New school board standards question climate change

Environmental groups upset

Steve Hawley, Apr 08, 09.

The Texas State Board of Education has adopted new teaching standards that seem to question the existence of global warming, according to the Austin American-Statesman. The specific language, which was approved unanimously, instructs students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.”

Don McLeroy, the chairman of the board, called the new standards “perfectly good” and stated that climate change “is a bunch of hooey.”

However, the standards also call for students to “analyze the empirical relationship between the emissions of carbon dioxide, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the average global temperature trends over the past 150 years” and to “describe the effect of pollution on global warming, glacial and ice cap melting, greenhouse effect, ozone layer, and aquatic viability.”

Several environmental groups condemned the new requirements. According to James Canup, executive director of the Texas League of Conservation Voters, “Asking students to independently discover the relationship between ice melting and global warming is important. But the main message coming out of there is that Texas is setting a bad standard by putting question marks next to global warming in the textbooks.”

Jim Marston, regional director of the Environmental Defense Fund, stated, “The tragedy of this ruling is that it places Texas children at a competitive disadvantage in science education, thus failing them as they prepare to compete in the global marketplace.”

The previous education standards, updated about a decade ago, largely ignored climate change.