A national group that thinks global warming is "junk science" and that teaching it is unnecessarily scaring schoolchildren brought its first petition effort for "balanced education" to Mesa County Schools on Tuesday night.
-- From "Push to teach 'other side' of global warming heats up in Colorado's Mesa County" By Nancy Lofholm, The Denver Post 5/26/10
Rose Pugliese, an unsuccessful candidate for a District 51 school board seat in the last election, presented a petition with 700 signatures to the board asking that science teachers stop giving lessons on global warming.
Pugliese, a 32-year-old Grand Junction attorney and activist in Tea Party and conservative Republican groups, also presented a petition with 600 signatures demanding Mesa County schools keep political views out of classrooms.
Pugliese's efforts have made her the poster girl for the group Balanced Education for Everyone and have pinpointed Mesa County as a national test case for keeping the teaching of humans' influence on global warming out of science classes.
"It (global warming) is not a proven scientific theory. There is not evidence to support it," Pugliese told the board, generating applause from about 40 Tea Party and other conservative group members who filled the room for the first school board petition battle over this issue in the country.
Pugliese and three other people who spoke against global-warming education said that if the subject is going to be taught, the "other side" should be presented so that students aren't subjected to a frightening untruth.
"A survey showed two out of three kids were coming home thinking their world is going to melt away and all the polar bears are going to die," Laura Kindregan told the board.
Board member Harry Butler said this is the first time he has heard a complaint alleging that teachers are espousing too many liberal ideas in classrooms.
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From "Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons" By Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times 5/24/10
Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium [in London] to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.
A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.
Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions.
The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago.
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