The Florida Department of Education has approved the use of animated videos from the Prager University Foundation in public schools, several of which contain misinformation regarding climate change, according to an Aug. 7 article from E&E News.

With the heat records that have been broken this summer, it’s unnerving to see videos with false claims about the climate crisis being endorsed for educational use, especially when students and instructors at USF take this matter very seriously. The Florida Department of Education needs to prohibit these videos and take more precaution when it comes to what is shown in classrooms.

PragerU CEO Mariss Streit claims that the videos are meant to pose the topic as more of a debate.

“Young kids are being taught climate hysteria,” Streit says in the article. “They’re hearing that the world is coming to an end, and we think that there needs to be a healthy balance.”

However, many of the videos in question have been viewed as scientifically inaccurate. One video is titled “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis” and was uploaded on July 19 on the PragerU website.

It follows the protagonist who starts out as a climate change activist, only to change her mind when her parents inform her of how “the climate has been warming and cooling since prehistoric times, long before carbon emissions were even a factor.” This incites a change in her viewpoint, with her believing that “energy poverty, not climate change, is the real threat.”

The video implies that materials like coal are essential for many countries to function. However, these fossil fuels have been responsible for releasing more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, which has trapped heat onto the Earth, according to an accumulation of studies by NASA.

Several USF students believe that using alternative energy sources, like solar power, would be more environmentally friendly than using fossil fuels, according to a 2022 report from The Oracle. They also see the importance of climate change’s impact on Florida.

“Seeing as almost all aspects of Florida life are intertwined with the environment, the better question is what will not be impacted by climate change?” environmental science and policy major Michael Kolo said in the article.

USF also has several Environmental Science majors where a Climate Change class (EVR 4114), is listed as a “required” course. The university recognizes and educates on climate change, but informing a younger generation that climate change isn’t worth worrying about could deter future students from attending such courses.

Jeffrey Cunningham, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at USF, feels there is a clear distinction between the political and scientific sides of the climate change argument, the latter of which he finds is presented inaccurately within the video.

“It is now clear that the observed warming of the past 50 years –and probably the last 150 years, though that is less certain– is driven overwhelmingly by human emissions of greenhouse gasses, not by some ‘natural’ or non-human factor,” Cunningham said in an Aug. 16 interview with The Oracle.

“Therefore, it is misleading to refer to natural warming/cooling cycles that operate on time scales of millennia as evidence that recent warming might not be human-driven.”

This misinformation is particularly dangerous, as NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) labeled July 2023 as the hottest month ever recorded, according to an Aug. 14 press release from NASA.

Florida hasn’t been immune to these results. July was the hottest month on record for Tampa and Sarasota-Bradenton, and the second highest for St. Petersburg, according to an Aug. 4 climate summary of West Central and Southwest Florida from The National Weather Service.

Dennis Prager, co-founder of PragerU, even admitted their teachings are a form of indoctrination.

“We bring doctrines to children, that’s a very fair statement,” Prager said during a July 6 Moms for Liberty Summit event. “But what is the bad of our indoctrination?”

The PragerU videos represent a dangerous denial of scientific truth that shouldn’t be accepted in any classroom – Florida or not.