Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[removed]

Climate change is geography… but in the US geography is not in the SATs so students don’t care about it

In the context of ecological changes it is, but climate change itself is a geography subject

"Textbooks not responsible for covering material are not covering material"

[deleted]

Yes, print more paper to warn of climate change

Yep, folks don't need no learnin they can't get from the Facebook.

This refers to college level textbooks

The idea that you could cover general biology at a college level without discussing climate change is educational malpractice.

Weird, in Brazil we learn about climate change in middle school

Text books are meant to be sold, not educate.

In the US, many states either frown upon any discussion of climate change in public school textbooks. If publishers can't get the textbooks approved for important segments of the public school market, they won't bother publishing them at all.

It's almost like textbooks as a medium for knowledge has been obsolete for a while. I remember learning calculus and thinking that the textbook was confusing as hell, so I went and watched a free online video for it and they explained everything 1000x better.

Not if the school board is run by Republicans who chose the textbooks

Climate change itself may not fall under the classification of biology, but living things do not exist in a vacuum.

The impact of climate change on ecological and biological systems is vast and extremely relevant. Any college level text that doesn't include it is by definition lacking important contemporary context.

They do discuss it. It just doesn't meet the study's fabricated definition of adequate.

We should be planting trees, not corn.

I was responding to your claim that is not their job to discuss it.

[deleted]

Texas school boards are notoriously conservative and they are also beholding to petrochemical companies. Texas is a big market for school books .They do not want updated text books because of the doom and gloom they will expose.

> without discussing

And I was clarifying they do discuss it.

Why must a science sub always resort to political hatred?

Because Republicans vote against education, science, research, technology, and progress.

Biology isn’t on the SAT either. Students definitely care about subjects that aren’t on the SAT because that’s everything outside of English and math.

Sure, and Democrats are saints that have all your best interest in mind. If you really think any politician has you in mind when they do anything you are a fool. But please keep up with the hate filled rhetoric, it's good for your soul... Again this is a science sub, shouldn't be the political crapfest.

And please with all your wisdom become a politician, and do the right things for everyone. Or just hide behind your device and spread the hate you consume because you have nothing to add to the real conversation.

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

Do you not see the irony in cutting down trees to warn people about the environment?

Thats the american way!

No? Forestry is fully sustainable, thanks to the USDA. Sustainability is also a requirement for international trade, so no paper products sold in the US (or most of the world) are from environmentally detrimental sources.

Yes, and then we will eat them.

[removed]

Yes, if anything most people do care as much about the subjects on the SAT haha

> Looks at DARPA funding for MIT. NASA, Military branches and tech….

Everything you love about robotics, astronomy, mechanical engineering, aerospace, nuclear engineering, etc. was funded in part by the military industrial complex which is heavily supported by Republican politicians.

Lumber farms are actually lousy for diversity

I vote we move back to the old paper standard using papyrus over pine

Climate change is also biology. Different temperatures = different environmental factors = encouragement of growth of cells not native to current temps/environments

Go natural. Just let a forest take over the fields.

Yeah, bipartisan spending is interesting that. I specifically said what they vote against. Which is funding education. The point was missed by you.

Climate change has biological impacts and biological causes. The biology of many of our agricultural and industrial practices (i.e. the flora and fauna involved and impacted) is the primary driver of climate change. The way that changes in temperature will impact flora and fauna, and indeed us as well is also vitally important to know.

​

EDIT:
Here's a very basic example. Temperatures can impact reproductive frequency, behavior, and the physical sex of many species. If you are studying biology as it relates to an average temperature that no longer exists on earth, you are not studying biology as you need to understand today.

I'm not sure how climate change wouldn't be relevant in the context of biology. Sure something like microbiology or cellular biology aren't going to change much but every ecosystem out there is changing or about to start changing. I'm sure a book on artic wildlife would feature climate change extensively, the fact that others aren't just means they're behind the ball.

^ person that doesn’t understand science criticizing science

Do you not see the irony of exhaling CO2 when talking about the environment?

As others already mentoned there is a huge overlap between the effects of climate change and biologiy - from species distribution to ecology to even what happens to whole strata of species. Small example - some sea turtles gender ratio is linked to the temperature of the ocean and is shifting more and more as temperatures rise - with an increased risk of extinction. There's loads of that interaction.

But Climate Change also is relevant to near any academic topic: From engineering (most of our infrastructure is not climate change ready) to social and political science (it has and will continue to have massive impacts in both areas) to psychology (that we don't act is a psychological issue - not one of the natural sciences) to medicine to forestry to animal husbandry and soil science to ...

There is no area of what is true and factual and real about our world that will not be altered in some way as our atmospheric systems change.

Yes forestry is sustainable in America and other countries but not all countries, right?

I vote for only old growth paper.

“Textbooks aren’t indoctrinating youth as fast as we want it too”

FIFY

Do you see the irony in putting ice in your water? Why don't we just make our glaciers more bigger?

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.

[removed]

Now I see why you took my first post personally.

You didn't answer the question, which is a legitimate one. The USDA controls the import of all paper products to make sure they're sustainable?

My name isn't google dude. Man, you are weird.

I thought you knew something more because you sure were talking like you did.

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

As it so happens, microbes have a massive impact on climate change.

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

Based on that reasoning, we should be learning about waves from physics in biology since they are important to biology…

Odds of finding it in a textbook in Texas or Florida is certainly going to be pretty slim.

Who is actually suprised by this????? People think what they believe means more than facts or science.

I really wish I could find this story(I think it was NPR?) that interviews the writer of a college economics text book, talking about how his publisher forced him to include a chapter presenting outdated/debunked information about inflation as fact because they knew who they had to sell the text book too: old conservative department heads with outdated understandings of economics.

This article just takes me back to that. It’s not about making the best text book for the students, it’s about selling text books to schools.

Stop printing the books then, that would also help the environment.

School books are like that because relevant petrochemical corporations keep paying to the editors of said textbooks.

It is absolutely intentional

[removed]

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.

??

ecology has so so so many intersecting points w the climate, you can remark on the changing effects of climate change on the ecosystem every page

Ecology is an entire semester in 4th grade of high school bio class in my country.;

1st year: basic biochem, biomolecules, codones, blabla

2nd: taxonomy, the tree of life and various groups of animals

3rd: human biology and plant biology

4th grade: genetics, genomics + ECOLOGY

Thats an utterly false analogy. We are talking about changing ecosystems (due to climate change), and pupils learning wrong outdated information, not adding geophysics to bio class.

No injections from other sciences are being added (not learning geophysics there) just ecology being adapted to the times and context being added. Otherwise you're learning not ecology but paleoecology

edit; here; https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/zryepn/climate_impacts_are_increasing_textbooks_arent/j16fofz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

[removed]

Actually it's electromagnetic physics intersecting with molecular structures. Everything else is accessory after the fact, but not enough focus is given to the physical facts that are the basis of the idea.

Can you actually describe what happens -- CO2 goes into the atmosphere, and then what? How does it make things warmer?

They won't be satisfied until every class is 100% pushing the agenda.

The origin of the current degree of climate change we are observing is anthropogenic, ergo geography.

The mechanism is secondary to that.

Cellular biology slightly less so, But microbiology is massively impacted by climate change, plastic pollution, and other human made phenomena

Oh, but they don’t study ecosystems in every biology class…

So THATS a false analogy in your own right!

That's a bizarrely obtuse classification you're using, human action is compounding the physical basis of the concept, so the physics don't matter? Saying "people does it," is meaningless without being able to explain how.

Climate change should feature pretty prominently in physics, chem, bio, as well as geography; all branches are effected/contributory.

I never said the physics do not matter, my recommendation is you actually read what I wrote instead of being outraged about what you imagined.

The physical basis isn't secondary in any way tho, and it of course isn't solely the concern of geography.

I didn’t say it was solely the concern of geography, but it is primarily a geographical phenomenon.

No it's geography built on biology built on chemistry built on physics and understanding at all the levels is important, what with the drastic ramifications to the entire geosphere.

I agree that understanding at all levels is important

what are you even saying.

Using your own words against you…

do they study ecosystems in every biology class? Nope!

So therefore expecting to have that in EVERY biology class is also a false analogy.

I was being hyperbolic to prove a point.

[removed]

Yeah, let's blame biology books.

[removed]

But you said

> Because it is not the job of a biology book to discuss climate change?

You notice how whenever someone mentions the republicans doing something wrong, the go to response is always “yeah, but the dems aren’t perfect either and they’re doing the same thing!!!”

No one’s claiming they’re perfect except you?

Science shouldn’t be political, but only one party consistently votes against world wide scientific consensus.

Evolution, climate change, vaccines, basic virology. These shouldn’t be political issues, but one party understands and supports the science, and the other actively fights against the science.

Climate change and anthropogenic pollution have impacts worth mentioning beyond just ecology: e.g. evolutionary pressures of climate change (evolutionary biology), impacts of microplastics on the human body or corals (human and marine biology), degree and speed of extinction of different species, changes to biomes (biogeography), plastic eating microbes (microbiology) and so on and on.

No idea what kind of inner conflict this rambling is symptomatic of but i think our time can be better spent than this nonsense.

Everyone act surprised!

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

But what's the point of your point, or are you just being contrarion because why not?

Shocking that your main reddit activity is growing drugs. I don't even have a problem with drugs, but you seem juvenile.

I was going to write up this thing about the flow of information being too fast to keep up, and if you are relying on textbooks, your going to behind anyway blah blah blah

And then I read

"included less information about climate change than they did in the previous decade " Thats way more concerning.

[removed]

Given the price of text books, I'm surprised that they can't keep them up to date.

I teach intro bio every year and zero of the planned content is climate change. Students will see that in other parts of our overall curriculum. My job is to get them understanding cells and genes.

It is not the job of every biology book.

Textbooks are merely one tool for learning. They are great at laying out the broader field in a way that lets you see the forest through the trees. They are good at being comprehensive. There’s nothing wrong with textbooks.

It’s 2022. Give students ebooks and change the data as needed. What’s hard about this?

Okay? What I said doesn't change their material.

[removed]

Because that’s Earth Science not Biology

Geology text books are keeping up

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.

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.

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

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.

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

>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. :)

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.

[removed]

At some point we just have to give up, don’t we?

It’s gonna be bad and we’ll do nothing about it, because it’s not our call. The illusion will work for 10 more years at best and then they’ll just tell us we should’ve bought our own apocalypse arks.

We’re already living the end of the world, it’s just taking longer than Hollywood made us believe.

IDK, back when I was in school, climate in general was under geography lessons, not biology.

:) 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.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278532.g001

And that graph makes it really clear how far the spread of coverage was - with some books doing substantially more.

It also makes clear that the OPs press release mixed up average with mean - which happens so often.

That's more ecology than biology imo. They definitely teach how temperature affects such things as reproduction and sex, which I would expect most high schoolers to be able to connect to changes in climate.

All professionals in all disciplines need to understand climate change and make it part of their practice because it impacts everything. A medical doctor needs to understand how changing climate will impact their patients, for example.

It impacts everything. It's worth including in everything

This is the correct answer...........

A web page can do the exact same thing except it is far cheaper or outright free, and it can be updated and deployed to people instantly. In many fields a textbook can become outdated in literally just a few months, and now you wasted your money. But professors don't care because they're usually making money off of them.

Textbooks drain the already strained finances of countless students and are found to give old or flat out wrong information all the time. There is literally nothing a textbook does that an online alternative cannot, it's only negatives.

[removed]

For my own understanding, do you think Ecology is a higher level science that should be taught in a collegiate setting, or should we be exposing student to this subject (and climate change) in public schools?

[removed]

Ecology has very much been a standard part of good introductory biology curriculums, and climate change in that context is absolutely relevant.

>Texas is a big market for school books .

Texas has "cornered the market" on textbooks sold all over the country!