Keeping West Virginia's Children Ignorant About Climate Change

Once again West Virginia Board of Education is trying to weaken the science standards when it comes to global warming.

This started in December of last year, when board member Wade Linger, who has said that, “[w]e need to look at all the theories about [climate change] rather than just the human changes in greenhouse gases,” and that he doesn’t believe that global warming is a “foregone conclusion,” had language inserted in the state’s science standards that portrayed climate change as something that is doubtful and debatable. His suggestion, that “and fall” followed the word “rise” in the sixth grade science standard, was adopted. Other changes included the following:

Original ninth grade science requirement: “Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.”

Adopted version: “Analyze geoscience data and the predictions made by computer climate models to assess their creditability [sic] for predicting future impacts on the Earth System.”

Original high school elective Environmental Science requirement: “Debate climate changes as it [sic] relates to greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Adopted version: “Debate climate changes as it relates to natural forces such as Milankovitch cycles, greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Other Board of Education members also expressed views that were skeptical about the reality of global warming. After the Charleston Gazette reported on the adopted changes, however, scientists, West Virginia residents, and educational and environmental activists pressured the Board of Education to correct the standards to be more in line with the accepted science on the subject. Linger’s changes to the standards were withdrawn. That was back in January.

            While not a word-for-word revamp of his original science standards changes, Linger’s latest move is very similar to the ones he proposed last December. We will see what sort of backlash this latest move generates.

            Members of the West Virginia Board of Education might simply be avid listeners to Rush Limbaugh and other AM radio folks who deny global warming. Or these changes to the curricula might be due to pressure from King Coal. The coal industry already has a big influence on the curricula of eastern Kentucky schools with their Coal Energy and Resource (CEDAR) program. This video below gives an idea of what CEDAR is all about. Watch it and try to tell me it is not indoctrination:

Those tons and tons of coal that are mined in Appalachia turn into tons and tons of CO2 when they are burned in power plants and factories. The coal industry knows this. They know that children who fully grasp this connection will not likely be supporters of their industry when they grow up. So it’s best to keep them in the dark on what the science says about coal and a warming world.

North Carolina GOP: Maybe We Can Pretend That Global Warming Will Just Go Away

The state of North Carolina is on the verge of stuffing their fingers in their ears and saying “Blah, blah, blah!”

            And they want a law to do it.

            Apparently GOP legislators of the state don’t like some news that has come out of their state’s Coastal Resources Commission, which said that, due to global warming, an increase of about one meter in sea level can be expected by the year 2100. Coastal North Carolina is low lying. A rise of that much ocean could threaten 2000 square miles of the eastern part of that state.

            Instead of preparing for the rising waters and the threats that it may make on communities and infrastructure, North Carolina GOP lawmakers are circulating a bill that takes those inconvenient findings of the scientists and makes them go away. The proposed legislation restricts the measurement of sea level rise to the state’s coastal commission using historical records. Using any predictions based upon climate science would be against the law.

            Take away that pesky science stuff and all that global warming and rising seas goes away!

            Delaware, Louisiana, California, as well as other states, are preparing for sea level rises of a meter or more. Maine is preparing for a rise of up to two meters. But in Louisiana their GOP lawmakers want to stick their fingers in their ears and shout “Blah, blah, blah! Global warming is not happening!” In the meantime North Carolinians could build houses in coastal areas, only to see them become ruined by rising tides, and the building of protective structures, like higher seawalls, could be delayed needlessly.

            If this bill is any precedent, the Grand Old Party of North Carolina will next make it against the law for meteorologists to predict rain on days when picnics are planned.

Make all that sea level rise stuff go away!

Hat tip to my friend Robin for telling me about this story.

The Real Climategate

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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[i] http://environmentcontext.blogspot.com/2012/01/next-climate-change-battle.html

[ii] Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science New York Times 2/15/2012