Two years ago I wrote about a nascent alliance between people who oppose teaching evolution in the schools and those who oppose teaching about the role of human activity in climate change.

National Center

for Science Education

The movement manifested itself most strikingly in bills introduced in state legislatures demanding that science educators in public schools give equal time to alternative theories on both or at least present dissenting theories. But because the science underlying alternative theories is deficient, many educators argued that such legislation was simply a back door to teaching religion in science classes.

The National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group in Oakland, Calif., monitors legislation and local school board actions that are potentially threatening to the teaching of evolution. It also acts as a resource and adviser for science teachers who encounter problems with students, parents or supervisors on the issue. Climate change educators had no similarly devoted resource — until now.

On Monday, the center announced that it was putting climate change under its umbrella as well. Eugenie C. Scott, the group’s executive director, cited a rise in “creationist-like tactics being used in the attack on climate education.”



Dr. Scott said national surveys of science teachers indicated that “one-third or more of their teachers have experienced some kind of push-back on the teaching of climate change” — everything from demands by education board members that climate change skeptics debate a climate scientist in class to objections by parents to the screening of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary about global climate change.

She said she anticipated that more such incidents would become known now that teachers have a central place to report them.

Her group decided to take up the issue after concluding no one else was tackling the climate change piece, she added.

“Our ecological niche is that we help teachers deal with the political and social problem involved with the teaching of evolution,” Dr. Scott said. “What we are really good at are the local controversies and helping teachers resolve them. And now we will bring that expertise to climate change.”