Climate Science in Public Schools

The skeptics have a new convert:

One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Persuaded by Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.
Conclusion: climate catastrophe is called off

Unfortunately, information like this does not reach our students in the public schools.
At the local high school science class in my town the kids are reading stuff like this article, which was assigned reading.  Here's the headline:

Hyperwarming climate could turn Earth's poles green

Here's the first paragraph or two:

AN ERA of ice that has gripped Earth's poles for 35 million years could come to an end as extreme global warming really begins to bite. Previously unknown sources of positive feedback - including "hyperwarming" that was last seen on Earth half a billion years ago - may push global temperatures high enough to send Earth into a hothouse state with tropical forests growing close to the poles.

Climate scientists typically limit themselves to the 21st century when predicting how human activity will affect global temperatures. The latest predictions are bolder, though: the first systematic forecasts through to 2300 are beginning to arrive.

They also read (the same day), a July 2, 2007 article from Newsweek discussing the 'human contribution to global warming, in light of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that found that nearly all global warming was attributable to man-made greenhouse gases..."

It begins:

Which of These Is Not Causing Global Warming Today?

A. Sport utility vehicles; 
B. Rice fields;
C. Increased solar output.

The answer, of course, is supposed to be C. It continues (you can read most of it here):

 

When 600 climate scientists from 40 countries reported in February that there was, for the first time, "unequivocal" evidence that the world is warming and greater than 90 percent certainty that man-made greenhouse gases have caused most of the warming since 1950, at least one expert demurred. "We're going to see a big debate on it going forward," said Vice President Dick Cheney. By "it," he meant "the extent to which [the warming] is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it's caused by man."

There is some lip service given to the idea that, okay, okay, the sun, maybe, sometimes, has something to do with our weather, perhaps, but not much and anyway, so what?

There is no evidence I know of that the kids were told that IPCC report is seriously flawed and, we know, rife with failed predictions, that Sharon Begley is a fear-mongerer,

I'm pretty sure they have not been told about this:
“Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years.”

The probably have been carefully shielded from learning about the Climategate emails, including the one where Mike Hulme said:

I must say I find myself in sympathy with much of what Will Hutton writes. In particular his conclusion that the debate around climate change is fundamentally about power and politics rather than the environment seems undeniable. There are not that many "facts" about (the meaning of) climate change which science can unequivocally reveal.

That IPCC report (AR4, if you want to google around), infamously declared the Himalayas would be ice-free by 2035, which turned out to be a typo.  Anybody can make a typo.  But only Pachauri can defend the typo as solidly, soundly, accurate and accuse those who point it out of being practitioners of voodoo science:

WUWT readers may recall that when the “Himalayan Glaciers will melt by 2035″ error was first revealed, IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri famously labeled claims of the mistake “voodoo science”and then had to retract that slur later.
Now it appears there hasn’t been any melt at all in the last 10 years.

They have almost certainly never heard that there is NOT a consensus or that 'consensus' is the vocabulary of politics, not science.  I would guess they don't even know who Judith Curry is:

I have argued that a consensus on climate change is both unneccessary and undesirable, and that the consensus seeking process of the IPCC is having the (presumably) unintended consequence of damaging climate science and compromising the policy process.
Ward is concerned about absence of clarity over which consensus we are talking about; it seems that agreeing with the climate consensus requires supporting and endorsing the entire scope of IPCC conclusions and UNFCCC policies.
The climate community worked for 20 years to establish a consensus.  The impact of the consensus probably peaked in 2006-2007, at the time of publication of the AR4.  Courtesy of the CRU emails, we now understand the sausage making that went into creating the consensus.  Manufacturing a consensus in the context of the IPCC has acted to hyper-politicize the scientific and policy debate, to the detriment of both.  Its time to abandon the concept of consensus; consensus matters far less than simply being right and the arguments themselves that ought to be the focus for discussion.

Not too long ago there was a fuss over the Heartland stuff (when climate alarmist Gleike stole private documents and then passed around a forged document which cast Heartland in a bad light as though it were real, lying about its origins to his friends in the media)- because one of the things that was true about Heartland is that they want to develop materials to be used in schools, and those materials would focus on 'teaching the controversy.'
A number of naive adults who oft opine on climate issues at Judith's blog (including Judith), imagined that this would be *introducing* bias into the curriculum, as they apparently had no idea that kids in public schools are currently being taught the alarmist position in what passes for climate science.

It's a shame, really, that most students will never learn about the man I mentioned at the start of this post until they leave school and start researching on their own.

Here he is again:

Did you have indications that the dangers of global warming were overblown?
For years I believed the science of the IPCC was solid. I had the famous hockey stick graph (a graph purporting to show that current global temperatures are by far the highest in the last 1000 years, editor) in all my presentations. But then I read the book The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford, which is very critical about this graph. Slowly I started to realize we have been misguided by the IPCC about the natural fluctuations in the climate in the past thousands of years. The whole purpose of the IPCC has been to get rid of the so-called Medieval Warm Period, a warm period around the year 1000 when the Vikings settled on Greenland and were able to live there for a couple of centuries. After this warm period we have had the Little Ice Age which coincided with a very quiet sun. Many papers have been published in the last few years which show that the Little Ice Age was not a local European phenomena, as the IPCC suggests. So yes, the IPCC has underestimated the natural fluctuations of the climate and overestimated the role of CO2.

You really should read the whole thing- to your high school kids, preferably.  And ask yourself why the high school kids in my town are being told that the sun is the one thing that has nothing at all to do with the temperature of our planet.  Do you think your high school is so different?

Are the teachers unionized?
Did they go to state education schools?