In America’s Science Classrooms, the Creep of Climate Skepticism

STEVE VERNON lives with his wife in a meticulously manicured country club community secured by watchmen in guard booths. He is also a leader of the Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative, 20,000-member organization based in Naples that spearheaded a successful grassroots effort last year to pass the nation’s first state bill allowing residents to demand a public hearing on local school textbooks. With its passage, parents of students — as well as anyone living in a given district — can challenge the books a school is using to teach their community’s children. It was a seemingly parochial piece of civic legislation, but it was one with potentially great implications for science education in the United States.

The creep of climate skepticism in American classrooms.

“Membership increased significantly when we started saying, ‘Look at what’s in our textbooks.’”

On a bright afternoon in September, as Hurricane Florence was lashing the shores of states just a few hundred miles north, Vernon, a retired IBM contracts negotiator and Marine Corps veteran, answered his door barefoot, wearing shorts and a green t-shirt. He had joined the Florida Citizens’ Alliance as a board member in 2012, initially inspired by the organization’s gun-rights advocacy. In fidelity to the IBM corporate ethos, Vernon and others in the Alliance recognized that the group wasn’t optimizing its potential appeal to the Florida citizenry, so they commissioned a team of consultants to evaluate the group’s strategy for obtaining new members.

Read the story from Undark by Sean Patrick Cooper - “In America’s Science Classrooms, the Creep of Climate Skepticism.”