My summer course is going to be over soon, so please bear with me. I need to unload all this on the blog in order to be patient and kind with students.
I’m not a climate change denier, believe me. Neither am I indifferent towards environmental issues. But there has got to be a limit to how often people bring up climate change in completely irrelevant contexts.
You know that stereotype of beauty contests where a contestant always ends her response with, “. . . and world peace!”? This is what happens in my class discussions. Whenever we start enumerating the problems faced by medieval Spanish Kingdoms, the Aztec Empire, the colonial Latin American societies of the XVIIth centuries, Argentina in the 1860s or Cuba in 1898, there is always a student who adds, “And climate change!”
“And pollution!” another student immediately chimes in.
“And toxic waste!” somebody immediately adds.
I’m waking up at night in cold sweat because I dream of somebody interrupting my lecture on Lope de Vega to say, “And there was toxic waste lying all over the place, polluting and causing climate change!”
Clarissa's Blog 
Thank you for making my week 🙂 Not even getting into the position on climate change but one regulation I would love to support is if you haven’t researched climate change for at least x hours (I would say 10.. but hell 1 probably makes the point) you must refrain from using the term.
I kid of course, but does really give us young adults a bad image when idealistic, uninformed youth spew this junk. Good luck with the end of classes.
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” I would love to support is if you haven’t researched climate change for at least x hours (I would say 10.. but hell 1 probably makes the point) you must refrain from using the term”
– I agree. 🙂 That’s why I don’t use it in class. But it seeps in because nowadays everybody is a specialist.
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???
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Deforestation was probably a problem for at least one of those civilizations, but that’s not climate change. Climate change of the non-anthropogenic type may have been a problem for meso-America, if Velikovky was right.
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“Climate change of the non-anthropogenic type may have been a problem for meso-America, if Velikovky was right.”
– That’s what I tried to explain when we were talking about the Mayans. As one of the possible explanations, of course.
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