Texas Wants Your Kids To Know That Climate Change Isn’t Real

glasses-resting-on-open-textbookYou guys, I’d like to take a moment to speak on behalf of Texas to you, the parents of children who may one day have to use the textbooks decided upon and conceived of here in the state where you can buy an artisinal freshly squeezed durian juice organic latte in the same strip mall that you can buy a whole buttload of guns.

There are a whole lot of things that Texans are very good at, something I wouldn’t have even been able to admit a few years ago. But there is at least one thing that they suck immensely at, and that’s making textbooks.

I mean, given all of the drama that has surrounded Texas and how it’s curriculum standards shape the textbook market for the rest of America, no one should have been surprised, but leave it to Texas to shock the crap out of you even when you’re sure you’ve seen and heard it all.

If you need a quick refresher, the Texas school board leans heavily to the right and passed new curriculum standards that reflect that. This matters to everyone else because Texas is a huge market–the makers of the books will print a metric assload of them, and they become available to your state so that your kids can be dumbified, too.

The big point of contention in the proposed textbooks is climate control, but that might just be because we haven’t gotten to evolution yet. The National Center for Science Education reviewed these bad boys and were not pleased. No, they were not pleased at all. According to the Huffington Post:

Two of the books have passages stating that scientists disagree about the causes of climate change, according to NCSE. The report says this misrepresents current scientific thinking.

“Scientists do not disagree about what is causing climate change, the vast majority (97%) of climate papers and actively publishing climatologists (again 97%) agree that human activity is responsible,” says the report.

Another passage, from a Studies Weekly textbook, claims that global warming will cause Earth’s temperature to rise for only a few years before temperatures will start to cool and eventually ”even out.”

The NCSE report says, ”We are not aware of any currently publishing climatologists who are predicting a cooling trend where ”˜things will even out.’”

I feel like Texas is just like this one little boy that I used to care for at daycare. Adorable but also a huge liar. I just want to hug Texas and be like, “I like you, but you have to stop making shit up, okay?”

Not long ago, the social studies portion of the new proposed textbooks came under fire for their thinly veiled racism and being vastly out of touch with reality. They featured hilarious comics about little green aliens invading Earth to get their hands on some of that sweet affirmative action, and left out entire chunks of history like the New Deal.

Of course it wouldn’t be Texas without religion, and according to The Washington Post:

Ideas promoted in various proposed textbooks include the notion that Moses and Solomon inspired American democracy, that in the era of segregation only ”sometimes” were schools for black children ”lower in quality” and that Jews view Jesus Christ as an important prophet.

The textbooks will be voted on in November, and I am sure they are very likely to pass, which means that even though I don’t want to home school (and I never will) I’m going to have to be on top of what she’s reading at school and gently correcting her when she comes home saying stuff like “Jim Crow doesn’t sound so bad!” or “How can the Earth be warming when it’s so cold outside?”

And you might have to, too.

(Image: Ermoalev Alexander/Shutterstock)

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