“What happened in the Education Committee was simply excluding five paragraphs from those standards which dealt only with the negative effects of humans on the environment,” Syme told weather.com in an email. “Teachers are not precluded from teaching about climate change but the Committee felt the standards should reflect not only the adverse effects of humans on the environment, but also what humans do to mitigate those effects. The paragraphs that were excluded had standards that only dealt with the negative effects.”

Syme was recently elected to his position and made his living as a real estate broker and owns a small farm. He also is a retired Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq.

“I’m better known as Scott Syme the Science Guy, since I was the one that made the motion on this,” he joked in the House while making the case to remove the standards, according to the Spokesman-Review. “The standards said humans are bad – basically, that’s what it said, humans are bad, didn’t talk about any mitigating factors, any science to describe what we can do to make things better.”

Ryan Kerby, R-New Plymouth, who prior to joining the legislature served for 21 years as a rural school superintendent, also defended the omitted standards.

“I would like the climate change/global warming aspect of the standards be more inquiry based, like the rest of the science standards,” Kerby said in an interview with weather.com. “Let students do research, gather data, have discussions/debate in class and form their own conclusions.”

Kerby said that the representatives removed the climate change standards “to make a point.”

“Our expectation is that they will bring the standards back next year with modifications all sides will be happy with, and this discussion will be over with,” he said.

However, Chad Colby, spokesperson for Achieve, the educational nonprofit that helped put together the Next Generation Science Standards, said any removal or modification of the text would not be in compliance with the science standards.

“Teaching science includes the teaching of climate science,” Colby told weather.com.

Several of Idaho’s legislators are on record questioning the science of climate change, including House Resources Committee Chairman Dell Raybould, who told Idaho Falls Post Register reporter Bryan Clark that his source for climate change science was conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.

“Listen to Rush Limbaugh once in awhile,” Raybould said. “See what he thinks about it. He’ll tell you that this is just a bunch of nonsense.”

Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Moscow, told a concerned parent in an email that “global warming ranks right up there with Al Gore’s phony ozone scare.”



“I hope the Legislature enacts legislation to eliminate this ridiculous nonsense from all our textbooks,” he added.



Branch called Idaho’s move to remove climate change from the state science curriculum “unprecedented” and “a lot more blatant than what other states have done.” He thought the changes were “scientifically unwarranted and pedagogically harmful.”

“I can confidently say that in no other state has the legislature taken it upon itself to engage in such a wholesale deletion of content about climate change from a proposed set of state science standards,” Branch said. “If they remain as they are, Idaho will have a good claim to have the least adequate state science standards in the country with regard to climate change.”