Teach Your Children Well

Some other climate blogger is using songs from the 70s as titles for his posts. Well, two can play at that game!

I’m volunteering part time at a local elementary school teaching English here in Taipei. And I swear the kids are the cutest in the world. Smart, too. Makes me a lot less worried about the future.

These kids range from 9 to 12 and they’re not at all concerned about climate change. They know a lot about the reduce, re-use, recycle mantra (Taipei is the cleanest big city I’ve ever seen–cleaner than Singapore!) and most of them wear masks to fight the air pollution. Right now we’re getting a dose of mainland China’s dirty air (wind’s out of the northeast–does that mean Mary Poppins is coming?), which pleases no-one here.

Should I tell them anything about global warming? If so, what? I’m not sure my recently released book would serve as a text, although I strongly believe you should buy it now. If I did say something, should I go by Spencer Weart? Roy Spencer? My nephew Spencer? He’s half Japanese, cute as hell and smarter than I am. He’ll learn anything as long as a pillow fight precedes the lesson.

Should I ‘teach the controversy?’

Should I use global warming as an example of how difficult problems can be in the real world?

Can’t get too deep, of course. I just graded 23 essays, six of which were primarily focused on bathroom humor.

Let’s put it this way. Since so many in the climate blogosphere are male, pale and stale like myself, what do you hope your grandchildren are being taught about climate change? What are they being taught?

The Klimate Kultists have a variety of essays out on ‘how you should talk to your Uncle Fred about climate change’, especially if he’s a conservative skeptic. They even have a couple of videos. Has anyone here ever actually had a conversation with a family member about climate change? Were any of them children?

Teach your children well.