More climate change chicanery
Posted by Richard on October 3, 2007
Let's say you're writing a children's book about global warming and you want to scare them with your good friend Al Gore's impending doom scenario. A graph showing that increased CO2 levels caused global temperature increases would help, wouldn't it? But what do you do if the graph shows exactly the opposite — that for the past 650,000 years, increases in temperature have always preceded increases in CO2 levels? Well, you could just mislabel the graph and misrepresent the data:
Sept. 1 saw the release of "The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming," co-authored by Al Gore acolyte and "Inconvenient Truth" co-producer Laurie David and former advertising copywriter and environmental activist Cambria Gordon.
…On page 18 of the David-Gordon book, the authors present a graph of the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures for the last 650,000 years.
The graph is accompanied by text that reads, "The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the lower the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph on the left …
"What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising carbon dioxide to rising temperature, scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse gas pollution and global warming."
…
"What really makes [the David-Gordon] graph 'amazing' is that it's dead wrong," says a new report from the Science and Public Policy Institute.
"In order to contrive a visual representation for their false claim that carbon dioxide controls temperature change, David and co-author Cambria Gordon present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and carbon dioxide graph that falsely reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature," says the SPPI report.
"The actual temperature curve in the chart was switched with the actual carbon dioxide curve. That is, the authors mislabeled the blue curve as temperature and the red curve as carbon dioxide concentration."
The publisher, Scholastic, acknowledged the "error" and agreed to correct the graph — but only the graph, not the accompanying text. Because correcting the text would destroy the whole premise that our CO2 emissions are driving global warming, and would thus undermine their agenda. So they'll leave the youngsters bewildered by a graph that doesn't seem to match the words accompanying it (encouraging them to conclude, erroneously, that the corrected graph is actually mislabeled).
Fortunately, as Steve Milloy noted in the above story, there's another book about climate change for children, The Sky's Not Falling! Why It's OK to Chill About Global Warming, that could help calm kids who are increasingly fearful about the future. Unfortunately, it's written by an academic, not by the wife of a big-shot Hollywood producer and a former ad writer and "activist." And it's not going to be promoted to a fare-thee-well by its publisher, the media, and the education establishment, like the David-Gordon book.
So — like Michael Mann's bogus "hockey stick" graph, which manipulated out of existence the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in order to persuade people that 20th-century warming was unprecedented — the false claim that atmospheric CO2 increases precede global warming will no doubt remain something that "everybody knows" among the cognoscenti.
hathor said
I don’t get all this nickpicky back and forth between non-scientist. Just how are these little children’s minds are going to be warped. I would think with bad science education that wouldn’t allow for them to judge somethings for themselves when they would be able to understand the graph. I sometimes think that there is a dearth of understanding of science since one bad graph and a few non scientist can say any thing, then it is claimed all science about global warning to be fake.
RedPencil said
Religious beliefs aren’t amenable to debate. (And tend to graph poorly.) Oh well.