Resolved: Climate Change Is Not A Crisis
An Oxford-Style Debate for Ecological Citzenship
Peter Buckland
Academic Programs Fellow and Curator of The Field Guide to Teaching Sustainability
Penn State’s Sustainability Institute
Email: [email protected]
OVERVIEW
This assignment is designed to develop students’ ecological citizenship skills on the issue
of Anthropogenic climate change. It accomplishes this by placing them into teams of two or
three to engage in an Oxford-style debate on the proposition “Climate change is not a
crisis.” Healthy debates such as this require extensive preparation that builds significantly on
four of the five sustainability competencies in “An Exploration of Competencies in
Sustainability: Working Paper” by Engle et al. This assignment sheet is structured as follows:
1. Assignment
2. Format & Logic
3. Skills developed
4. Guidance for assessment in a basic rubric.
5. Supplemental sources of information for climate and debates.
ASSIGNMENT
Climate change is NOT a crisis. Using up-to-date scientific evidence available,
you are tasked with convincing your peers whether or not anthropogenic climate change is a
crisis. What does this mean?
You will be assigned to a team of 2 or 3 students and assigned a position for or
against the proposition that climate change is not a crisis. Your group will prepare a tenminute argument in favor of your position. This means that you will have to gather good
evidence from respected sources, appeal to our values, evaluate the risks of anthropogenic
climate change, compare climate change risks to other alleged crises like global poverty,
appeal to common values, and clearly communicate them all in 10 minutes or less. As part of
that preparation, your group will prepare an outline and write a research paper that makes
the same argument.
Requirements:
I will check with you daily to ensure progress. You will receive a simple 1 or 0 and verbal
feedback about the next steps you will need to take on your
A preliminary outline that sets up the paper.
5-7 page paper: The paper must have a focused thesis, clear structure including introduction,
body paragraphs that include rebuttals to possible counterarguments, and a conclusion. It
must be written in proper English, use 10 appropriate sources, and provide solid content and
details. In-text citations and works cited should follow ___ style.
Presentation and Argument: This will be a short presentation of 5 to 7 minutes. You will prepare
it with your partner(s) and deliver to class on ___. You will make a tri-fold poster to guide
you. The presentation must focus on your paper’s most important information and deliver it
with a similar level of detail. You will be timed. You will be penalized for going under 5
minutes and over 7 minutes. I will stop you at 8 minutes (1 minute over). Your peers will
have 4 minutes to ask questions. The outline is the same as the paper.
Grading:
Outline graded on clariry and completeness
Paper and presentation graded on
Content and Detail – 50%
Clarity of presentation and manner – 50%
* Bonus of 10% to the argument the class votes as the most convincing.
FORMAT & LOGIC
In my class, we spent 8 weeks preparing for the debate without them knowing that
they were preparing for the debate. This included a 5-week unit on climate science and
climate change followed by a 3-week unit on energy. Then they prepared for one week in
teams to debate. We followed the debate with a reflective exercise using the Yale Six
Americas survey as a way to discuss our personal and collective perceptions about climaterelated risks.
First, we went through a 5-week unit on the science of the climate and climate
change. Our primary text was Wright’s and Boorse’s Environmental Science: Toward a Sustainable
Future 10th edition from Prentice Hall. For climate change, I supplemented the book with
materials from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the National Oceanographic and
Atmospheric Administration, the United Kingdom Met Office, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change Working Group I, the BBC, and PBS. Because of my class’s place-based
nature, we focused on climate change’s impacts on forests because ~½ of our campus’s 350
acres were wooded.
Second, students conducted research projects on forms of energy production,
processes related to energy like fractional distillation, and energy conservation. They had
three weeks to work on these projects, much of it in class with my guidance in the library.
These resulted in films about an increased role for solar and wind in the future, an in-class
interview with a wind farm manager in Salix, Pennsylvania, a multi-scalar project on solar
energy for which students interviewed renewable energy scholars and engineers, the history
of coal-fired power in Pennsylvania, the history and current state of hydroelectric power
across the world, nuclear fuel disposal and processing, and others. They had developed a
collective sense of the state of the climate and the role that energy production plays in
forcing climate change.
At the end of these units, I split the class into small groups of two or three to debate
the proposition take positions on the following proposition: “Climate change is not a crisis.”
Groups will be for the proposition—IS NOT A CRISIS—or against the proposition—IS A
CRISIS. This debate follows the rules of the Oxford-style debates from National Public
Radio’s Intelligence Squared US. They are quoted here with a note on what I required of my
students and how I modified the debate to fit my classroom:
“Before the debate begins, the audience registers their pre-debate opinion using an
electronic voting system. These results are announced later in the program.
Alternating between panels, each debater gives a 7-minute opening statement. After
this segment concludes, the moderator opens the floor for questions from the
audience and inter-panel challenges. This adversarial context is electric, adding drama
and excitement. The debaters have one final opportunity to sway audience opinion
through their 2-minute closing arguments. The audience delivers the final verdict by
voting again whether they are for, against, or undecided on the proposition. The two
sets of results are compared and the winner is determined by which team has swayed
more audience members between the two votes.”
Students must be well-prepared to enter into this debate in order to persuade one another
and other audience members.
As we prepared I instructed my students’ to incorporate well-grounded scientific
information that reflects current understanding and make a clear argument of definition
about what does or does not constitute a crisis. I chose this format for a few strategic
reasons. First, the debate was not “Climate change is real: yes or no.” We could not deal in
disproven or junk science. Second, by debating the proposition in the negative – “not a
crisis” – I avoided an alarmist’s position. Third, equal numbers of students would have to be
on one side or the other in groups I created deliberately. This way I could put very
concerned or alarmed students for the proposition and dismissive or doubtful students
against it, thereby inviting them to reason in ways that could counter their own motivated
reasoning. Fourth, at no point did I tell my students to be “objective,” “unbiased,”
“rational,” or “open-minded.” While I might like them to do that, entreating them to be so
could backfire as research has indicated it does. We like to believe we are open-minded and
those people over there are the close-minded unrealistic ones. My set-up could avert some of
that problem.
This assignment requires that students be literate in the science of the climate, the
current state of Anthropogenic climate change, and aware of current climate-related policies
to make a reasoned argument about climate change related risks. Additionally, it invites
students to think about interconnected political, economic, social, and natural systems, how
those systems have evolved and how they could evolve depending on what we do now,
compare those effects to their own and their collective ethics and senses of risk, and then to
communicate those as clearly and effectively as they can.
If you are interested, you can read more in-depth thoughts about this lesson at
“Resolved: Climate Change is NOT a Crisis” at the blog of the Yale Cultural Cognition blog.
Skills developed
(Taken from Bybee et al 2014)
 Acquisitive: skills and abilities of gathering information
o Searching—locating sources, using several sources, being self-reliant,
acquiring library skills and the ability to use computer search programs
o Inquiring—asking, interviewing, corresponding
o Investigating—formulating questions
o Gathering data—tabulating, organizing, classifying, recording
o Researching—locating a problem, learning background, setting up
investigations, analyzing data, drawing conclusions
 Organizational: skills and abilities of putting information in systematic order
o Comparing—noticing how things are alike, looking for similarities,
noticing identical features


o Contrasting—noticing how things differ, looking for dissimilarities,
noticing unlike features
o Classifying—identifying groups and categories, deciding between
alternatives
o Outlining—employing major headings and subheadings, using sequential,
logical organization
o Reviewing—identifying important items
o Analyzing—seeing implications and relationships, picking out causes and
effects, locating new problems
Creative: skills and abilities of developing new approaches and new ways of
thinking
o Planning ahead—seeing possible results and probable modes of attack,
setting up hypotheses
o Synthesizing—putting familiar things together in a new arrangement,
hybridizing, drawing together
Communicative: skills and abilities of transferring information correctly from
one experimenter to another
o Asking questions—learning to formulate good questions, to be selective in
asking
o Discussing—learning to contribute ideas, listening to ideas of others,
keeping on the topic, arriving at conclusions
o Explaining—describing to someone else clearly, clarifying major points,
exhibiting patience, being willing to repeat
o Reporting—orally reporting to a class or teacher in capsule form the
significant material on a science topic
o Writing—writing a report of an experiment or demonstration; describing
the problem, method of attack, data collected, methods of analysis,
conclusions drawn, and implications for further work
o Criticizing—constructively criticizing or evaluating a piece of work, a
scientific procedure, or conclusion
o Graphing—putting in graphical form the results of a study or experiment,
being able to interpret the graph for someone else.
Supplemental sources of information for climate and debates
See “Engaging Climate (Mostly Science) Curricula” on The Field Guide to Teaching
Sustainability