Déjà Vu All Over Again

Abstract

What is accepted by the scientific community on the basis of overwhelming evidence, yet opposed by a vocal minority on ideological grounds, and therefore the target of attempts to undermine its presentation in the science classrooms of the public schools? If your answer was evolution , help yourself to a gold star. After all, in the 90 years since the Scopes Trial, the teaching of evolution has been the leading source of controversy in American science education. But if your answer was anthropogenic climate change , you, too, can give yourself a gold star. Like evolution, anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change offers challenges – but also opportunities – to biology teachers. The facts are clear. Global temperature has increased rapidly and significantly over the past 150 years, and human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, has been, and is, a major cause of the rise in temperature. The resulting changes to the climate will have (indeed are already having) disruptive – potentially disastrous – effects on human societies and the natural world. The multiple, independent, and converging lines of evidence for anthropogenic climate change have been acknowledged as convincing by the scientific community, including the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society (2014) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2014). Owing to the disruptive, widespread, and interconnected effects of the rise in …