NEWS

The UK Independence Party has promised it will ban the teaching of climate change in schools, if elected in May next year.

The party’s 2010 manifesto included a pledge to ban Al Gore’s Oscar-winning global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth from schools.

But this week UKIP Education spokesman MEP Derek Clark has said the party will go even further. Clark told Index on Censorship:

We will still ban Al Gore’s video for use in schools if I’ve got anything to do with it. I will not have much opposition within the party. It is, of course, not just this video which needs banning; all teaching of global warming being caused in any way by carbon dioxide emissions must also be banned. It just is not happening.”

Dr Nick Eyre, Jackson Senior Research Fellow in Energy at the ECI and Oriel College Oxford and Co-Director of the UK Energy Research Centre, said of the proposal: “It is anti-scientific nonsense – as well as a worryingly repressive approach to education. The very strong link between climate change and anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is overwhelmingly accepted by the global scientific community, and has been for at least 25 years.”

A recent IPCC report shows that scientists believe with 95% certainty that humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming. A 2013 study by UK Energy Research Centre, however, showed that 46% believe that climate change is ‘partly caused by human activity’, 22% believe that climate change is ‘mainly caused by human activity’ and another 6% believe that climate change is ‘entirely caused by human activity’. In total 74% of those surveyed believed that human activity is responsible for climate change.

This article was posted on 15 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org

An earlier version of this article stated: “95% of scientists believe that humans are the ‘dominate cause’ of global warming.” It has been edited to: “scientists’ believe with 95% certainty that humans are the ‘dominate cause’ of global warming.

This article was amended to include the total number of people in the UK Energy Research Centre study who believe that human activity is responsible for climate change.