How to teach kids about climate change where most parents are skeptics

COEUR d’ALENE, Idaho — Jakob Namson peered up at the towering ponderosa pine before him. He looked at his notebook, which was full of calculations scribbled in pencil. Then he looked back at the pine. If his math was right — and it nearly always is — he would need to plant 36 trees just like this one to offset the 831 pounds of carbon dioxide that his drive to school emits each year.

Namson, 17, gazed around at his classmates, who were all examining their own pines in northern Idaho’s Farragut State Park. He considered the 76 people in this grove, the 49,000 people in his home town of Coeur d’Alene, the millions of people in the United States driving billions of miles a year — and approached his teacher, Jamie Esler, with a solemn look on his face.

By Sarah Kaplan

Full Story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-to-teach-kids-about-climate-change-where-most-parents-are-skeptics/2017/06/03/1ad4b67a-47a0-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_idaho-1118am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.45b7e08c7fdd

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How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science

The campaign ad appeared during the presidential contest of 2008. Rapid-fire images of belching smokestacks and melting ice sheets were followed by a soothing narrator who praised a candidate who had stood up to President George W. Bush and “sounded the alarm on global warming.”

It was not made for a Democrat, but for Senator John McCain, who had just secured the Republican nomination.

It is difficult to reconcile the Republican Party of 2008 with the party of 2017, whose leader, President Trump, has called global warming a hoax, reversed environmental policies that Mr. McCain advocated on his run for the White House, and this past week announced that he would take the nation out of the Paris climate accord, which was to bind the globe in an effort to halt the planet’s warming.

The Republican Party’s fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favoring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over cooperation and conciliation.

By CORAL DAVENPORT and ERIC LIPTON

Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html?hpw&rref=politics&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well