From the You can’t handle the truth! department comes this sad but predictable tale of closed minded pettiness. NSTA, is your position so strong and unassailable that you have to trample free speech rights to protect teachers from hearing alternate views? Does cancel culture now extend to the minds of educators?
From Greg Wrightstone, president of the CO2 Coalition who reports they were evicted from their paid and agreed to exhibit just minutes after the show opened. This picture shows them on their way out the door while the show is in progress.
He writes:
We had an exhibit booth and were attending the NSTA convention, but they were having none of it. We were thrown out of the NSTA annual convention yesterday for exposing their position on the teaching of climate change. Our science was not on the “Approved List” by them.
Their press release about attending:
Challenging the NSTA’s Position Statement on Climate Change
The CO2 Coalition has reviewed the National Science Teaching Association’s Position Statement on Climate Change and has found that it has serious problems, which we address in this assessment. Our objections to this document are many but can be separated into two major categories.
Our detailed rebuttal, Challenging NSTA Position Statement on Climate Change, was published March 23, 2023.
- Reliance on “consensus” science and a rejection of critical thinking skills and the scientific method.
- NSTA’s embrace of the hypothesis of “harmful man-made warming” despite its basis in flawed science and government opinions and its rejection of all contradictory science.
- A primary role for the NSTA should be to develop critical thinking skills for students and to instill in them knowledge and use of the scientific method.
- Students should be encouraged to review all facts on a subject (in this case climate change) and make up their own minds rather than be indoctrinated into an established political agenda.
Unfortunately, the NSTA has taken a strong position that is antithetical to the scientific method, critical thinking and open scientific debate. Its position is one of censorship of any scientist or science that does not support the NSTA-approved “science.” The NSTA Position Statement on Climate Change fails to delineate between real science and political science.
Background
In early 2021, a group of CO2 Coalition members decided to act on their concerns about the state of science education in America. They recognized that the teaching of science had strayed from the 400-plus-year-old scientific method and was less inclined to encourage inquisitiveness in students and more prone to require conformity to the opinions of teachers. At present, much of the instruction on climate change resembles an indoctrination into a political agenda rather than the provision of necessary tools for critical thinking.
It is our knowledge of science and commitment to the scientific method – not political narratives – that make the CO2 Coalition uniquely qualified to lead in the development of a fact-based program of climate-science education.
Read the Complete Report Here: Challenging NSTA Position Statement on Climate Change
The CO2 Coalition is attending and exhibiting our findings at the National Science Teaching Association’s Annual Convention in Atlanta, GA (March 23 to 25, 2023). We are proudly promoting the teaching of sound science and the scientific method to those who wish to indoctrinate our children and grandchildren.
[Corrections received by email from Gordon Fulks]
Let me correct a few things in this story (story tip). The NSTA did not throw out the CO2 Coalition until the second day of the conference.
They sent their Chief Operating Officer (Ryan Foley) to confront us. He indicated that the NSTA was not happy with the publications we were giving away. Those publications included both the article critical of the NSTA support for climate hysteria and the illustrated materials we are publishing for children, including “Once Upon a Time,” “Simon, the Solar-powered Cat,” and the “Magic Mirror.”
All are or will be available on our website (co2coalition.org) or a new CO2 Learning Center website that should be up and running in two weeks. All three illustrated stories are presently available on Amazon (Kindle). Teachers should be able to get copies for their students for free by contacting the Coalition.
When the Coalition’s Executive Director, Greg Wrightstone, tried to point out that we were only supporting the Scientific Method, the NSTA official drew a blank. We realized later that he had no educational background in the sciences or in education. That is very typical of so many who promote climate alarmism. They have no standing to do so. Our team included two PhD Chemists and our Executive Director with a Masters in Geology. The Coalition itself consists of about 125 high level scientists and economists. Furthermore, the most recent teaching standards for American children no longer emphasize the Scientific Method as the basis of science. That is a travesty in itself.
As the author of the children’s stories, I wrote to the NSTA asking what they found objectionable about stories that teach very basic science about carbon dioxide and climate. They have not replied. That likely says that they cannot defend their actions or are too embarrassed to do so. Before our team was thrown out of the conference on the second day, we enjoyed overwhelmingly positive feedback from the teachers in attendance and distributed many hundreds of our publications for children, far more than we expected to distribute. Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics) Board of Directors CO2 Coalition Arlington, VA USA
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As a retired teacher of high school chemistry and physics, who still substitute teaches in science classes, I have seen first hand some pretty non-scientific teaching going on. For one thing, it seems the use of lab work has declined significantly among new teachers entering the profession, although the University of California system still requires 20% of the curriculum to be lab-based for applicants to U. C. Substitute teachers often find a science teacher’s plan to incorporate showing a video, (I often used that type of plan as well for subs) but sometimes the science presented is pretty sketchy. Subbing for a chemistry/physics teacher, I once showed a video that spent an hour discussing ocean acidification, but did not once mention the actual measured change in pH. That the actual change was perhaps from pH 8.2 to 8.1 on average, which is better described as neutralization than acidification was not mentioned, nor that the daily and seasonal pH changes are an order of magnitude greater than that.
Also, while if a teacher in the UK uses Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth video in class, he or she is required by law to mention 9 cases in which the video is wrong, but mention of those errors is not required in the USA, or at least in California.
Al Gore’s Climate Change Science Fiction film is not fit for English school children.
Al Gore should be ashamed of himself, except he is an ego-maniac who doesn’t feel any shame.
We need to get that English judge to rule on all this other BS (Bad Science) that passes for climate science! 🙂
they should show that clip of Gore screaming that the oceans are boiling
Yeah, Al was quite agitated at the time of this utterance. It’s like he *really* believed it.
Al is a real piece of work.
The claimed historical pH of 8.2 is an assumption based on a model because actual measurements were deemed unreliable. I don’t believe any uncertainty envelopes are attached to either number. Therefore, we don’t really know whether there has been a 0.1 unit decline in the average pH, or if the difference has any statistical significance that would allow us to conclude that the samples come from different populations.
I thought the science was settled. 🙂
One more nail in the coffin of public school teachers. Their reputation and honor were scraping the bottom of the barrel before this outrage now it is worse.
You know with certainty that people adverse to your well-being are trying to ram a fiction down your throat to erode your rights, protections and freedoms, when they refuse any attempt to examine their arguments and evidence, and they work insidiously to silence any rational voices.
The NSTA has become a propaganda arm for globalist elites who want to wrest any influence parents and caregivers have over children’s education so as to ensure that critical thinking and awareness of truth become scarce if not extinct.
Now is the time to record and remember all the names of those who tried to silence truth so that the future will hold them accountable.
When in the Course of governmental affairs, it becomes possible for the ruling class to ignore the regulatory constraints which have limited them to being equals in common with the rest of society, and that they attempt to assume among the powers of the earth a separate higher station, outside of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that their deeds should be declared & recorded, such that they cannot avoid the future acts which may cause their head and body a just separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident ….
It is a fact, universally acknowledged, that a cult (as AGW surely is) when challenged resorts to extreme measures to shut down all criticism to ensure the overriding supremacy of its chosen narrative. Unfortunately, such extreme measure have the inverse benefit of highlighting the inadequacies of the supporting arguments whereupon the responses become increasingly strident and incredulous. As with previous cults eventually they become unsustainable and implode exposing the vacuity of the emperor’s wardrobe.
It’s been a great number of years since American students have been taught critical thinking skills. Instead of HOW to think, they are taught WHAT to think.
Some half a century (+) ago, I was friends with math teacher who had a master’s degree in math. At the time, my ‘freshman 101 introductory’ course in math was Calculus I, in order to obtain an engineering degree. The friend with the math degree had no calculus at all. I wonder if these ‘science teachers’ ever had the equivalent Physics 101 and Chemistry 101 (followed by 102 and 103) in order to get their teaching degrees. It looks like they didn’t.
I had to take numerous additional math courses before I could graduate. I also had Physics and Chemistry all through that first year. These three introductory curricula were called the ‘engineering dropout’ classes and only about 5% of us in that freshman class got through college with an engineering degree. Some of the ‘engineering dropouts’ went on to become teachers. From what it seems with today’s total lack of true science knowledge in the teaching community, it has gotten worse, not better.
The scientific method attempts to falsify all conjecture and hypotheses. That is exactly the objective. People who claim to teach that method should not be banning the participation of those who attempt follow the method. Thats bad juju for their organization.
Let me correct a few things in this story (story tip). The NSTA did not throw out the CO2 Coalition until the second day of the conference. They sent their Chief Operating Officer (Ryan Foley) to confront us. He indicated that the NSTA was not happy with the publications we were giving away.
Those publications included both the article critical of the NSTA support for climate hysteria and the illustrated materials we are publishing for children, including “Once Upon a Time,” “Simon, the Solar-powered Cat,” and the “Magic Mirror.” All are or will be available on our website (co2coalition.org) or a new CO2 Learning Center website that should be up and running in two weeks. All three illustrated stories are presently available on Amazon (Kindle), the first for free and the other two for $1.99. Teachers should be able to get copies for their students for free by contacting the Coalition.
When the Coalition’s Executive Director, Greg Wrightstone, tried to point out that we were only supporting the Scientific Method, the NSTA official drew a blank. We realized later that he had no educational background in the sciences or in education. That is very typical of so many who promote climate alarmism. They have no standing to do so. Our team included two PhD Chemists and our Executive Director with a Masters in Geology. The Coalition itself consists of about 125 high level scientists and economists.
Furthermore, the most recent teaching standards for American children no longer emphasize the Scientific Method as the basis of science. That is a travesty in itself.
As the author of the children’s stories, I wrote to the NSTA asking what they found objectionable about stories that teach very basic science about carbon dioxide and climate. They have not replied. That likely says that they cannot defend their actions or are too embarrassed to do so.
Before our team was thrown out of the conference on the second day, we enjoyed overwhelmingly positive feedback from the teachers in attendance and distributed many hundreds of our publications for children, far more than we expected to distribute.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Board of Directors
CO2 Coalition
Arlington, VA USA