SPPI Exposes Fundamental Scientific Error in Laurie David’s ”Global Warming” Book for Children
The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming”, by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon, is intentionally designed to propagandize unsuspecting school children who do not have enough knowledge to know what is being done to them.
What really makes the David-Gordon graph amazing is that its egregiously counterfactual. Worse, in order to contrive a visual representation for their claim that CO2 controls temperature change, the authors present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.
Case in point, on page 103 of their book, David cites the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005). However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite, that CO2 lags with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles.
The SPPI paper states, in part:
with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles. A new SPPI paper (http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/childrensbookerror.html) briefly examines a cardinal error, found on page 18 of the David book, where she mousetraps children: The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph. What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution (sic) and global warming.
The manipulation is critical because Davids central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes.
Parents and teachers should be concerned enough to demand that the publisher, Scholastic Books, recall, pulp and correct the error before mores copies reach innocent children, said Ferguson.
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