Florida Officials Altered Climate Change Content in Textbooks

Florida education officials requested that science textbook publishers alter content related to the climate crisis during the summer of 2024, leading to the dilution or elimination of information about climate change impacts. These changes were not mandated by the state's science standards, which require instruction on human-caused climate change in several high school science electives. The investigation by WUSF and The Hechinger Report revealed specific instances of these alterations across multiple textbooks. For example, in McGraw Hill's "Marine Science" textbook, content detailing research that attributed at least 150,000 deaths annually to climate change and projected a doubling of that figure with an additional 1 degree Celsius of warming was replaced with a more general statement about increased CO2 and its impact on human health. The phrase "climate change" itself was substituted with "changes in the environment" in another section of the same book. Similarly, Cengage's environmental science textbook removed the descriptor "polluting" from "coal burning power plants." It also omitted a reference to University of Washington students voting to pay higher fees for renewable energy sources for their campus. Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, stated that these requested modifications to climate change coverage are "very unusual" and not necessary to align with existing state science standards. The state of Florida is also in the process of updating its science standards for the first time since 2008. Current standards, established in 2008, mandate that students learn about human-caused climate change in subjects such as earth science, marine science, and environmental science, and allow for its discussion in other courses. The alterations suggest a deliberate effort to downplay the severity and scientific consensus surrounding climate change in educational materials, despite the state's existing academic requirements. The National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization, monitors how climate change is taught in classrooms nationwide and has noted the unusual nature of these state-directed revisions. The publishers involved, McGraw Hill and Cengage, are prominent educational content providers, and their compliance with Florida's requests indicates the significant influence state education departments can exert on curriculum materials. The timing of these changes, coinciding with the state's science standards review, raises questions about the future direction of climate education in Florida's public schools.