Will Media Report Error in Laurie David's Global Warming Children’s Book?

September 13th, 2007 12:31 PM

When climate change activists Sheryl Crow and Laurie David went on their "Stop Global Warming College Tour" last spring, media sycophants followed their every move reporting their exploits on almost a daily basis.

With that in mind, if a serious, scientific error were discovered in the global warming children's book co-authored by David, shouldn't that be newsworthy as well?

As you ponder, Robert Ferguson of the Science and Public Policy Institute published his findings Thursday concerning a material error in "The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming" which media seem destined to ignore for the benefit of the climate change movement (emphasis added throughout):

On page 18 of Laurie David's new children's global warming book, there is a glaring scientific error.

[...]

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:

As compared to the false allegations being made by media accusing President Bush and Gen. David Petraeus of cooking the books concerning what's going on in Iraq, David was verifiably fudging the numbers:

What really makes their graph "amazing" is that it's dead wrong. In order to contrive a visual representation for their false central claim that CO2 controls temperature change, David and co-author Cambria Gordon present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that falsely reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.
The actual temperature curve in the chart was switched with the actual CO2 curve. That is, the authors mislabeled the blue curve as temperature and mislabeled the red curve as CO2 concentration. The real data show that the red curve represents the temperature changes over geological time, followed (lagged) by changes in CO2 concentrations represented by the blue curve. Thus, children tracing the properly labeled curves from right to left (from past to present) can easily see the real, science-based relationship (particularly clear in the interval between 500,000 and 150,000 years ago).

Here's the corrected chart:

Will media hold David's feet to the fire concerning this factual misrepresentation?

I for one am not holding my breath.