Publishers remove confusion about climate change from Texas textbooks

The Texas state school board has been notable for its shaky grasp of science, mostly targeting the presentation of evolution in science textbooks used by the state. This has posed problems for the nation as a whole, as the size of Texas' large student population ensures that publishers try to structure all their textbooks so they can be approved by Texas—including ones that get used elsewhere.

That history made people very nervous when it became apparent that some of the social studies textbooks submitted for approval in Texas had stumbled into a scientific topic—and fallen flat on their face. The topic was climate change, and the textbook writers did things like present the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as being functionally equivalent to the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that has in the past questioned whether second-hand smoke was dangerous. Other texts confused carbon dioxide with ozone-destroying chemicals or suggested that there is widespread disagreement over the cause of recent warming.

Normally, the thing to do in cases like this is to inform the school board of the problems and get it to mandate changes in the textbooks. But given past history, many people were not optimistic this would be a fruitful approach. Groups concerned with science education, including the Texas Freedom Network and National Center for Science Education, instead took a two-tracked approach, highlighting the problems to both the board and the textbook publishers themselves. They also brought in organizations like the American Geophysical Union and American Association for the Advancement of Science.