Temperatures Rise as Climate Critics Take Aim at U.S. Classrooms

(Bloomberg) -- Boys and girls, are global temperatures rising or falling?

While scientists almost universally agree the world is warming, school kids in Texas, Wyoming and West Virginia will get a much less definitive answer if local activists and politicians get their way.

At a time when U.S. President Barack Obama is pushing a global effort to rein in greenhouse gases, conservative critics back home are pressing a grassroots counterattack, targeting how schools address global warming. The goal is to emphasize doubts about whether humanity is indeed baking the planet.

“Climate change was only presented from one side and that side is the Al Gore position that you don’t need to discuss it, it’s a done deal,” said Roy White, a Texan and retired fighter pilot, referring to the former U.S. vice president’s warnings on global warming. “The other side just doesn’t seem to want to allow the debate to occur.”

White, who lives in San Antonio, doesn’t want kids indoctrinated by “misinformation,” he said, so he and 100 fellow activists have sought to change textbooks that refer to climate change as fact, rather than opinion. That the vast majority of scientists disagree with him is more a sign of dissent being quashed than of true consensus, White, 60, said in a telephone interview.

White’s band of volunteer activists, the Truth in Texas Textbooks coalition, lobbied the state to reject social studies books that they said contained factual errors or fostered an anti-American bias. Among the books’ sins: omitting mention of those who question climate science.

‘Political Agenda’

If the coalition had its way, any reference to “global warming,” melting polar ice caps or rising sea levels would be excised from textbooks, or paired with dissenting views. Phrases such as “consensus science” and “settled science” should be avoided, the group warned in letters to publishers last year, as they suggest a “political agenda.”

So far, the campaign has had only limited results. One publisher deleted a reference to global warming and others ignored White’s appeals. The group isn’t done, however. This year, they plan to take their textbook ratings to local school districts, urging them one-by-one to buy more “balanced” selections.

“We want to affect the bottom line,” White said. “That means purchasing.”

To Lisa Hoyos, efforts like White’s amount to “lying about science.” Two years ago, the San Francisco mom and former union organizer co-founded the group Climate Parents to defend the teaching of climate change around the U.S.

The group has members in all 50 states, Hoyos said. These days, they’re busier than ever.

Wyoming, South Dakota

In Wyoming last year and South Carolina in 2012, legislators banned their states from adopting educational standards that treat human-caused global warming as settled science. A similar measure passed the Oklahoma Senate last year but failed in the State House. Michigan’s state board of education is bracing for its own debate on new standards later this year.

“We’re having this Groundhog Day experience, with state after state actively seeking to thwart kids from learning the truth about climate science,” Hoyos, 49, said by telephone. “You’re seeing science standards held hostage to political machinations.”

The latest skirmish came last month in West Virginia.

The state board of education voted to reverse a decision, made in November, that children should be taught that global temperatures have both risen and fallen over the past century. The original language stood contrary to data showing the average temperature steadily increasing, with the 10 hottest years on record occurring since 2000.

’Vanishingly Small’

Most scientists consider the climate question settled. A 2013 report in the journal Environmental Research Letters reviewed 4,000 published studies and found 97 percent of them endorsed the idea that human pollution is heating the planet. Only “a vanishingly small portion” disagreed, the authors wrote.

Last month, NASA scientists said 2014 was the hottest year on record, echoing similar reports from Japanese and U.K. meteorologists. Researchers in the journal Science, meanwhile, warned in a Jan. 15 paper that human activity was pushing the earth’s natural systems into a “zone of uncertainty” that could destabilize the planet.

Obama has turned up the volume on the climate issue in recent months. Unable to win greenhouse-gas legislation in Congress, he proposed new regulations in June to cut heat-trapping pollution from power plants. He’s also taken part in a globe-hopping campaign to win agreement from China and India to control emissions.

Next Generation

In the U.S., climate critics have trained their critiques on the Next Generation Science Standards, a set of guidelines for kindergarten through high school designed by 26 states, the National Science Teachers Association and other groups.

Released in 2013, the standards recommend that students study “the rise in global temperatures over the past century” and “the major role that human activities play,” among other aspects of climate change. Twelve states and the District of Columbia have adopted the guidelines so far.

“As more and more states start to turn over their science standards, they are including climate change,” said Minda Berbeco, policy director at the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, California-based advocacy group. That, in turn, has sparked a backlash that’s “likely to come up again and again,” she said. “You’re going to see more conflict.”

‘Rise and Fall’

In West Virginia, the state education board adopted standards based on Next Generation’s work in November but with modifications to the climate section. The board approved a requirement that sixth-graders scrutinize “the factors that have caused the rise and fall in global temperatures,” adding the reference to falling temperatures.

Another tweak added a reference to Milankovitch cycles, long-term shifts in the Earth’s orbit that some skeptics -- though few scientists -- have blamed for rising temperatures.

The changes were requested by L. Wade Linger, an education board member who runs an information-technology company. Linger said he’s heard from many scientists who question the science behind global warming and doesn’t believe the consensus is as overwhelming as has been portrayed.

In any event, “science has never been advanced by consensus,” Linger said. “It’s been advanced by contrarian views that caused people to think.”

‘Science Compromised’

The West Virginia Science Teachers Association disagreed. “The science was compromised” by Linger’s changes, Libby Strong, the association president, said in a statement last month, before the board voted to revert to the original language. Strong called the changes a “misrepresentation of trends in science.”

To Hoyos, the Climate Parents founder, the backlash recalls efforts by conservatives in the 1980s and 90s to block schools from teaching evolution, or at least place creationism on equal footing. Where that movement was rooted in religion, climate skeptics often cite economic concerns -- the fear that local industries like West Virgina’s coal mines and Wyoming’s oil and gas drillers will be harmed by greenhouse-gas restrictions.

“There’s this ethical breach when you have political leaders who support the fossil fuel industry being OK with hiding scientific evidence from children,” Hoyos said. “It’s like saying because tobacco supported our economy in the 50s that people don’t deserve to know that smoking causes cancer.”

97 Percent

Mandating time for climate dissenters is misleading, she said: “On one side you have 97 percent of scientists and video of melting polar caps and on the other you have 3 percent of scientists with discredited theories. Why give them equal space?”

With polls showing more Americans worried about the climate, skepticism hasn’t always proven an easy win. In Wyoming, the Republican-controlled legislature, after taking criticism for its ban, is considering a measure to undo the move. The bill’s author, Republican state Representative John Patton, said the decision belongs with educators, not politicians. His legislation passed the state House last month and now faces a vote in the Senate.

In Texas, White said he has no problem with teaching climate change -- as long as schools present “both sides of the argument.” He also disputes the idea of a consensus among scientists, citing “hundreds of sources” online that raise questions.

Local Boards

The concerns mostly failed to move publishers during last year’s campaign. Two publishers, Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill Education, strengthened language about the risks of warming, after being pressured by activists on the other side of the issue.

Undaunted, White’s coalition is sending its textbook ratings to local school boards. Like-minded citizens in California, Ohio, Florida and seven other states have contacted him for advice on how to duplicate the effort, White said.

“Parents are concerned,” he said. “It’s an issue that’s not going to go away.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Nussbaum in Lima atanussbaum1@bloomberg.net