Story submitted by Eric Worrall | 
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has published a critique which expresses deep concerns about the latest McGraw Hill Education, World Cultures & Geography [Teacher Version] (Grade 6) school textbook. According to the critique;
“This book has a deeply concerning section comparing the Heartland Institute with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in relation to climate change.
This misleads students as to good sources of information, pitting an ideologically driven advocacy group (Heartland Institute) that receives funding from Big Tobacco and polluters against a Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientific body (IPCC).
The IPCC reports utilize hundreds of scientific experts and reviewers, as well as thousands of peer-reviewed articles. The Heartland Institute has no such expertise nor do they utilize the depth of research available in this area. Independent of the content area, this is a completely inappropriate presentation of the information or comparison of sources.
Specifically; “This entire section is misleading. 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.”
Source: http://ncse.com/files/Texas-social-studies-report-2014.pdf
As support for this claim, the NCSE cites a paper which references Naomi Oreskes, who is a well known objective activist scientist, and a deeply flawed paper whose lead author was John Cook, the cartoonist who runs Skeptical Science.
The link to the Cook paper is broken, the link they were trying to provide is this one. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
My thought – this effort by the NCSE deserves an “F”. Not only did they not bother to proof read their own paper, they also obviously didn’t perform any serious background research on the activist sourced material they provided, as the supporting evidence for their critique of Texan education policy.
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The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has published a critique which expresses deep concerns about the latest McGraw Hill Education, World Cultures & Geography [Teacher Version] (Grade 6) school textbook.
Quick question: is the title of the textbook really “World Cultures & Geography”? Because the image accompanying the article shows “World Geography & Cultures.” Might that be a totally different textbook? The NatGeo logo on the image surprised me since I expected NatGeo to slam the Heartland Institute, not endorse it as a reputable source of info.
Yup.
Which one (IPCC or Heartland) has made climate predictions that have turned out to be closer to the truth?
This is either yet another attempt at indoctrination via gatekeeping, or else it is impossibly naive. Al Gore won the Nobel Prize too. Someone tell me how his divinity training made him an expert in climate sciences.
Moral of the complaint – when it comes to holding up as a paragon people who have no idea what they are talking about…it’s okay when WE do it.
Maybe Al thinks he’s a god!!
Know who else won a Nobel Peace Prize?
Yassir Arafat.
Draw your own conclusions.
Also B.H.O., a community organizer/lawyer……….just saying.
@ur momisugly dlbrown –
Did he? Or did Hope and Change win it?
As an aside, Al’s divinity training consisted of only a year at Vanderbilt. I believe he flunked out. Obviously he never got to the prognostication courses.
You have to love the hypocrisy of them attacking Texas for suggest schoolbooks should not be dogmatic and should encourage their reader to think for themselves on a subject. When these same people attack Texas and others for schoolbooks that are dogmatic and discourage people thinking for them. Of course as ‘the cause ‘ is the true unquestionable religion you can understand why they take that view.
Oh NO it’s worse than we thought. Consensus is now at 97% squared.
I know where you are going on this but 97% squared =94.09%
A few more iterations and the number will be closer to accurate.
Sorry, but in climate science 97%^2 is 9,409.00%
I am ashamed now to have been a member of NCSE, back in the day when they fought against young-Earth creationism being taught in schools. They’ve really gone over to the other side; the CAGW meme is the modern young-Earth creationism, a faith-based dogma.
Funny enough, the origin of this earth will always be more of a philosophical argument than a scientific since observed proof will always be hard to come by (pending any Tardis). I would much rather see our children taught the scientific process down on the basic level and leave all this faith-based dogma including “The Big Bang” for philosophy class. Honestly “that’s how things evolved” has become as much a faith based answer as “God created it that way.”
Thank-you very much. My biology training (pre-med) taught me that teleology was bad (non) science, and yet my kids are taught so many examples of teleology in science class it makes me sick. Teach what you KNOW is true and can prove, not what you imagine is true and can make a good story out of.
There is nothing faith based about the creation of planets, the big bang or evolution. There is evidence that supports the theories where religion does not have any evidence, in fact in religion you’re told that you don’t need evidence, just faith.
That is a poor understanding of faith. Yes you can have blind faith, but that happens outside religion as much as in it. Faith in a person implies some understanding of that person. Many people look at the earth and all the convenient laws and complexities and see a God or other intelligence that designed it on purpose (or a whim according to rw) and that combined with a purpose for existence is enough evidence to sustain that faith. So yes there is faith in believing the big bang and evolution just as in anything, because you are still putting faith in the people that have done the studies and the evidence shown. As you pointed out, both are still theories, so still no factual proof. The cricket link provided earlier is a great example. People putting much faith in nature overcoming a problem through evolution when there are still other explanations unexplored. Yes, inbreeding could be considered a form of evolution, but not in the sense the link is trying to pass.
On a side note any religion telling you to just take it on faith without understanding is selling something and followers should tread very carefully.
Why are EITHER mentioned in a book on Geography and Culture?
prjindigo: The ‘consensus is even mentioned in a beef they have about a 5th grade text book: Pearson, Social Studies K-5 (English) !!!!
” Over 97 percent of climate scientists are in agreement that human activity is driving much of the climate change that we are now experiencing, and which will grow in severity. Statistically, we can predict that there will be more heat waves, floods and droughts and a rise in global sea level as the heat in the atmosphere and in the oceans increases,”
Catherine Gautier, UCSB Professor of Geography
http://www.noozhawk.com/article/letter_to_the_editor_a_climate_scientists_perspective_on_measure_p
Misconceptions About the Greenhouse Effect
” we comment on the potential role of these students in public decision making related to global climate change,… Our work (Rebich and Gautier, 2005) included a thorough analysis of conceptual change that occurred as a result of ESS instruction in the form of a mock summit class. The goal of this role-playing class (Gautier and Rebich, 2005) is to review the basic scientific concepts underlying climate change”
http://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/files/nagt/jge/abstracts/gautierv54p386.pdf
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/catherine-gautier.html
(Conceptual change taught in upper division UCSB Geography course. Gautier’s publications include analysis of conceptual change in middle school grades.)
It’s the Common Core concept. Everything has to include references to climate change.
How else to get folks to want $0.40 / kWh electricity? Lessons in hellfire and brimstone to come.
Good question I have often wondered why National Geographic talks about global warming at all.
Questioning CAGW??
Well done Texas, way to go.
Is it really a surprise that one of the USA’s biggest conservative bastions is waking up?
well, at heartland institute 100% of people “agree that human activity is responsible” (*), so why do NCSE bother ?
😉
(*) according to an article at WUWT i may find some day
Nature is responsible for 97% of atmospheric CO2. 100% of Heartland agree that any warming effect man is having can’t be extrapolated from the noise and therefore must be minute and nothing to worry about. Straighten facts please paqyfelyc.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/11/the-climate-consensus-is-not-97-its-100/
Gosh, teaching the concept that pupils should use a variety of sources! Whatever next?
“The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has published a critique which expresses deep concerns …”
Any national organization connected with the public schools or the government (however loosely) will sooner or later become a propaganda organ for the state. That is just the natural way of things. The NCSE has never been an advocate for the scientific method and open debate. It never will be, as that is not its purpose.
There is no “consensus” but even if there were a “consensus” it would not matter since we seek the best approximation of the truth and not a happy consensus. As far as I know, the consensus that the planets revolved about this planet rather than the sun was in effect and dominate for centuries; yet it turned out to be wrong.
Mark-in 2010 the University of Virginia, Arizona State, the Boston Museum of Science, the Colorado School of Mines, and National Academy of Engineering all established an NSF-funded Climate Change Educational Partnership. It is determined to force schoolchildren into believing in the need to engineer human systems like cities, economies, and how individuals live in order to combat Climate Change. Climate Change must be accepted as a cross-cutting concept, not questioned. Yesterday the NAS released a report from three related workshops called “Climate Change, Engineered Systems, and Society.”
Climate Change-the ultimate excuse for social engineering, industrial policy, behavioral planning, and especially taxpayer money to cronies. The poor schoolkids are being led to believe the world works like a videogame’s virtual reality. In fact the NSF loves to cite River City as a new way to teach science.
A key aspect of the current K-12 education reforms known as the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards, which are so closely aligned with Texas’ TEKS and its STAAR assessment that they are using Understanding By Design like the other states to teach the ‘knowledge’ (Texas went to outcomes-based education in the late 80s. It did not need to join these initiatives to get to performance standards) is that students should learn to discern between ‘good’ sources of information and inferior sources.
Now since knowledge is so underplayed, this plays out in training students to defer to the presence of professional degrees (are they an ‘expert’ is the question asked?) and other symbols of authority. Those sources get accepted as authoritative and there is little independent knowledge to dispute what is asserted or to challenge inapt comparisons. Course materials in both the hard sciences like AP Biology and the social sciences and history are just full of comparisons between closed physical systems like heart-pulmonary to how weather or social systems must work. I call it the inapt comparison problem and it intentional and omnipresent.
Textbooks in general are going away. The desire now in K-12 is for ‘guided experience.’ http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/history-as-psychological-reality-transformation-tool-must-begin-well-before-high-school/ explains that and the 4th Grade science lesson training students to analogize from weather systems to ecosystems. The AP Biology example is from a reader who wrote in after Parents Night at her private school was just full of the inapt comparisons to social systems.
Heh, Bad Poets Society.
================
The Early Bird has caught enough worms to cover a multi-day fishing tournament.
Meanwhile down under the usual suspects are going catatonic before the next Big Climate knees up-
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/climate-council-report-predicts-rising-sea-levels-will-cause-200-billion-of-damage-to-coastal-infrastructure-by-2100/story-fni6uo1m-1227061529903
You Texans are not going to have disappearing beaches as big as ours 😉
Ah, the NCSE. During my internet wanderings I found an outrageous piece on their site about their pressing for a new European initiative promoting “climate literacy” for children, wrote a blog post.
http://kdkadaka.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/inaccurate-intolerance-instillation-instigated/
Who can not like their organization, read what they say on their About page:
Powerful stuff. And they support the absolute truth that is science, so you know all of that must be true.
Oh yes, it must be true…especially their reliance on CO2 as the “prime driver of climate”. And yet while the Pause is approaching 18 years, the global level of CO2 has increased about 20%. Apparently, the NCSE’s “science” doesn’t consider correlation or they’d not make such an unfounded assertion.
A propagandist organisation referencing a blatant propagandist for authority. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Pointman
I wonder if their criticism would be quite as childishly scathing and/or indignant if it was one of the hundreds of AGW advocacy groups…
In case anyone thinks what I just described is just a Texas or US problem, UNESCO makes teaching these strategies of which sources to defer to and which to ignore a key component of K-12 education itself going forward. It is embodied with the acronym MIL–Media and Information Literacy. It was all laid out about a year ago at an international conference in Sakhalin, Russia called “Internet and Socio-cultural Transformations in Information Society.”
The same MIL focus was also a key component of the Aspen Institute report that came out this summer “Learner at the Center of a Networked World.” Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush chaired that Task Force.
Both the Sakhalin Conference and the Aspen report are primarily focused on changing student values and ways of thinking. Everyone these days seems determined to prevent K-12 education from creating any more Axemaker Minds, using my favorite metaphor.
The Early Bird has found the Worm.
===========
Yes except unfortunately this is all NOT just a metaphor or the virtual reality of a videogame.
Eugenie Scott, head of the NCSE, is a bigshot in one of the soi-dissant capital-S “Skeptical” organizations, which have also nailed their colors to the mast of this climate-change ship of fools. Bon voyage to the bottom of the sea!
I’ve always found it odd that “skeptical groups” would be believers.
That one paragraph is appaling but this sentence I find especially egregious and disgusting.
“And like evolution, the science of climate change is remarkably clear and well-supported.”
Climate science is no where near as well supported as Evolution science. Worse it is implying that people who disagree with bizarre, rationally disputed or unsupported claims of the climate field are the same people who disagree with evolution on the basis of religious texts.
It is outrageous and abusive behaviour. If a piano fell on their heads from a tall building I would not weep.
The current climate alarmist position and that of the hard-core Darwinists are very similar. In both cases they claim a total consensus and yet there is much controversy in both disciplines. We talk about the controversies in climatology here and elsewhere often, but evolutionary theory also has controversies. People who believe that life has evolved may disagree on how that happened and often do just that. Likewise most people believe that certain gases in the atmosphere have warming and cooling effects but disagree on the extent of these effects.
So now we want to teach our young to obey authority, to not even question authority, and to worship those good things that the “experts” bring to us. Hmmmmmm. I bet Stalin is looking on and feeling very envious of the modern rulers.
Nonsense. You’re saying Dobzhansky and Fisher and Mayr are like Jones and Wrigley and Mann? Have you actually read anything in the field of evolution? Say, for example, (at the very least) a recent textbook such as the one by Futuyma?
Do you think that the fact that the genetic code is universal is an accident? What about the prokaryotic features of chloroplasts and mitochondria, is that just happenstance? What about differences along clines, should we just ignore that? What about dominance wrt alleles? What about biogeographical patterns such as the fact that islands at the same latitude always have species that resemble those of the nearest continent – is that an accident? a whim of the Creator? Etc., etc. etc.
And yet there is a range of views on evolution as there is on climate change, based on the level of proof and how far you take the evidence that exists. Can one believe in evolution without believing that men evolved from the primordial soup? Yes, and that does not make you an idiot. I believe that is analogous to agreeing that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and causes some incremental warming, but it does NOT mean that CO2 is the control knob of global climate. Don’t take the evidence too far in either case, thank-you. I require a higher level of proof.
Even if they could perform an experiment showing that life came from a soup of suitable chemicals, that soup would still have been created by an intelligent being, and would not be accidental. We do genetic engineering all the time now, and in some future time where this technology was forgotten, how would they explain the evolution of things we created for fun, like glow in the dark trees and fish?
One of my big concerns is that our development as a species is treated in a binary way ie it was all evolution or all pre-programmed by an intelligent being? What about a compromise? All the various breeds of dogs were created by people selecting for traits they liked. Those breeds are not random accidents even though the genes that made them possible might have been.
It seems people need an absolute explanation when none is possible with what we currently know. The bible may have the creation events in the correct order, but it tells us nothing about the processes used. Knowing how the processes worked enables us to then extend them into useful applications we can use now.
I believe science and religion can live harmoniously together if both don’t take themselves too seriously.
what about all of us who disagree with evolution on the basis of scientific evidence (which happens to align well with the Bible)? Where can we be lumped?
It’s evil; the essential factor in the fabrication of AGW, a strawman to disguise the depopulation agenda that’s been promoted by a psychopathic elite since the 1960’s.
“If a piano fell on their heads from a tall building I would not weep.”
—————————————
Why do you hate pianos?
It’s nice to see a science body such as this call for listening to authority over teaching kids the basics of scientific method. /sarc
I wonder what kind of inquisitive minds that would produce? Or what kind of minds do they want to produce?
The solution would seem to be for parents to have a big input into their children’s education. Discuss this stuff with them. Argue the points. Get them to check stuff out themselves. Tell them some of the stuff they are being taught is not without controversy. Tell them ONLY sceptics have an inquiring mind. The others just soak up the formula. Most have let this babysitting institution for K-12 have its way. Sinistras, recognizing this, have taken the opportunity to subvert the minds of the next generations. It’s often pointed out by alarmists that sceptics are a bunch of old duffers. Gee, I hope we haven’t left it too late to open the minds of young folk to scepticism. Anyway, “Don’t mess with Texas” seems to be still a valid notice.
The problem with this suggestion is that most of the parents I have dealt with will defer to authority faster than their children do. Between working hard (most of the parents who work, work 60+ hours per week) and struggling to keep their homes together most people do not have time to keep up with the details of all this research, so whatever was shouted at them from the CBS radio news at the top of the hour is all they know about the issues. Most people don’t understand enough world history to keep up with current events, let alone enough science knowledge to grasp more than the alarming concepts. In many cases they don’t even understand the reason, they just know they are supposed to be afraid. People make STUPID political decisions when they are scared, and that is what this whole scam is about.
Owen I know it ain’t easy. I still work 10 years after retirement age, partly because of things I felt I had to do for my children’s education. Young parents today, too, have been educated in an earlier version of the same stuff -this was the reason for my second last sentence. But something must be done. Get your kids into chess clubs, at least discuss what they learned in school. At least tell them not to believe everything they hear or read and pick an example. You are only reinforcing the idea of an incubator to shape your kids.
Gary,
I know. I did that with my children, but I am a retired Intelligence Analyst who was paid for years to keep on top of the scientific and political events around the world. For me, it was easy to counter the misinformation coming in the curriculum, but most people don’t have these sorts of resources. (My wife and I may have overdone it a bit – our oldest came home from school one day and said “why should I listen to any of my teachers? If I want to know something, I can just come home and ask you and mom.” My wife is a historian and librarian to add to my expertise.)
What we need is some sort of Cliff’s Notes for the marginally interested to get these busy people up to speed. It really isn’t apathy or lack of intelligence on most of these people’s part, it is just that they are so caught up in living their own lives that they don’t make time to look at data and read a bunch of graphs. The statistical arguments glaze many of their eyes over, as the schools don’t even cover the normal distribution, let alone a fractal one and why the tests applied should be different. This is a steep hill we are trying to overcome, but somehow, we need someone who can break this down in layman’s terms the way Feynman did for his physics lecture series, and in small enough chunks to digest in a five to ten minute session.
The “Don’t Mess with Texas” slogan originated with an anti-littering campaign about thirty years ago. This slogan was supposed to stop people from tossing trash out of their car windows. It did not work so well and Texas is still littered.
“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.”
This is a flat out lie.
97% scientists agree on vague and various things, hard to tell what, since the Cook paper is so shoddy. But that human activity is [solely] responsible for climate change is not one of them.
I do not know if the NCSE is that ignorant or purposely blatantly lying. Either way I have to question the motives for such mis-information. Have they devolved to simply a propaganda tool for a political cause?
So much for higher education.
“they also obviously didn’t perform any serious background research on the activist sourced material they provided”
Nor apparently on the IPCC…
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
NCSE is a joke. Kudos to Texas.
BTW, is this current? http://glencoe.mheducation.com/sites/0078745292/index.html
The book is copyrighted 2008. There does seem to be a 2012 edition.
I am certain the text book sellers like to keep Texas happy, as Texas is their biggest customer.
Again, NCSE is simply and advocacy group. They are dangerous in my opinion.
“The IPCC reports utilize hundreds of scientific experts and reviewers, as well as thousands of peerNreviewed articles. The Heartland Institute has no such expertise nor do they utilize the depth of research available in this area.”
This claim is false. The Heartland Institute produces reports written by the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change. These reports are written by scientists, they reference only peer-reviewed literature (NB: the IPCC reports include gray literature) and they are as extensive and detailed as the IPCC reports. The difference is that they include the evidence which is contrary to the current paradigm, which the IPCC deliberately excludes.
“……pitting an ideologically driven advocacy group (Heartland Institute) that receives funding from Big Tobacco and polluters…..”
One of the few good things to emerge from the Peter Gleick “Fakegate” affair was that the funding sources of the Heartland Institute were revealed in the documents he obtained by criminal deception. These showed that the Heartland Institute is not funded by big tobacco or major oil companies. It was probably this embarrassing discovery which necessitated the faking of the “strategy document”.
Enough other commenters have referred to the ridiculous claims of a 97% consensus.
Indeed it should be embarrasing enough that the critic even cites “that receives funding from Big Tobacco” because it has no bearing whatsoever on the issue at hand. Big Tobacco doesn’t give a s— about climate change.
The fact that the claim is verifiably untrue is incidental to me.
“against a Nobel Peace PrizeNwinning scientific body (IPCC).”
(check spelling above)
Dare anyone question the credentials of any past winners, IPCC, Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, EU, UN, …
The NCSE has absolutely zero influence on what happens in my science classroom, jes’ sayin’. They jumped the shark long ago.
Encouraging news. I look at the teachers and students at public school with sympathy for the bill of goods pushed on them by arrogant fools.