POINT AND COUNTERPOINT Point and counterpoint: climate change education Hilary Whitehouse 1 Published online: 31 March 2017 # Australian Curriculum Studies Association 2017 Abstract As pointed out by UNESCO, the time for properly addressing climate change disruption in national curriculum has well and truly arrived. The project now is to more appro- priately educate children and young people for the conditions they will deal with the whole of their lives. This introduction to the Curriculum Perspectives Point and Counterpoint discus- sion on Climate Change Education sets out a rationale for change in the Australian Curriculum and briefly describes the contributions of participating authors. Keywords Climate emergency . Climate change education . Australian curriculum . UNESCO CCESD Introduction When I was younger I read Rolling Stone for the music arti- cles. These days I read Rolling Stone for their coverage on climate change. For a recent article titled, ‘The point of no return: Climate change nightmares are already here’, meteo- rologist Eric Holthaus interviewed over two dozen climate scientists and found every conversation veered towards apocalyptic terms. Holthaus (2015) remarks, BAs you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmen- tal catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists^. A great sadness drifts among the people who are documenting rapid, global environmental change, along with a great frustration that the living fabric of our beautiful world is still being destroyed. The severity of our situation was well understood in the 1970s and certainly by the 1980s (Taylor 2014). In Australia, we lost traction for action in the previous 25 to 30 years large- ly due to the manufacture of climate denial and disinformation campaigns by large corporate interests who Bbankrolled the rise of the climate denial industry … propagating the phoney idea that there was a deep debate about the reality of global warming^ (McKibben 2016). This has left us in a position where Bthe public seriously underestimates the level of con- sensus among climate scientists that human activities have caused the majority of global warming^ (King and Henley 2016). The rejection of climate science has been primarily driven by ideological factors (Lewandowsky et al. 2016). Human ideology has no traction over the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, and this is why we are in a dangerous situation. Whatever you personally think about the nature of the climate emergency, planetary systems are falling into cri- sis. Even if carbon emissions drop to zero in this decade, we will still be experiencing human-driven change for centuries. Hopes of limiting average global land temperature rise to 1.5 °C - the Paris 2015 agreed target - have already disap- peared, while Bthe 2°C threshold is also under threat if coun- tries don’t promise to cut back on their carbon use even further ^ (Nield 2016 ). Though many nations are de- carbonizing their economies, carbon emissions are not stop- ping tomorrow, so what we are looking at is educating for an unpredictable and very uncertain future. An International View The United Nations (UN) has clear policy affirmations that education is an essential element of the global response to * Hilary Whitehouse hilary.whitehouse@jcu.edu.au 1 Centre for Research and Innovation in Sustainability Education (cRISE), James Cook University, Cairns, QLD 4870, Australia Curric Perspect (2017) 37:63–65 DOI 10.1007/s41297-017-0011-0