Florida stripped climate language from textbooks
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- Florida's Department of Education asked publishers McGraw Hill, Cengage, and Savvas in summer 2024 to weaken climate language in approved science textbooks, including replacing "climate change" with "changes in the environment" and removing "polluting" before "coal burning power plants."
- McGraw Hill's Marine Science textbook had a WHO-cited statistic that climate change kills at least 150,000 people per year rewritten to read "human health will also be affected by the increase in CO2" — a change author Michael Huber said distorts the original message and "degrades the book."
- Climate-focused textbooks (environmental science, earth science, marine science) were initially adopted at less than half the rate of other science subjects; Florida approved most of them only after publishers complied with the requested edits.
- Biology textbook authors Ken Miller and Joe Levine were told by Florida to strike "caused by human activity" from their book and add peer-reviewed citations — demands Miller noted were applied only to the climate chapter, not to chapters on DNA or the digestive system.
- Florida is quietly updating its science standards for the first time since 2008, and state education officials did not respond to repeated questions on whether climate change education will remain in any class.
- Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a measure in May 2024 officially removing references to climate change from state statutes, a move teachers described as part of a broader "culture of caution" against discussing the topic in classrooms.
Why it matters: Florida's roughly 3 million K-12 students — in a state the source describes as "arguably the most affected by climate change" — are now receiving textbooks where climate language has been softened at the state level, with one cited author saying edits distort WHO-sourced mortality figures. The changes arrive alongside Florida's first science-standards rewrite since 2008, with the department declining to say whether climate content will appear in any revised standard.
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