As we noted yesterday, evolution wasn’t the only target of social conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education this week. New public school science curriculum standards approved by the board also weaken instruction on climate change.
Board Chairman Don McLeroy told a reporter that he thinks the standards, including a measure suggesting there is no scientific consensus on global warming, “perfectly good”:
Conservatives like me think the evidence (for human contributions to global warming) is a bunch of hooey.
As with evolution, however, the mainstream scientific community thinks McLeroy’s position is “hooey.”
Changes in the atmosphere, the oceans and glaciers and ice caps now show unequivocally that the world is warming due to human activities, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in new report released today in Paris.
The IPCC, which brings together the world’s leading climate scientists and experts, concluded that major advances in climate modelling and the collection and analysis of data now give scientists “very high confidence” – at least a 9 out of 10 chance of being correct – in their understanding of how human activities are causing the world to warm. This level of confidence is much greater than the IPCC indicated in their last report in 2001.
Climate change isn’t one of the issues the Texas Freedom Network follows closely. But Chairman McLeroy’s comment reveals precisely the problem we are working to overcome: ideologues trying to promote personal and political agendas over honest science, research and facts in public school classrooms.
“Conservatives like me think the evidence (for human contributions to global warming) is a bunch of hooey.”
There’s what blows my poor little occasionally rational mind – that listening to demagogue right-wing clowns like Rush Limbaugh sling their antiscience takes the place of reading actual scientific evidence. The IPCC, despite McLeroy’s and Rush’s claims to the contrary, is not a huge cell of commie freedom-hating pinko gay baby-killing libruls out to invent ways to bring about the fall of Exxon, Christianity, and Amurrica. They really do have the science! It gets published after it’s peer-reviewed!
And it’s so bizarre how issues get bundled – right-wingism with anti-evolutionism, global warming denialism, and often HIV/AIDS denialism. I wonder if Dr McLeroy wears rubber gloves when he pulls premolars?
I think it would be accurate to say that they have “a bazaar of the bizarre.”
Sorry, when it comes to global warming, a skeptical view of the debate comes down on the side of human causation being not likely. The IPCC is a governmental board, that solicited input from scientists, but drew up the conclusions at odds with many of the members. IPCC is not a good source.
The models upon which global climate projections are made are very complex, and some of the inputs are very poorly understood. How to handle clouds, for example. They warm at night, but cool during the day (very approximately). And the error bars around the projections are much larger than any of the changes projected.
Sorry, better evidence needed before we buy that one.