THE ROLE OF CARBON DIOXIDE IN "GLOBAL WARMING" AND ITS APPROACH IN CHEMISTRY TEXTBOOKS

Abstract

This work aimed to investigate the approaches given to the hypotheses that describe climate controllers, especially the warming theory_, by Brazilian Chemistry textbooks for high school, from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We start from the assumption that the concept of CO2's role in global climate change is mostly based on theoretical data and fragments of information derived from computer climate models. In parallel, several empirical studies have pointed to the natural and cyclical character of climatic phenomena that have occurred throughout history. It was proposed, therefore, to confront these works with the content available in some of the main textbooks used in Brazil in the early 2000s, for High School, using Discursive Textual Analysis. According to the results, all the collections analyzed opted for unilateral warming approaches, derived from the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports, that is, without a comprehensive description of antagonistic and natural hypotheses about current climate change.