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mrlolloran t1_j168l5p wrote

Awful headline but also frankly maybe a worse article.

Basically they’re concerned that there is less information about climate change in the books than there used to be. While I agree with people in thread saying it belongs in Biology but is nowhere near the focus I want to say this is a problem but the problems comes with how they’ve quantified it. They go by amount of sentences. They got up to 50 sentences in the average Biology textbook but it’s now down to 45.

I’m not saying they’re moving in the right direction but I don’t think this is a big deal. Especially since the thing they were most concerned about was that actionable remedies to climate change were removed, but that content doesn’t really belong in Biology. You need to understand some climate change basics to understand certain changes in a species biology but how to end climate change seems to primarily belong to another area of science IMO

edit: a word

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Swarna_Keanu t1_j16ivex wrote

There's no one solution how to sequester carbon back out of the atmosphere. But healthy ecological systems are among the most cost-effective and likely to work.

That is to say - biology and ecology are a major, probably the only reliable, way to solve this. All technological solutions are unproven, highly expensive and would require a huge amount of energy.

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mrlolloran t1_j16v85y wrote

I’m guessing that since there was only 50 sentences on climate change overall there has never been an entire chapter on this in the books they’re talking about. Leads me to believe this is studied elsewhere in a specialized way but maybe I’m looking at it wrong

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Swarna_Keanu t1_j18pcti wrote

You misunderstand the statistics. An average of 50 sentences could mean that one book had 200 sentences and three others nothing. It doesn't tell you anything about the individual books. Which isn't what is important for their methodology.

They wanted to see if, on average, the topic is covered more or less. As climate change has a huge impact on biodiversity but also distribution of species, ecosystems, etc - it's an increasingly important topic to understand what happens out in the real world. If it's covered less across the books used they miss the mark of what needs to be communicated.

As I mentioned previosuly climate change is interdisciplinary. It ought to appear in textbooks everwhere it matters - from the perspective of that discipline. Unless / until climate change becomes a specific seperate subject in the curriculum - but that's evidently not the case, either.

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mrlolloran t1_j18pztl wrote

Wow, implying I don’t understand what the word “average” means is incredibly insulting.

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Swarna_Keanu t1_j18rr0b wrote

I didn't imply that.

>I’m guessing that since there was only 50 sentences on climate change overall there has never been an entire chapter on this in the books they’re talking about.

I responded to this - where you took the average as an absolute. You can't know - from the data - if there ever was an entire chapter on this in the books they're talking about.

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mrlolloran t1_j18sgxc wrote

If entire chapters are missing why didn’t they say so. It seems so obvious that that information would have been included in here that I cannot even fathom why it it would be omitted. I mean think of how much more weight the article could have. The only way that makes sense to me if it’s in the study but not the article about it and that frustrated the editor, who then editorialized the headline to match what they considered to be the importance of the study. Almost, but admittedly not quite, an ad absurdum fallacy to me given the lack of context.

It also would have been useful to include the average chapter length but maybe I either missed that or it’s in the more detailed study

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Swarna_Keanu t1_j18sx4h wrote

>If entire chapters are missing why didn’t they say so.

'Cause it's not what they measured. Happy to debate if that was good methodology or not ... but the study just is what it is. :)

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mrlolloran t1_j18to4r wrote

Studies usually have conclusions. I’m not actually a trained scientist, and I haven’t read this study, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never read a study. They looked at under 100 books, they could have and should have checked the table of contents, it would be all too easy to check this stuff. Frankly if they didn’t then I’d call it really bad methodology.

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Swarna_Keanu t1_j196ejt wrote

:) Welcome to the nonsense that happens due the the "publish or perish" mantra.

It's still informative in that the average sentences decreased. But you know - that's all it says, and all they checked. Would need to dig into the data for more. Might be that there'll be a follow up study in a couple years. And another, and another, which is when it becomes more of a useful data set.

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Chetkica t1_j1797s9 wrote

Sequestered carbon in the form of Forests is back in the atmosphere with the first wildfire. And boy will there be many ,many, many. The Mediterranean and Siberia have been burning up for years.

Carbon offsets and similar stuff are distractions to keep consumption at unsustainable levels, and plain ole scams; and then you have both the big emissions that were supposedly "offset" and the additional carbon in trees burning up (thats when corporations actually do anything and arent just "planting" their offsets in the Australian desert...)

Now we should keep finding new ways, but defo wouldn't count on trees, and such sabotaging scams as carbon offsets

Sayin Just in case.

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Swarna_Keanu t1_j18of2n wrote

I wasn't talking about offsets. That's greenwashing nonsense. As is focusing on technological solutions.

I am not talking about forests. I am saying we need healthy ecosystems. So - appreciate the comment, but missed the mark of what I was indicating.

We need to alter how we interact with the environment. That's social science and psychology mainly.

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