Illustration: Keith Negley for HuffPost

This story about climate change and education was produced as part of the nine-part series Are We Ready? How Schools Are Preparing and Not Preparing Children for Climate Change , reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Science textbooks used in Florida and Texas call climate change one of the most debated issues in modern science. A Texas science textbook for seventh graders says scientists hypothesize that the increase in carbon dioxide has contributed to the recent rise in global temperature.

A high school social studies book, also used in Texas, says of rising temperatures, Some critics say that this warming is just part of the Earths natural cycle, though, in truth, theres overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that the current warming is due to human activities.

Such descriptions of climate change are muddled and misleading, according to four climate scientists who reviewed them as part of a Hechinger/HuffPost analysis of 32 middle school and high school textbooks and digital curricula and what they say on the subject.

In the review of the 32 textbooks, which are used in California, Florida, Oklahoma or Texas, we found that at least 12 included descriptions of climate change that were superficial or contained errors. Another four of the science books did not discuss the topic at all. And some downplayed the scientific consensus that human activities are causing the current climate crisis, according to the four experts who reviewed the passages for Hechinger/HuffPost, although they had varying perspectives on the extent of those problems.

What many of the texts have done is to give the few contrarian voices with their loud megaphones a much greater voice in the text than is warranted based on the science and the assessments of the various national academies of science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Richard Alley, a professor in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State who studies climate change, and who was most critical of the textbooks, wrote in an email.

Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote that many of the texts at least tried to get the science right on climate change and most errors were minor, but in a few cases, it was fairly clear that there was little interest in conveying a scientifically correct account, or worse, an active intent to deceive.

High school students have become an increasing force in climate change activism; in 2019, hundreds of thousands of young people skipped school and took to the streets to protest the climate crisis in a global strike . But in the United States, many of the textbooks they use in class barely scratch the surface of the tremendous obstacles their generation will face on this issue.

Misleading Language

Some of the textbooks also introduce confusion about the causes of climate change, according to the four experts, who in addition to Alley and Emanuel included scholars at Texas A&M and the University of California San Diego.

Scientists hypothesize that this rise in [carbon dioxide] has contributed to the recent rise in global temperature, reads a passage from TEKS iScience Grade 7, the Texas version of a McGraw Hill book published in 2015.

Hypothesize is too weak, one expert wrote. Its much stronger than a hypothesis, wrote another.

The eighth grade version of the same book says some of the increase in carbon dioxide is due to human activities, when nearly all of it is caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human actions, the experts wrote.

And a passage that appears in a 2019 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sixth grade science textbook used in Florida and in a 2015 sixth grade science book used in Texas calls climate change one of the most debated issues in modern science.