 controversy continues to surround this topic, especially in the United States.
The Associated Press reported recently that the school board of a Seattle suburb has restricted the showing of An Inconvenient Truth in classrooms unless its balanced with a credible, legitimate opposing view (McClure & Stiffler, 2007). This school board policy came in response to a complaint from parents who objected to what they felt was a politically biased viewpoint presented as fact. This follows on the heels of the National Science Teachers Associations (NSTA) decision to shy away from the film and its hot topic. In November 2006, the Association refused to help the films producer, Laurie David, distribute 50,000 copies of the DVD to schools nationwide. According to Ms. David, who offered the DVDs with no strings attached, the NSTA responded in an email message that active involvement with the film might place unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supportersread business interests like Exxon Mobil (David, 2005, p. B01).
What does all this tell us about the state of science education in this country? It says a great deal certainly about the cozy relationship between the nations largest science teacher professional organization and certain multinational corporations. But theres a bigger issue here. Events like these are a ringing indictment of our national efforts to teach the public about science in its most meaningful sense. Too many of our citizens simply dont understand how it is that researchers figure out whats going on in the world. Its this misunderstanding about how science is done that has been and continues to be exploited by various business and political interest groups.
The situation with global warming is a telling case in point. Given that the majority of the public hold an oversimplified view of scienceas an activity that is capable of producing verifiable knowledge by means of a carefully prescribed experimental methodits not surprising that those who seek to undermine public faith in the claims made by climatologists have highlighted the uncertainties in their work. This is a not-so-subtle way of implying that scientists have yet to hit the nail on the head with respect to global warming, with the upshot being that, since definitive evidence hasnt been found to link human activity to global temperature increases, then we really dont know for sure whats going on, and, they argue with a wink, it clearly wouldnt be prudent to take any rash actions at this pointcertainly not any that might put a cramp in American economic growth or corporate profits.
This is precisely the tack bureaucrats in the Bush administration have taken. The chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, for example, from 2001 to 2005 repeatedly altered official scientific reports on global climate change. Apart from deemphasizing the potential devastating effects of this phenomena, his primary work focused on changing wording in ways that increased perceptions of uncertainty in the various reports. Efforts to add statements about the uncertain status of climate knowledge into an Environmental Protection Agency document were also made in 2003 by administration officials, signaling a pattern of distortion and suppression of science for ideological purposes (Shulman, 2006; see also Mooney, 2005).
Now, of course, scientists and those who study science know that science and uncertainty go hand in hand. Moreover, the scientific truths that can be derived from direct evidence that tightly couples cause to effect in an unambiguous, repeatable way is limited, mostly to situations where researchers can actually put their hands on and manipulate the systems in questionsuch is the case in fields such as molecular biology or in certain areas of physics and chemistry, to name a few. There are other sciences, however, that, because they deal with phenomena that are not easily manipulated, rely on indirect evidence, statistical reasoning, or other less obviously experimental methods (Longino, 2001; Rudolp