NCSE Evolution and Climate Change Update – 10/3

NCSE’S ROSENAU AND MCCAFFREY IN THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

NCSE’s Josh Rosenau and Mark McCaffrey were invited by the Houston Chronicle (September 30, 2014) to discuss the controversy over the treatment of climate science in social studies textbooks now under consideration by the Texas state board of education. “Today, climate change isn’t just a scientific issue,” they explained: “critical debates about our response to climate change belong in textbooks covering civics, economics, history and geography, rooted in the social and political context while always informed by accurate science.”

“Unfortunately, many of the social studies textbooks under consideration simply ignore climate change, depriving students of the tools they’ll need to become tomorrow’s leaders,” they continued. “But there’s a problem that publishers and the board can solve today: the factual errors in the books that cover climate change. Most egregiously, several of these books claim that there is active dispute among scientists about the primary cause of climate change. That’s simply wrong.”

Previously, NCSE and the Texas Freedom Network announced in a joint press release that “an examination of how proposed social studies textbooks for Texas public schools address climate change reveals distortions and bias that misrepresent the broad scientific consensus on the phenomenon.” A number of errors about climate science were present, as well as a quotation from a notorious climate change denial organization presented in rebuttal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Rosenau and McCaffrey concluded, “Tomorrow’s Texans will have big decisions to make—in deciding how to confront rising seas and declining freshwater, in choosing between the fuels of the future and those of the past, in creating new businesses and new kinds of jobs in the new world ahead.  Social studies classrooms and textbooks are the perfect place to explore those questions and to prepare our students to build the future they deserve.” The Texas state board of education is expected to make a decision on the textbooks in November 2014.