Excerpt
SUMMARY: For the first time, new national educational standards for grades K-12 will link global warming trends to manmade emissions. Part of our Coping With Climate Change series, Hari Sreenivasan looks at the challenges teachers face when covering the topic of climate science in their classrooms.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And now to our series called Coping With Climate Change that examines how communities around the country are dealing with unfolding changes.
Tonight, Hari Sreenivasan focuses on the challenges of teaching about climate science.
Other significant excerpts
CHERYL MANNING, high school science teacher: They hear it on the news. They see it in the newspaper. They hear their parents talking about it. There are people who say that climate -- the climate may be changing, but it's not our fault, or the climate isn't changing at all; this is a natural cycle. There are all sorts of things that the kids hear. They want clarification.
CHERYL MANNING: I had students looking at data sets that were published online by NOAA and NASA and other international science organizations. And I had them comparing and looking at those and looking at projections and models, what were the models indicating.
And I had some parents come to me during parent-teacher conference, and they were very upset that I was teaching about this. And they referred to peer-reviewed sciences, the Kool-Aid of the left-wing liberal conspiracy. And it was at that point where I realized what I was up against with this group of parents, and I knew that I needed to get some help.
HARI SREENIVASAN: To help teachers respond to concerns from students and parents, Buhr and colleagues have developed climate change workshops, even curriculum and lesson plans on how to keep the science in the classroom and the political controversy out.
CHERYL MANNING: In the popular culture, the word theory is a weak concept. It's an idea. In scientific culture, the word theory is equivalent to the word survivor.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Science teacher Cheryl Manning says the distinction is important.
CHERYL MANNING: It is the idea that best explains a phenomenon and has had lines and lines of evidence supporting it, and it has been tested and tested and tested, and it survived all those tests.
ROBERTA JOHNSON, National Earth Science Teachers Association: The science classroom is about using science -- fundamental principals, fundamental principals of science and our ability to look at evidence and analyze it and draw evidence-based conclusions. It's not about talking about policy debates. It's not about whether something is socially acceptable. It's evidence.
COMMENT: The anti-global-warming crowd are in denial. They just do NOT understand the difference between climate and weather. That is, climate is global (the entire Earth) and weather is what happens in your backyard.
JAMES TAYLOR, Heartland Institute: We have seen that soil moisture globally has improved. We have seen that droughts have become less frequent and less severe. We have seen expansion of forests. We've seen crop production reach record levels.
We've seen tornadoes and hurricanes -- to the extent that we can ascribe trends, we've seen that they have become less frequent and less severe. Across the board, we've seen that warmer climate, warmer temperatures have always benefited humans, and continue to do so.
Boy, you talk about having your head in the sand. He needs to talk to the people in East Africa where they have been in drought for several continuous years (revers dry, no well water) or the people in the Indian Ocean whose islands have disappeared due to the rise in ocean level.
He also ignores, that IF the effects of Global Warming are true, the longer we wait the more expensive it will be to deal with the effects on our nation's economy. It's like having preventive health care vs having to use the Emergency Room.
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