MISEDUCATION

Kristin Del Real teaches a science class at Chico Junior High School in California. She invited the author to visit her sixth-grade class in March 2021. The lesson was on geologic time, part of a buildup to lessons on the atmosphere, solar radiation, the greenhouse effect, and weather systems.

Three years earlier, it had been much different. Her students had arrived in class grumpy, saying they didn't need to learn about global warming. She soon found a history teacher was showing them contrarian videos from YouTube which called global warming a hoax. When she confronted him, he said he just wanted his students to know both sides.

On a typical school day in the 100,000 public schools across America, 3 million teachers are imparting knowledge to 50 million students. There is no way to know exactly what they are learning about climate change (or any other subject), since no national curriculum exists. But the broad outlines can be determined. Examining scores of textbooks and visiting dozens of communities, the author built a 50-state database. What she found might well be termed a "ball of confusion" — the full spectrum of views on, and conflicts about, climate change.

This puzzled her, because there is nothing ideological about the actual science of climate change. But outside the rational domains of science, ideological and venal battles rage. The adult world is riven by these skirmishes about what is true, and kids cannot help but pick up misunderstanding. They are, in a very real sense, collateral damage in a war over the nature of the future.

As with the standards, so with the textbooks. Each state's board of education selects the K-12 textbooks for the entire state, and thus some state textbooks do better on climate change than others. Texas is the big wheel in the K-12 textbook market; in at least some cases, publishers will only produce one version of a textbook, and that one will be edited to sell in Texas. Three publishers dominate the textbook market: McGraw-Hill Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson K12 Learning (now Savvas Learning Company.) The author investigated McGraw-Hill's iScience textbooks thoroughly, tracking down editors and contributors, and established that a cautious approach to describing climate change is de rigeur. First published in 2012, iScience is McGraw-Hill's major project for middle-school classes over the past decade. Its three volumes cover the basics of biology, physical science, and Earth science.1

The author notes that an 8-page section on climate change begins well by saying, "Average temperatures have been increasing for the past one hundred years." But as to the causes of this warming, it offers: " 'Although many scientists agree with' the UN's conclusion that human industry has caused it, 'some scientists propose that global warming is due to natural climate cycles.' " (page 81) She goes on to highlight other examples of what she describes as providing "accurate information cloaked in irresolute language" — for example, that CO₂ "is suspected of contributing to global climate change." (page 82, italics hers).

This equivocation remains the norm in a majority of K-12 textbooks in US classrooms. The reason is that fossil-fuel companies and their front groups assiduously promote it. Chapter Six, "Selling Kids on Fossil Fuels," describes how determined and persistent their campaigns are, and Chapter Seven, "The Victory," concedes — honestly, I think — that they have held out long enough to have won the war for the minds of a majority of the nation's young people.

Chapter Seven begins by describing a Powerpoint presentation that includes these five bullet points:

• Arctic sea ice has decreased since 1970s
• But it was increasing from the 1940s to 1970s!
• IPCC based their conclusions on poor data and computer models that didn't work
• Arctic sea ice has been repeatedly advancing and retreating since long before the Bronz Age!
• It seems to be due to the Sun, not CO₂

The presentation took place at the Heartland Institute conference of 2019 in Washington, DC. To say the bullet points are misleading is an understatement. This chapter is the first mention of Heartland, which surprised me. I guess she chose to first explain the "big guns" among the denialists: the fossil fuels companies and the think tanks they supported. Heartland calls itself an "action tank," and while its influence does not match that of the agents we see in Chapter Six, it is far from negligible. With funding drawn from obscure sources, it has produced a variety of materials totaling some 4,000 pages and distributed them to perhaps 200,000 teachers.2

This chapter also describes a collaboration between the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and three industry-related groups: The American Petroleum Institute, ConocoPhillips, and the Environmental Literacy Council. These partnerships produced a series of educational materials with the familiar doubt-fostering slant.3 Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer, two men who appear in every campaign to distort science, appear again in this chapter.4 So do Myron Ebell, who was Trump's transition-team advisor on the EPA, and Steven Milloy, operator of the "Junk Science" Web site. Ms. Worth interviewed both men; they predictably minimized their own roles but maintained their anti-science positions.

The research done for this book demonstrates that Ms. Worth is a journalist par excellence.5 The book's contents clearly establish that the campaign against mitigation of climate change continues. For that reason I consider it a must-read. I found no grammatical errors. I can fault it for only two things: it seems a bit rushed, and it lacks an index. Because of that I don't consider it a keeper. I'll be passing my copy along, as I did with Mary Guay's book.

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This page was last modified on 14 July 2024.