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Home / UKIP threatens to ban schools teaching about global warming

UKIP threatens to ban schools teaching about global warming

By staff writers
January 17, 2014

A senior figure in UKIP has claimed that the party would ban teaching about climate change in schools if elected.

The party's 2010 manifesto had already included a specific pledge to ban former US vice president Al Gore's Oscar-winning global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth from classrooms.

This week the UK Independence Party education spokesperson, Derek Clark MEP, told Index on Censorship that he believes his party will go even further.

"We will still ban Al Gore's video for use in schools if I've got anything to do with it," he said. "I will not have much opposition within the party. It is, of course, not just this video which needs banning; all teaching of global warming being caused in any way by carbon dioxide emissions must also be banned. It just is not happening."

Dr Nick Eyre, co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre, quoted in The Ecologist magazine, said of the proposal: "It is anti-scientific nonsense - as well as a worryingly repressive approach to education."

He continued: "The very strong link between climate change and anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is overwhelmingly accepted by the global scientific community, and has been for at least 25 years."

A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows that 95 per cent of scientists recognise from the reviewed research and data that human activity is a 'dominant cause' in factors that trigger global warming.

However, a 2013 study by the UK Energy Research Centre showed that just 22 per cent of the population recognise the crucial connection between human activity and global warming, while 19 per cent do not accept that the world's climate is changing.

* More about UKIP on Ekklesia: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/ukip

* 'UKIP: The respectable face of the far-right', by Symon Hill: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/17465

* UK Energy Research Centre: http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/

* IPCC: http://www.ipcc.ch

* The Ecologist: http://www.theecologist.org/

* Index on Censorship: http://www.indexoncensorship.org/

[Ekk/3]

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