WV Legislature Blocks New Science Standards, Because Global Warming, Also Freedumb Too Derp
Beginning this summer, public school students in West Virginia were supposed to learn about human-induced climate change three times — in sixth-grade science, in ninth-grade science, and in a high school elective course on environmental science. Now, it’s unclear whether students will learn about climate change at all.
That’s because the West Virginia House of Delegates voted last Friday to block new science standards from being implemented for at least another year, due to the fact that they mention climate change as a man-made problem. Proponents of the delay, which was introduced as an amendment to a larger education bill, argued that the new curriculum would have presented the science of climate change without properly reflecting both sides of the global warming debate.
“In an energy-producing state, it’s a concern to me that we are teaching our kids potentially that we are doing immoral things here in order to make a living in our state,” Delegate Jim Butler, (R) told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. “We need to make sure our science standards are actually teaching science and not pushing a political agenda.” Butler also worried that the new curriculum would “expect students to believe” in global warming and “prove it with evidence.”
If Butler’s concerns were realized, West Virginian students would join an overwhelming number of scientists, governments, and businesses, all of which accept climate change as a man-made phenomenon driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Among publishing climate scientists, there is a 97 percent consensus that humans are responsible for global warming. That roughly means that scientists are as certain about the relationship between humans and climate change as they are about the relationship between cigarettes and lung cancer.
EDIT
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/02/29/3754731/west-virginia-house-halts-science-standards-over-climate/
= new reply since forum marked as read
