The Magazine of The Sierra Club
A Science Educator Busts Myths About Climate Change
Alexandra Moore took action in response to a right-wing think tank
Dr. Alexandra Moore works to correct climate change misinformation. | Photo by Brett Carlsen
Last spring, the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank, mailed its climate-denier publication, Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, to 300,000 teachers across the country. When Alexandra Moore and her colleagues at the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York, found out, they were stunned. They decided they had to counter Heartland's misinformation.
A native of Massachusetts, Moore has been an earth science educator for over 25 years, teaching everything from field studies in Hawaii to classes at Cornell University. Now she works as a senior education associate at PRI, which publishes Bulletins of American Paleontology and a series of Teacher-Friendly Guides on earth science topics.
Moore and her colleagues want to provide the latest edition of their Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change to every public high school science teacher in the country—that's over 200,000 copies. They hope to raise $86,000 for the effort through a crowdfunded campaign on the GiveGab platform.
"It's dishonest, what [Heartland] is doing, so this really cuts at the core of who I am as a teacher, as a scientist, and as a U.S. citizen," Moore says.
Moore wrote the Frequently Asked Questions section of the guide, in which she explains how the Heartland Institute textbook distorts data to make it look like there has been no increase in global temperatures.
"They do it by chopping off the most recent data points, which of course are the highest temperatures and the most carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," Moore explains. "Or by compressing the axis [of their graphs], so that the vertical scale is so enormous that any rise looks like a flat line."
Moore sees the project as an opportunity to put "actual science" into the hands of students and teachers. The first batch of textbooks were sent out this summer.
"I want students to be able to take facts and make informed decisions, and to be confident in that process," Moore says.
This article appeared in the November/December 2017 edition with the headline "Myth Buster."
Climate Lessons In a survey by Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education, 30 percent of science teachers said they teach their students that climate change is "likely due to natural causes." Another 31 percent teach students that the science is unsettled.
