The Nation­al Cen­ter for Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion, where I work, has focused on fight­ing polit­i­cal attacks on evo­lu­tion edu­ca­tion for all of its 30 year his­to­ry. When the group was found­ed in the ear­ly ’80s, they did­n’t choose a name nar­row­ly focused on evo­lu­tion, hop­ing that they’d make quick work of cre­ation­ism and then move on to oth­er prob­lems in sci­ence edu­ca­tion. Today’s announce­ment that NCSE’s tak­ing on cli­mate change is a par­tial ful­fill­ment of that dream.

Cre­ation­ism is far from dead, of course. This year, leg­is­la­tors in Indi­ana have filed two bills attack­ing evo­lu­tion. One bill revives the sorts of laws NCSE was found­ed to fight, and would require stu­dents who learn evo­lu­tion also to be taught “cre­ation sci­ence.” The Supreme Court struck such laws down in 1987. Cre­ation­ists respond­ed at the time by talk­ing up “intel­li­gent design.” Despite a fed­er­al court’s rul­ing that teach­ing intel­li­gent design cre­ation­ism was a vio­la­tion of stu­dents’ rights under the First Amend­ment, leg­is­la­tors in New Hamp­shire and Mis­souri have already filed laws this year that would require or encour­age teach­ers to teach it.

Those big flare­up don’t keep us as busy as the dozens of local inci­dents that nev­er make the papers. A par­ent who won­ders why her kid is com­ing home with quizzes ask­ing about Adam and Eve. A teacher want­i­ng help explain­ing to par­ents why it’s impor­tant to cov­er evo­lu­tion at all. A prin­ci­pal look­ing to please every­one by sug­gest­ing that biol­o­gy class­es just cov­er “both sides.” It’s not sexy, but that’s the front line of the bat­tle over evolution.

In our time on those front lines, we keep hear­ing from teach­ers fac­ing sim­i­lar pres­sure about cli­mate change. We hear it from teach­ers in work­shops. We see it in news­pa­per sto­ries. We track leg­is­la­tion lump­ing evo­lu­tion and cli­mate change togeth­er as “con­tro­ver­sial” issues in sci­ence class, even though both are sup­port­ed by over a cen­tu­ry of unchal­lenged sci­en­tif­ic research. And as we looked around, we real­ized that, while lots of groups exist to encour­age good cli­mate change edu­ca­tion and pro­vide pos­i­tive con­tent for class­rooms, no one else was focused exclu­sive­ly on block­ing bad sci­ence from cli­mate change lessons. 

So today we offi­cial­ly launched a new ini­tia­tive on cli­mate change, includ­ing our new cli­mate change web­site sec­tion, and announced that we’d hired a spe­cial­ist in cli­mate change edu­ca­tion. Our exec­u­tive direc­tor, Genie Scott, and our new cli­mate guy, Mark McCaf­frey, spent most of last week and today in inter­views with the press. I was up until 5 am last night putting the last touch­es on the web­site. We’ve already fought back a few cli­mate change flare­ups (I was the inter­im cli­mate guy, and am glad to be pass­ing the reins to Mark), and we’re look­ing for­ward to hear­ing about more of them.

I’m not reveal­ing any inter­nal secrets by say­ing that we’ve all been tremen­dous­ly grat­i­fied by the pos­i­tive response we’ve got­ten from NCSE’s mem­bers and allies. Today’s response on Twit­ter seems entire­ly pos­i­tive, and if there’ve been crit­i­cal blog reports or news items, I’ve yet to find them. When Genie men­tioned this new ini­tia­tive at The Amaz­ing Meet­ing! last sum­mer, she got a spon­ta­neous ova­tion. Sci­en­tif­ic soci­eties and teach­ing soci­eties and envi­ron­men­tal groups, skep­tics and civ­il lib­er­tar­i­ans and sci­ence fans — every­one has been encour­ag­ing and sup­port­ive, even grate­ful. So thank you all for that.

It’s a big change, and inevitably we’ll get push­back. Some of our mem­bers may decide to with­draw their sup­port over this deci­sion. So it’d be great if those of you who do sup­port this exten­sion of our mis­sion would help make up some of those loss­es.

There’s a lot yet to catch up on. We’ve been track­ing anti-evo­lu­tion activ­i­ties for 30 years, the teach­ers know us and know to call us when they’ve got trou­ble, and we know what they’re fac­ing. We have to get a feel for the chal­lenges faced by cli­mate change edu­ca­tors, and we have to learn what state sci­ence stan­dards and text­books cov­er, and what sorts of pseu­do­science is being pushed into class­rooms. We need to build a new archive to match our rather spe­cial­ized col­lec­tion of evo­lu­tion books. We need to let par­ents and teach­ers know that we’re here to help them.

You can help with all of that. Not just by join­ing NCSE (though you should!), but by ask­ing your kids’ teach­ers (or your nieces and nephews, or what­ev­er) what the teach. There’s an exten­sive dis­cus­sion of ways teach­ers can teach cli­mate change well on the new web­site, and I’m sure Mark would appre­ci­ate feed­back from more teach­ers. There’s also a handy primer on the sci­ence behind cli­mate change, a dis­cus­sion of what cli­mate change denial is and how to respond to it, and sug­ges­tions on ways you can sup­port and defend cli­mate change edu­ca­tion. We hope you find the advice use­ful, and that you rec­om­mend it to others.

It’s an thrilling way to start the year, and I expect it’ll only get more exciting.

And, for what it’s worth, work­ing on this new web­site and the new ini­tia­tive more gen­er­al­ly is only one of the big pieces of news which has kept me away from blog­ging late­ly. More on that anon.