A Textbook Case of Downplaying Global Warming?

Matthew LaClairMatthew LaClair criticized passages in a textbook on global warming, and the publisher is reviewing the book. (Mike Derer/Associated Press)

[UPDATED 3:45 p.m. below – response from publisher] Matthew LaClair, a high school senior in Kearny, N.J., had already gained fame as something of a one-man American Civil Liberties Union for pointing out intrusions of religion into the classroom.

Now he has persuaded Houghton Mifflin, one of the powerhouses in textbook publishing, to review a popular college and advanced-placement high school text, “American Government,” over its characterizations of human-caused global warming and other controversial issues.

Nancy Zuckerbrod of The Associated Press provides a summary of the criticisms of the book, and the publisher’s reaction:


Matthew started the process rolling by contacting the Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit group in Amherst, N.Y., that says its goal is to defend reason and science. (A PDF version of its critique is online.)

Letters criticizing the book’s portrayal of climate science were written to the publisher and authors by James E. Hansen of NASA and Michael MacCracken, a former government climate expert and longtime contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They can be found as PDFs in a news release from Friends of the Earth.

Here are some lines from the book that were excerpted by the environmental group:

The earth has become warmer, but is this mostly the result of natural climate changes, or is it heavily influenced by humans putting greenhouse gases into the air? (p.559)

Certainly, if the I.P.C.C. is to be relied on as a bellwether of the predominant view of climate experts, that is a dubious assertion, even if it refers to the 2001 report from the panel and not last year’s. The 2001 report said: “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”


The panel’s latest climate panel reports did say that at least until 2050 or so, mid-latitude regions will probably see agricultural benefits, and certainly heating bills will be lower (while cooling bills will rise). But to set up a comparison of heating-bill changes and coastal retreats in a way that implies equivocal costs and benefits seems questionable.

But many other problems are much less clear-cut. Science doesn’t know how bad the greenhouse effect is. (p. 566)

Here things get interesting. As we’ve written many times, the climate system’s response to rapidly rising greenhouse gas concentrations remains laden with uncertainty. A doubling of concentrations from the long-term ceiling of 280 parts per million for carbon dioxide before the industrial revolution would most likely raise global temperatures 3.6 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, by the latest I.P.C.C. analysis. So in that legalistic sense, it’s true that science hasn’t defined “how bad” climate change will be.

Needless to say, these lines have to be seen in full context. I’ll be trying to wade through the book once I have a copy. If anyone has it, please weigh in here. I imagine you’ll have a range of reactions reflecting the continuing polarization of the public on this issue. Dot Earth has been exploring how values create filters for information, and this has impeded efforts to galvanize a large-scale movement.

I encourage you to read the letters from Dr. Hansen and Dr. MacCracken, which provide lots of additional detail. Is it possible to write a policy-neutral, scientifically accurate textbook on such a charged issue? I hope so.

[UPDATE 1 p.m.] Some teachers and school systems using the book have defended it. Grist weighed in yesterday with a different kind of response.

[UPDATE 3:45 p.m.] Richard Blake, senior vice president for communications and government relations of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, sent this note:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt takes these concerns very seriously. American Government plays an important role in stimulating discussion and debate of policy issues in classrooms across the nation. This 600-page textbook examines a wide range of topics affecting the past, present, and future of the United States, and the book’s editors are committed to ensuring the relevance and support of all information.

In the 10th edition of American Government, published in 2005, the authors discuss four types of politics that define the government’s response to major public concerns such as environmental policy (limited to several pages in the 600-page text, less than two of which are devoted to global warming). This is a government textbook, not a science text. The authors do not provide a history of global warming; rather they use the issue to illustrate “entrepreneurial politics.” As part of this illustration, the book cites a wide range of sources, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore.

Late last year, we released the 11th edition of “American Government,” which included some revisions to the “entrepreneurial politics” section. These revisions reflect current developments in environmental policy research. We remain committed to ensuring that all of our textbooks, including American Government, reflect the most current research base available.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

What can we expect in a country where so many still believe in “intelligent” design?

I encourage Matt LaClair to read:



Indoctrination U:The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom , by David Horowitz

heck, for that matter – go read
State of Fear by Michael Crichton

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whereas the student may have had a valid beef with the textbook’s presentation only a few months ago, perhaps his criticisms are already out of date. i’d like to see you address the revelations explained in the below article, which discusses roy spencer’s recent paper, the latest satellite data and the apparent climbdown on the importance of co2 by a lead author of the ipcc assessments.

“Apparently the lead author of the IPCC chapter on feedback (the word used to describe what effect – negative or positive – a gas has on the temperature) has written to Dr Spencer, agreeing that he is right.” [about the ipcc’s reassessment of co2’s effect on climate]

//www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=21153&c id=39&cname=NBR+Comment

I think the kind of thinking that this young man has demonstrated is exactly the type mind-set we should all have. In this case Matthew has challenged something that 99% of people would just accept as normal. People accept things like that as normal because it is just part of their normal routine and until they change or someone points out something wrong, they are going to continue making the same mistake. Is it not clear that so many of us Americans have lifestyles that include blatanlty silly things but we don’t realize it because it’s the only thing we know as the norm? For example buying pre-cut, pre-packaged apples that we later put in a plastic grocery bag, bring home and eat only half of the 100 pack we purchased from costco. Instead someone could plant an apple tree in there yard or just buy a regular apple at a local farmers market, the kind of thing many europeans with a smaller carbon foot print would do. The former is the kind of activity that causes America to stick out in carbon production. We need not just to turn off the lights and build more wind turbines, we need to dramatically alter our way of life. From the person who buys pre-packaged apples from china to the person that eats the fruit in season that they grew in there garden or terrace.

I really feel sorry for AGW proponents. To characterize those two innocuous excerpts as objectionable or biased is laughable. Liberal group think is already pervasive in our school systems, and here warmers see a further need to suppress the development and exercise of independent thought.

So, based upon projections (no less)of what it may be like in 2050, the authors and the text book publisher are to be taken to task? Simply ludicrous.


al gore’s latest 27 minute video (recently presented at TED conference):


Steven Earl Salmony April 10, 2008 · 11:47 am

Very clearly, without a single degree of doubt, our children are going to have to lead their elders now.

All of us owe a great deal to Mr. Matthew LeClair for his outstanding service to humanity.

Apparently, too many people in my generation of leading elders are not only too conservative and set in our ways, but also wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable; we choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; and we act accordingly. But, despite all our shared fantasies and soon to be unsustainable activities, Earth exists in space-time, is tiny and bounded, and has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends. Whatsoever is is, is it not?

We need new leaders who possess intellectual honesty and moral courage that we can see in Matthew LeClair and our children. Too many of our current leading officials and ‘experts’ are evidently bereft of these virtues. They eschew good science, reason and common sense in favor of the politically convenient and economically expedient. Whatever serves these ends is all that matters. Wealth and the power it purchases seem to rule their lives……and the wholeness of the human world.

With new leadership will surely come novel ideas, better judgements, more reality-oriented decision-making and sustainable action plans that will replace the soon to become patently unsustainable business-as-usual production, unrestrained consumption and unregulated propagation activities of the human species.

If the relatively small planet we inhabit is finite, then the endless consumption, production and propagation activities of so dominant a species as Homo sapiens cannot continue much longer, let alone indefinitely. This is not rocket science. It is simply the way the world works, I suppose; most people of average intelligence who give unadulerated thought to this matter would agree, I believe.

Surely, all of us can at least agree that the Earth is not like a teat at which the human species can eternally suckle. Earth has restricted resources and, therefore, by its very nature cannot be a foundation for the endless growth of human activities, especially given the colossal scale and unbridled growth of production, propagation and per human consumption.

Are there no limits to the seemingly endless growth activities of the human species? Yes, I do realize this question practically answers itself. Even so, there are adamant economists, demographers, politicians and ideologues of all sorts who self-righteously dispute reasonable and sensible responses to the question.

From my point of view, the book by James Wilson and John DiIulio is like many others in that the book fails to take account of the best available scientific evidence and, instead, embraces an outdated, unscientific perspective for the sake of political convenience, economic expediency and the maintenance of the social status quo.

Although it goes without saying, still I need to report to you, Matthew, that my point of view could be fatally flawed and may not objectively correlate with what is somehow real. With diminishing vision and waning faculties generally, we cannot rule out the possibility that I have lost my mind and, even worse, lost touch with blessed science itself.

Teach your elders well, Matthew.

You’re not reading sas’s links. The figure for climate sensitivity to doubling of CO2 of 3.6 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit depends on water vapor being a large positive feedback. That is very much in question, these days.

That was a balanced account in the book.

Of course it’s possible “to write a policy-neutral, scientifically accurate textbook on such a charged issue”. One could write a book that surveys the scientific assessments of the causes of global warming, including feedbacks (albedo flip, etc.), that totally ignores public policy. The real question then becomes: If you think the global warming situation is anywhere near as serious as, say, Hanson does, would that be a useful, or dare I say it, moral book?

Plus, if the goal of writing such a book on a charged issue is to avoid polarization, I think the effort would ultimately fail. Any serious treatment of man made emissions and global warming would either be so watered down (as in the excerpts above) or accurate enough to unleash attacks from the Inhofes and Lutzs of the world as to be useless or further polarizing.

As long as there are people involved in this debate who treat it as more of a sporting event to be won at any cost than a public policy matter, there’s zero chance for everyone to happily work together to achieve common goals.

I get endless angry e-mail thanks to my own web site, The Cost of Energy, for talking about global warming and peak oil, a combination that darkens the skies with deniers, I can assure you. I’ve long ago given up on trying to convince them, and instead focus on helping those who see the problems and want to do something positive.

The global warming statements appear to be far from the only problems with this textbook – read the “Center for Inquiry” report – they’re wrong on basic constitutional issues like the origins of separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and the role of the supreme court.

How do textbooks like this get into US classrooms? Do schools just trust the publishers to do a good job of fact-checking and editing of these books? Apparently it’s not just the short-attention-span media like newspapers and TV that keeps people so sadly misinformed about things these days!

The wilson-dilulio text book is 99% factual and basic poli-sci. At 600 pages with 10 font no less it is quite a good book. If anything it represents the often contradictory opinions that are found in America. If the eleveth edition contained passages on frogs killed by warming, would this be news. Speaking of which how many science books are out there that contain just such a fact? Should they be discarded?

Dear Andy—AS you note, no question that the science has not converged to a precise forecast for the next 100 years, so sure there are uncertainties. As Barrie Pittock says in his book—“uncertainty is inevitable; risk is certain.” And fine for you to cover this, though you should of course note that all issues governments are to decide on have uncertainties (the Iraq hearings of the last few days being an example).

But you also need to step back just a bit. The full title of this book is “American Government: Institutions and Policies”—so they are covering the processes of government and how things work, or that is what it seems is supposed to be covered. Recognizing the difficulty of the climate change issue, the governments of the world in 1988 organized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it has set up a very comprehensive process of getting inputs and going through the review process, etc., etc.—including getting inputs from The Skeptics and others. Sure there are still complainers—some saying IPCC over-state and others saying they understate (and on sea level, I am sure in this camp)—but IPCC is the official international government process to get an assessment of the science (and then too there are lots of national academies of science). And IPCC has worked hard to develop a lexicon to help communicate levels of confidence and degrees of evidence, etc. For this process, they won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now this may have come about after the book was published, but the book, as far as I know, made absolutely no mention of all of this—but this is official government process. Instead we get the undocumented opinions of the authors.

Jim Hansen’s letter discusses the science issues they really need to understand—and some will argue. My longer letter tries to start to get them to focus on the process—which is completely missing. How should government policymakers deal with complex issues, what sort of policy should they use, what are they doing—there is so much that could have been said to help students think about how to approach the discussions and contention that is naturally part of science—how to ask scientists to step back from the cutting edge where it is disagreement that helps us progress (as Dick Lindzen likes to note—correctly) and instead give us the best summary of what you do understand that you can because, it sure does seem, that there are substantial risks to what is going on and policy action is needed given the time scale of the problem. If policy on climate change waits until things are certain, it will be far too late (after all, there are still lots of arguments about what has happened in the past 100, 1000 or more years—certainty is generally an illusive, unattainable goal on the really interesting problems and questions).

So, indeed, get the text, and then maybe also write something about how this book has really gone off in a biased way here—putting in personal interpretations rather than helping students gain insight into how to approach challenging scientific questions (maybe also cover how the IPCC experience grew out of the CFC-ozone experience and how the Montreal Protocol has worked, etc. Basically, the authors chose one issue, provided no context on it regarding the international scientific process (or the national one of going to the US National Academy of Sciences—President Bush’s gold standard).

It is going to take much more than changing a few phrases to fix this book.

What bitter irony this antitheist has bought in hook line and sinker into the cultist Church Of Global Warming.

Whenever I would ride by Pepperdine I would think about Ken Starr and that was to me depressing. It must be that there is a circle of people who fancy themselves to be “conservatives” and add the assertion of Christians to make it Conservative Christians.
We are living in a world that is in a lot of trouble and it is for the most part an unseen kind of trouble, but it is not all unseen. We might not be able to see the CO2 rising into the atmosphere just as we were not able to see the CFCs that were going into the Ozone layer and destroying it like little Pac-Men gobbling away at these molecules that protect us from the suns more caustic rays.
But we are able to see the traffic and realize that it is burning a lot of gas and if close enough we are able to see the fumes from coal burning generators. And if we look closely enough we might not see any nutrients in large parts of the oceans. And if we go into the woods we might not see much left of the giant forests that once graced the North American Continent.
We realize politicians are not always the best managers and sometimes are corrupted by association. But at the same time we hope we can trust each other to be honest though often enough we are disappointed because of the seemingly sophomoric struggles that depreciate the potential for positive reformations that come from honest realizations.
If is also a shame that so many young Americans drop out of High School and have to pay exorbitant fees to go to college even when they are qualified. This is coupled with exorbitant lending rates.
So it is good to see that when told a lot of garbled messages that some young people might have to will to stand up and have something to say. Perhaps they are concerned with their own futures that might fall prey to CO2 buildup, for one, and as a result honesty must come from the mouths of these babes.
I still can’t figure out why these people call themselves Conservatives and I differentiate some Christians from others. I still think of Jimmy Carter as a terrifically good Christian regardless of his disappointment with Israel regarding the treatment of the Palestinians.
We used to say the 23rd Psalm in school. “Though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death I will fear no evil…” But striving for the goodness of life seems just as if not more important. “As I grow I hope that I can participate in reforming the problems that have through vanity and naieveity hurt our wonderful world, its atmostphere, its land, it oceans and other waters, it forests and the animals.”

All students should mull over the career of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, “Agronomist”.

You quote a question and call it an assertion.
A question, moreover, that seems like an obvious lead-in to a detailed discussion of the subject. If the book goes on to say that current science indicates at least half the warming of the last 50 years is due to human influence, is that not exactly what the IPCC says?

Let me repeat: that was a question, not an assertion.

As to the comment about warming also having benefits, how is it ethical to suppress that information? What, we should brainwash our children by giving them biased narratives?

I hate to jump on the bandwagon of bashing Hanson, but based on the excerpts you provided if he wrote a letter criticizing the text it sounds like he’s just trying to suppress discussion.

No one has a right to demand that science textbooks conform to some religious orthodoxy on environtmentalism.

One interesting thing I noticed when looking at the most recent (2008) edition of the textbook. Almost all footnotes in the global warming section link to sources that are 10 years old or older. It seems somewhat disingenuous for the book’s authors to continue assert that there is an ongoing debate regarding whether global warming is caused by humans, and then use pre-1998 references to make this case.

Also, for anyone interested in contacting the publisher to call for revisions, there is an e-mail form on Friends of the Earth’s website (//www.foe.org).

I’m Matt’s dad. I want to thank Mr. Revkin for picking this up. It’s an important story because a widely used text was misused for political purposes.

To understand the issue, you must read the section of the text on global warming. The authors set the tone by stating that not all environmental issues are equally worthy of support, take the case of global warming.

Our problem with the text is not merely that it is one-sided, which it is, but that it is dismissive of most of the world’s scientific community. The authors call scientists who acknowledge global warming “activist scientists,” which is a cheap shot, and certainly dismissive. They argue, with virtually no support, that politics drive the environmental movement, but fail to mention how the oil companies, the timber industry and other interests drive these politics from the opposite side. If the authors had acknowledged that numerous international organizations agree, as bodies, that global warming is a major, human-caused problem, but that there are dissenters, that would have been acceptable.

However, that is not what they did. The authors wrote this section of the text to support a political agenda, and in so doing they turned it into a tool of indoctrination.

While not Mr. Revkin’s main interest, the section on school prayer is even less defensible. The authors state in three separate places that the Supreme Court will not allow students to pray in school. That statement is false and utterly indefensible. The Supreme Court has never said that or anything close to that.

The irony is that if George Bush’s former head of the faith-based initiative wants to make the public schools more friendly to student prayer, he may have shot himself in the foot. If students take his text seriously, some may decide not to pray because these authors wrote that they are not allowed.

Most of the text is fine, as several writers here have observed. However, one gets the sense that these authors lost sight of their purposes, in more ways than one. That is why we believe this subject merits attention, and why I thank Mr. Revkin for picking this up.

“Science doesn’t know how bad the greenhouse effect is. (p. 566)”

Yes it does: the radiant energy budget of the planet is well understood. But science doesn’t know how exactly much warming a human-enhanced GH effect will result in, or what our best policy options are for dealing with the anticipated impacts, though many excellent suggestions are being made. While there is uncertainty, this does not extend to a scenario in which the planet starts to cool. More energy in than out = warming. That’s why it’s called a budget. The authors have also apparently managed to conflate “the greenhouse effect” with “global warming” in this sentence (presumably they meant to say “Science doesn’t know how bad GW is”). I see this confusion often in non-major freshman undergraduates but would expect better from the writers of high school textbooks.

How did Global Warming ever become associated with Liberals? What has a physical phenomenon got to do with politics?
By the way, just what is a “liberal” ?

Three cheers for Matthew LaClair! That young man deserves a medal.

Likewise for the Center for Inquiry.

Related: the (partly) oil-industry-funded National Science Teachers Association’s declining to distribute free copies of An Inconvenient Truth (and being unusually candid about their reasons (link)).

And any movement to “teach the controversy” that doesn’t leave the students clear about the reality – Greg Craven recommends teaching the controversy as a way to teach what is and isn’t good science, which is great, but I can envision other science teachers doing it as a he-said-she-said gesture, that bestows credibility where it’s not warranted.

How can you blame a student making up his mind in such a complex matter, with the information provided by the media? This, while as a society we are not even able to implement the Clean Water Act as the result of an incorrect essential pollution test.
In the following paragraphs High Country News in 1987 explains why:


With his attack on the BOD5 test and the design of sewage treatment plants, Maier broadened his critique from. Salt Lake City to the national clean-water program. Washington, D.C. water-lawyer Larry Silverman says that people at EPA headquarters tell him off the record that Maier is right, and that regulations and tests can and should be improved. But, they also tell him change is impossible because, Silverman says, “It would require the re-education of an entire industry.” He adds that it might also require the re-tooling of an industry that is happy with the status quo.

Salt Lake City illustrates the industry’s ability to resist change. According to Silverman, “In Salt Lake City, as in most of the country, there is a sewer lobby. They have a product to sell and they sold it. There are equipment manufacturers, engineers who designed it, construction companies that built it. They are all good citizens in the sense that they support the local politicians; they are well placed and highly organized.”

Thanks to the huge sums allocated to sewage plant construction under the Clean Water Act, this environmental-industrial complex has an open door to the federal treasury. It also has a monopoly on the knowledge needed to evaluate the projects it proposes and builds.

The Nation has thrown massive resources at the water pollution problems since 1972, only to witness the ‘relative failure of the regulatory and technical solutions it chose. The blame can be spread far and wide.

Brigham Young University’s Professor LaVere Merritt, who was also on the Governor’s Science Council committee that investigated the controversy, says Maier is a very important voice in the wilderness. “Peter (Maier) may help move us towards a more rational approach in pollution control over time. He is a not-to-well received proponent of a valid point of view, one we will probably move to in the future”.

For entire article visit //www.petermaier.net in the articles PDF section.

kim (#8), Can you point us at a reference for that “water vapor not being a large positive feedback” assertion? Thanks.

I’m just surprised that they still give kids textbooks. That is so 20th century. At least very few of them will be read.

Dear Andrew:

What could be fairer than the way both sides of the issue are presented evenhandedly in the textbook? To suggest that global warming is man-made, given the number of reputable and accomplished climatologists and scientists who dispute the contention, is to lose conformance with objective reality. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed it so eloquently: you are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts. In outlining the issues, your abject inability to recognize the distinction reveals an inexcusable bias. You really need to be exposed to the fundamentals of objective reportage.