Year 3, Month 1, Day 21: You Can’t Make An Omelette Without Breaking A Few Eggheads…

The L.A. Times’ Neela Banerjee writes about the NCSE’s decision to address the way climate change issues are handled in our schools:

Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.

In May, a school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., passed a measure, later rescinded, identifying climate science as a controversial topic that required special instructional oversight.

“Any time we have a meeting of 100 teachers, if you ask whether they’re running into pushback on teaching climate change, 50 will raise their hands,” said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who meets with hundreds of teachers annually. “We ask questions about how sizable it is, and they tell us it is [sizable] and pretty persistent, from many places: your administration, parents, students, even your own family.”

Against this backdrop, the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland-based watchdog group that supports the teaching of evolution through advocacy and educational materials, plans to announce on Monday that it will begin an initiative to monitor the teaching of climate science and evaluate the sources of resistance to it.

Good for them. The NCSE does terrific work. Sent January 16:

The conservative assertion that climate change is a “scientifically controversial” topic offers an example of how their ideologically-driven strategy functions in the public sphere. Since there is no significant scientific disagreement on the basic facts of global warming (it’s happening, it’s largely human-caused, it’s getting worse, the sooner we do something about it the less it will cost), the denialists in politics, media and the corporate sector have manufactured a convenient controversy by misinterpreting analyses, obfuscating results, and all too often simply lying through their teeth.

If all the scientists but a petrol-funded few are on one side of an issue, and a political philosophy with a long history of rejecting inconvenient facts is on the other, does that actually count as a dispute? If we’re supposed to “teach the controversy” of global climate change in our schools, what’s next for our science teachers — the medieval theory of humours?

Warren Senders