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Articles by Jessica Meszaros, WUSF

Jessica Meszaros is a reporter and host covering climate change and the environment for WUSF, the NPR affiliate in Tampa.

Featured Article

Had Florida’s high school marine biology students read the original draft of their textbook, they would have learned about research that found climate change is killing at least 150,000 people per year, and another 1 degree Celsius of warming would double that.

Instead, they learned that “human health will also be affected by the increase in CO2 and another 1 degree Celsius will further increase the impact.”

In another spot in McGraw Hill’s Marine Science book, “climate change” was altered to “changes in the environment.” An environmental science textbook by publisher Cengage removed the word “polluting” in front of “coal burning power plants.” And it cut a reference to students at the University of Washington in Seattle voting to pay higher fees to help the school buy electricity from renewable energy sources.

These count among the changes that Florida education officials asked science textbook publishers to make in the summer of 2024 that e... Read more