EDUCATION
State board's global warming standards irk environmentalists
Textbook requirements question whether it exists but also push students to explore its implications.
By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, March 28, 2009
The State Board of Education on Friday adopted standards on the teaching of global warming that appear to both question its existence and prod students to explore its implications.
Standards are used to guide textbook makers and teachers.
Language that instructed students to "analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming," which had been offered as an amendment and was adopted unanimously in an initial vote Thursday, led to outrage among environmental groups.
"In a last-minute assault on science and sensibility, the board appears to be supporting its own ideological views rather than those of proven science," said Ramon Alvarez, a senior scientist with Environmental Defense Fund.
The chairman of the state board, Don McLeroy, called the standards "perfectly good."
"Conservatives like me think the evidence (for human contributions to global warming) is a bunch of hooey," McLeroy said.
But the state board approved standards that engage some of the underlying causes and effects of global warming, including one that calls on 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 another to "describe the effect of pollution on global warming, glacial and ice cap melting, greenhouse effect, ozone layer, and aquatic viability."
The current standards, which were adopted about a decade ago, barely touch on climate change.
"Asking students to independently discover the relationship between ice melting and global warming is important," said James Canup, executive director of the Texas League of Conservation Voters. "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."
asherprice@statesman.com; 445-3643
