AUDIO: Why Oklahoma Lawmakers Don't Want Kids To Learn About Climate | Mother Jones

Please explain how $10 billion in agricultural loss is hyperbole? It's almost as if they want to bring on their own mini Armageddon. Oh, wait they do!!

Two things that no one can deny, no matter how you want to slice it or dice it - global warming is continuing at an unprecedented pace and much of it has been due to human activity.

Second, we will never have political consensus but among CLIMATE SCIENTISTS (notice the key words there), 97% of climate papers that took a position on the issue, said humans are causing global warming.

So why are POLITICIANS handicapping a child academically by eliminating good climate science education? Why are POLITICIANS, after 30 minutes of discussion, destroying a year's worth of work by SCIENCE EDUCATORS? You know people who actually understand the stuff they teach.

"It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists."

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Earlier this week, reports the National Center for Science Education, a committee of the Oklahoma House of Representatives voted 10 to 1 to reject a set of proposed "Oklahoma Academic Standards for Science" that have already been adopted by the state board of education. "A rejection of the proposed education standards by the legislature is unprecedented and at this point the real impact and implications are unknown," says the Oklahoma Science Teachers Association.

"You basically have a couple of members on this committee who are second-guessing a panel of science educators who spent more than a year working on these standards," says Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education. "And on the basis of a half an hour hearing, they decide to block what science educators in Oklahoma overwhelmingly regard as a major advance for science education in Oklahoma's public schools."

It's clear that the issue of climate change content was a central reasons for the rejection. The Oklahoma science standards were, in significant part, based on the Next Generation Science Standards, which discuss climate change (and were rejected for that reason by the state of Wyoming earlier this year). And in legislative hearings, notes Climate Progress, Oklahoma Republican lawmaker Mark McCullough criticized the proposed Oklahoma science standards' references to "the climate" and "human impacts on the environment." McCullough suggested there has been "hyberbole relative to climate change" and asked if the standards "could potentially be utilized to inculcate into some pretty young impressionable minds…a fairly one-sided view as to that controversial subject, a subject that is very much in dispute among even the academics."

AUDIO: Why Oklahoma Lawmakers Don't Want Kids To Learn About Climate | Mother Jones