can be accomplished, according to former Vice President Al Gore last night. None of it will be easy. The fact that we need organizations like Climate Reality and others to educate, lobby and advocate for action to address the climate crisis is a sign of how far our education system has deteriorated. These topics should be front and center in our schools and in career development for students coming up. There are many obstacles to training the coming generation of Americans to take up the climate crisis as a main stage endeavor.

We do what we can. The trouble is we don’t always realize how much potential we possess to address the climate crisis. Its time to figure that out.