Victory as WV School Board Allows Students to Debate Global Warming

The West Virginia Board of Education voted yesterday to put an end to months of controversy and open up teaching standards to permit students to consider both sides in the climate debate.

The Board voted 6-2 in favor of amending the standards to, as the Charleston Daily Mail reports, “allow students to use scientific models to form their own conclusions on the debated topic.”

“Supporters of the changes, including board members Wade Linger and Tom Campbell, argued that ‘science is never settled’ and that debate will lead students into a deeper understanding of the issue,” the paper added.

The vote represents a significant victory for student rights and for science.  The scientific method demands consideration of all data, without regard for the impact this may have on a cherished theory.  Open minds and free debate are essential to science and climate science is no exception.

When the Board voted in December to amend teaching standards to allow students to consider both sides in the climate debate, global warming pressure groups were apoplectic.

They ridiculed the Board and demanded it drop its revised standards and ban facts which question the man-made global warming narrative from the classroom.

CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker, Marc Morano, who edits CFACT’s Climate Depot news and information service and a contingent of students from CFACT Collegians chapters at the University of West Virginia and Marshall University testified before the Board, which voted in January to temporarily pull back the amended standards and further consider the matter.

CFACT also asked readers to submit comments to the Board and large numbers did.  Sources close to the West Virginia Board report that CFACT readers submitted thoughtful and persuasive comments that made a  significant impact on the proceedings.

The original standards forced students to only consider “rises” in temperature.  The amended standards substitute “changes” and permits students to consider “natural forces” as well as human activity when they study the climate.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would do the world a lot of good if it adopts similar standards.

Thanks to everyone who emailed their comment to the Board.  Your voices were heard.  Well done!

 

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Here’s the comment CFACT sent in

Subject line:

Protect students’ rights to all the facts about the climate

Email:

The Board of Education should ensure that its science standards permit students to examine and learn from all the data and analysis about global warming.

Must students be made ignorant of scientific data which shows that over the last 18 years climate computer models have consistently projected a warmer world than scientific observations record? Global warming has not occurred as projected during the entire lifetime of today’s school children.

Should the actual recorded data of world temperature, sea levels, storms, droughts, floods and all the rest be banned from our classrooms? Is comparing this data to the pronouncements of highly funded global warming pressure groups heresy?

Claims of an overwhelming scientific global warming consensus have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked.

The discussion is far from over. The true mind of science remains open to new data and alternative explanations. Whether and how much of the approximately 1/2 degree C of warming which occurred in the latter half of the 20th century is due to human industry has not been conclusively established. Neither have any of the incredibly expensive “solutions” proposed to address any global warming been shown to be meaningfully effective or worth their tremendous cost.

The Board owes every child an open-minded education free of indoctrination.