Perhaps the problem lies with the notion of “belief.” Beliefs are easy (see Shermer’s The Believing Brain) and consequently worthless. What matters is being able to draw deductions from empirical evidence. Today climate change is the consensus agreement, and personally I’m deeply troubled by the fact we’re blithely pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, not least because the resulting acidification of the oceans will diminish the phytoplankton that create 80% of the world’s oxygen. But there are holes in the models used by climate scientists, which are also very sensitive to fine-tuning.

Most students merely “believe” in climate change simply because authority figures have declared it to be a fact and have done no personal investigation into the matter. Re-tweeting a post by a teenage Swedish girl isn’t meaningful, nor is repeating a sound-bite, no matter how good such activities may make other teenagers feel. So perhaps engaging all the students in a research project in which they have to amass actual data, and then discuss the validity of that data, would be a healthy learning experience for everyone?

It’s salutary to remember that in the 1970s the fear among climate scientists (the consensus view of the time) was that we’re in for another mini ice-age. While science improves all the time due to more and more data being acquired, it’s not a perfect world and learning to understand how complex a picture can be painted by empirical data is always going to be a useful corrective to our hardwired tendency for simplistic black-white thinking.