![Eugenie C. Scott Eugenie C. Scott](http://ncse.com/files/images/10-Oct-120x150.jpg)
NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott was interviewed by Inside Climate News (July 2, 2013). "As America's debate about global warming became politicized over the past half-decade, the controversy entered a new battleground: the nation's classrooms," the introduction to the interview reported. Scott explained that NCSE detected commonalities between attacks on evolution education and the increasing attacks on climate education: "So we hitched up our pants and decided okay, we need to tackle this."
Asked whether the same people are behind evolution denial and climate change denial, Scott explained, "There is a tiny bit of overlap," but emphasized that, "The similarity for us is that you have topics understood by the scientific community as being very well supported by data. And you have opposition from the public that basically arises from ideology, not from science. With evolution, the ideology is religious. With climate change, the ideology is not so much religious, but political and economic."
Looking toward the future, Scott predicted that the Next Generation Science Standards — which call for introducing climate science in the science curriculum starting in middle school — as helping to improve the extent of climate education: "But it will take a while to trickle down." She also predicted that court cases over climate education are unlikely: while teaching creationism is unconstitutional because of creationism's religious nature, "[t]here's no constitutional protection against bad science."