Last month I blogged about the difficulty science teachers are having teaching the science of climate change. About 25 to 30 percent of teacher reported that parents, teachers, and members of their communities had in some way questioned whether climate change was happening or whether it was a phenomenon caused by humans.[i]
As if this endemic resistance to their science curriculum weren’t enough, there has been a leak of documents from the Heartland Institute, an organization that promotes and serves business interests. A portion of the leaked documents outlines a plan to create curricula for public schools that cast doubt on the science of global warming. For example, one of the claims of the proposed school lessons would be that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”[ii]
Depicting itself as libertarian in orientation, with interests in a wide range of public-policy issues, the Heartland Institute has worked in the past with Philip Morris, producing policy studies, op-eds, and radio interviews that tried to cast doubt on the scientific link between health problems, such as lung cancer, and secondhand smoke. They also support vouchers for schools, and the term “free-market solution” occurs a lot on their website.
In my pervious blog, I asked if there were organizations that were behind the resistance that science teachers were experiencing concerning climate science. I guess that there are not any right now, but that the Heartland Institute is stepping up to the plate to take on the science and the scientists that tell us that we are making a warmer world for ourselves.
Teachers have it bad enough with the resistance they are already experiencing to teaching climate science. If Heartland is successful and they produce this anti-science indoctrination for schoolchildren, it will only compound this problem.
I think this leak of documents, one that the Heartland Institute doesn’t deny—although they dispute the credibility of a couple pages of the leak—is the real scandal that should be called the Climategate.
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