Texas wants to rewrite 6th grade school books to deny that climate change is caused by humans, falsely claiming scientific disagreement on the topic.
An entry in the Texas school texts making false claims about the driver of climate change Photograph: Texas Freedom Network
The proposed Texan science book writes “scientists…do not agree on what is causing the [climate] change”. Let’s take a moment to analyze the facts here. While climate change denial may be given a lot of air time, it has almost no scientific credibility. The measure of scientific credibility is peer reviewed articles, and out of the 13950 scientific articles on climate change published until 2012, just 24 reject climate change. The ratio has remained the same in the past 2 years. As for what is causing the climate change, that’s also pretty clear. Various studies have placed the certainty of humans causing climate change anywhere between 95% and 99.999%, so again there’s not much scientific controversy, despite what Fox News might tell you.
The fact that this textbook featured passages speaking against manmade climate change shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider that two staffers (not scientists) from the Heartland Institute worked on it. In case that doesn’t ring a bell for you, the Heartland Institute made some of the most grotesque advertisements in modern history, likening climate scientists to terrorists and mass murderers. Naturally, any research institute who worked on this should have been dissolved, but this wasn’t the case. The Koch brothers, two billionaires who made billions from the oil business and invest heavily in climate change denial continue to fund the Heartland Institute.
So the facts are clear – climate change is happening, and unless the entire scientific community is wrong and we’re missing something extremely big here, we are causing it.
“Scientists do not disagree about what is causing climate change, the vast majority (97%) of climate papers and actively publishing climatologists (again 97%) agree that human activity is responsible,” the report analyzing the book said.
Kathy Miller, the president of the Texas Freedom Network, suggested that the proposed text books had been deliberately misleading, in alignment to the rightwing parties (most notably the Tea Party). Furthermore, a majority of the rightwing Republicans in Congress are firm deniers of climate change, opposing any action. Many of them are also linked to major oil companies.
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