US teachers offered support for climate change lessons

Suzanne Goldenburg in the Guardian (UK) writes about some welcome help in resisting the onslaught of climate ignorance in the US: An organisation that has championed the teaching of evolution in America's schools is offering support to teachers who have come under attack for lessons on climate change.

The National Centre for Science Education (NCSE), which has worked for 30 years to keep evolution in the classroom, said it will begin offering teachers advice on how to deal with students, parents, and even school authorities demanding they drop classes on climate change. "We have been getting anecdotal reports for a couple of years now of teachers getting hammered for teaching climate science – just like they did for teaching evolution," said Eugenie Scott, director of the centre.

The new initiative launches on 16 January – in the throes of a Republican primary contest in which candidates have fallen over each other to discredit climate change, or the link to human activity. Until now, the campaign against climate science has been conducted mainly at the university level. Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, is pursuing the climate scientist Michael Mann through the courts, to gain access to his email and other work documents.

...In the last two years, however, the NCSE has registered a crossover effect, with opponents of evolution also taking on climate science. "Evolution is still the big one, but climate change is catching up," Roberta Johnson, director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association (Nesta), told Science earlier this year...

This is a recreated vector image in SVG. The original "Human_evolution_scheme.png" was made by José-Manuel Benitos. The following was stated by the original author: "Simplified scheme of human evolution, it does not try to be trustworthy, but a symbol of this process". This version by M. Garde, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license