Even as the federal government did its best to pretend that climate change didn't exist, the push against it expanded out into the school system this week. The state legislature in Idaho removed mention of climate change from its science education standards, even as a "think" tank sent school teachers copies of a text that promotes a plethora of non-scientific ideas about climate change.

On the federal level, it has been a bad couple of weeks for science, as the Trump administration released a budget outline that would dramatically slash spending on research and science-based policies. That was followed by an executive order that blocked the US government's first attempt to come to grips with the problem of climate change. Capping things off was a bizarre hearing held by the House Science Committee, in which the chair of the committee accused the entire climate science community of abandoning the scientific method. The new head of the EPA also decided to reject the advice of the agency's scientists, just for good measure.

Do not speak of it!

You might think that science would deserve a breather after all that, but it's not to be. Yesterday, Politico reported that the staff of the Department of Energy's Office of International Climate and Clean Energy have been told to avoid using the term "climate change" at all. While a DOE spokesman denied that this was a formal policy, the directive allegedly was handed down in a meeting. Staff was told that the term would cause a "visceral reaction" among the new senior staff, including Department head Rick Perry.

Meanwhile, the attempt to ignore the reality of climate change spread to schools. In Idaho, legislators passed a resolution that removed five items from the state's science education standards. All of them were about humanity's negative impact on the environment, and the net result is to remove climate change from the teaching standards altogether.

Local coverage of the debate over the move suggests at least some of the opponents of the science standards felt that the negatives of the discussion of human impact needed to be balanced by some positives. But as 59 Representatives voted in favor of removing mention of climate change, it's probably safe to assume some of them voted because they don't believe it exists.

Message from the Heartland

The Heartland Institute is certainly an organization that doesn't believe climate change exists. Or if it does, it will be mild. And anyway, CO 2 is plant food, so it'll be good for us to put lots more in the atmosphere. The fossil-fuel-funded think tank has used all of those arguments and more over the years and suggested that if you disagreed with them, you were probably a fan of the Unabomber.

Back in 2012, an environmental researcher named Peter Gleick impersonated someone from the Heartland Institute and obtained some of their internal documents. Along with details on how the think tank spends its money was the information that it was working on a school curriculum to get across its perspective on climate change. Now, half a decade later, PBS' Frontline is reporting that the curriculum effort is finally being rolled out. The first step? Mailing 25,000 copies of a Heartland-produced text out to US school teachers along with a video for use in the classroom.

The text is accompanied by a letter that reveals that Heartland has set up a "Center for Transforming Education." It asks the teachers to please reconsider the idea that the science about climate change is conclusive. Arguing that there's no scientific consensus, it urges the readers to "read this remarkable book," which arose out of Heartland's annual climate meetings.

The book (we're considering a review) is written by an odd assortment of characters. One of them is Craig Idso, of a group called the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, an institution notable for having a staff composed entirely of individuals named "Idso." Idso has done work for a variety of fossil fuel interests in the past. He's joined by Fred Singer, a scientist whose Wikipedia entry says he's notable for not believing in, well, anything: "his questioning of the link between UV-B and melanoma rates, and that between CFCs and stratospheric ozone loss, his public downplaying of the health risks of passive smoking, and as an advocate for climate change denial." The third author is Bob Carter, a now-deceased geologist who argued against the science behind human-driven climate change for decades.

These are not the sorts of authors that you'd want to write a science textbook. And, based on the bullet points at the start of the text, the results are about what you'd expect. The authors insinuate that the IPCC is corrupt: "Is not a credible source. It is agenda-driven, a political rather than scientific body, and some allege it is corrupt." And the book suggests the climate scientists that write the IPCC reports may be biased by factors that "include careerism, grant-seeking, political views, and confirmation bias." They repeat the falsehood that we've gone 18 years without any warming, and a number of others.

Based on its supposed "key findings," the book is a mess. But a recent survey found that about a third of teachers already teach that there's scientific controversy over the idea of climate change. So, it's likely to find a receptive audience among some teachers. And, in contrast to some of the misinformation regarding evolution, there's no issue of this being an unconstitutional imposition of religion that would force it to be removed from the classroom.