High School Senior Fights Flawed Climate Science Info in Popular Textbook

There’s a high school senior named Matthew LaClair seeing red over the flaws in his American Government text, and he’s doing something to make its authors see the error of their ways.

Of course, when one of them holds a prestigious position named after the U.S. President who purportedly took solar panels off of the White House and proclaimed them a sign of weakness one might reasonably suspect the contents are just a little bit skewed when it comes to the basic scientific facts about energy and even global warming.

Apparently, the text offers “a large number of clearly erroneous statements” that give students “the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain," according to Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and the sort of fellow who’s willing to lend a hand where it’s counted.

And the books publishers are taking notice, with all sorts of high-powered types set to review it and offer their own opinions on the topic. But the edition of the textbook published in 2005, and which is in high school classrooms now, states simply that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."

A mind-numbingly poor treatment of the topic.

Now I’d love to suggest it’s time for a good old-fashioned book burning, but then we’d have to offset the carbon emissions or we’d be compounding the problem.

And the twisted thing is that some of those books will be used in classrooms for the next twenty years; especially in districts without the funds to replace them. Perhaps people should just begin filing them under "fiction" in the school library?

via:: Associated Press