Proposed textbooks for schools in Texas contain a quantity of distortions and inaccuracies regarding climate science and climate change, experts charge in a report.
The report by the nonprofit National Center for Science Education says some of the textbooks the state is considering adopting for classroom use for social studies instruction contain an inaccurate presentation of scientific viewpoints on subjects including global warming and the part human activity plays in it.
"The scientific debate over whether climate change is happening and who is responsible has been over for years, and the science textbooks Texas adopted last year make that clear," says Minda Berbeco, NCSE programs and policy director. "Climate change will be a key issue that future citizens of Texas will need to understand and confront, and they deserve social studies textbooks that reinforce good science and prepare them for the challenges ahead."
Examples of inaccuracies cited by the NCSE are two books which present climate change and its causes as the subject of intense disagreement among world scientists, an assertion that goes against current scientific consensus.
"Scientists do not disagree about what is causing climate change, the vast majority (97 percent) of climate papers and actively publishing climatologists (again 97 percent) agree that human activity is responsible," the NCSE report states.
Another book under consideration includes a passage asserting that global warming's effect will last for just a limited number of years, to be followed by a cooling down as temperatures "even out."
The NCSE counters that, saying, "We are not aware of any currently publishing climatologists who are predicting a cooling trend where 'things will even out.'"
The report saved its strongest objection for a teacher's guide to one textbook that equated evidence presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with assertions made by the Heartland Institute.
While both organizations are presented in the textbook as legitimate scientific sources, the Heartland Institute is a think tank actively promoting skepticism on climate change, the NCSE says.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is generally recognized as the foremost international body investigating climate change, it said, for which it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Textbook publishers reacting to political pressure is another facet of the problem, says Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund.
"In too many cases we're seeing publishers shade and even distort facts to avoid angering politicians who vote on whether their textbooks get approved," Miller says. "Texas kids deserve textbooks that are based on sound scholarship, not political biases."
The state board of education is scheduling public hearings on the proposed books, which if adopted would be the first new social studies textbook in the state since 2002.
