Teaching Students to Dismiss Global Warming

April 10 post on the site OneClimate.net features another protest letter to Houghton Mifflin from Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for climate change programs with the

Jeffrey - Let me tell you what started my passion about this. Recently my son has been coming home from school and telling me about the lectures he has been getting on one side to the global warming issue - that we as humans are to blame. That our existence as humans is the root cause for a "Global Warming Crisis". Recently, we drove by an area of land that had been cleared to build a school, and he was concerned that the trees were being cut down. I asked why and he told me that we need to have trees in order to have oxygen. I asked him if people lived in the desert where there were no trees and had lived there for thousands of years and he replied "Yes". I then asked how cutting down these trees for a school here in Suburban Atlanta were going to affect our oxygen. For this he had no answer.

I dislike litter. I dont approve of wastefulness. If I see a car or Truck emitting a smokestack of pollution, it bothers me to some degree. Certainly I believe in cutting down on what might be having a harmful effect on the environment. I believe in experimenting with alternative forms of energy. My father owns 40 acres of land in N. Georgia - we want it to be healthy land for decades and centuries to come.

But what floors me is that people will so quickly jump on bandwagons of theory that our world is going to hell in a handbasket environmentally speaking. (By they way, morally and spiritually I do believe this to be true, moreso than environmentally, which is I believe a greater threat to our world than any amount of environmental crisis - but thats for another time)

I am saying that for all the "facts" that are presented for humans being the reason for this "warming" that we need to get both sides of information. These are not undisputed facts - this is an ongoing scientific debate. Hundreds of scientists disagree with mainstream press and popular belief of some that we have a global crisis.

Certainly prudent measures should be taken to protect the environment. But lets not forget that a Volcano emitting gases and even with a slight eruption can cause massive change environmentallly.

I want my son to receive both sides - not one side and to make up his own mind. And to not have a false sense of worry about a problem that may not even exist.

Hi Wesley,

No one doubts that temperature changes naturally occur across the Earth over time. But recent temperature changes have been far greater than were otherwise expected or explicable by natural means -- and they directly correlate with human production of greenhouse gases (the graphs laying temperature change over greenhouse gas emissions are stark).

Of course nobody knows what exactly to expect next from climate change because there are so many interrelated factors, but the best-case scenarios seem bad, and the worst-case scenarios seem catastrophic. So, simply considering that, it seems like we should be trying to do what we can to mitigate our contribution to the changing temperatures.

Plus, the things we can do to stop -- and maybe even begin to reverse -- the trend of rising average global temperature are not all that painful (unless you're an oil executive -- and even then they don't have to be). They require a shift in the way we produce and consume energy, but not a stoppage of growth. As a matter of fact, shifting to a cleaner energy economy, where we get much more of our energy from solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and other energy sources, presents an opportunity to jumpstart an economy that is severly in need of a jumpstart. More jobs in more places around the world. More small, medium, and large-size business opportunities. More skilled labor needed. More unskilled labor needed.

Seems like a win-win-win to me. I really don't understand why so many people are fighting it. All I can imagine is that the extremely well funded lobby of the oil industry is keeping the situation murky enough that people still believe doing something about global warming will hurt the economy. I hope more and more people will see through that myth, and begin to feel excited about the economic and environmental possibilities raised by alternative energy production and use. There's truly nothing to be scared of -- even the oil companies could offset their losses by investing in renewable energy development.

I would ask that each of you take a moment and look at the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

A sample of the long list of scientists, meterologists, biologists, etc across the globe who believe that we are not under a current threat or crisis of Global Warming and who believe that the earth naturally changes temperature over time.

thank you, jeff, for this. i have passed it on to our local Friends of the Earth group in Chinnor.

Alert for: "global warming" Teaching Students to Dismiss Global Warming By Jeffrey “Failure to correct the book’s errors will leave students gravely

Jeffrey wrote an interesting post today on Teaching Students to Dismiss Global WarmingHere’s a quick excerpt“Failure to correct the book’s errors will leave students gravely misinformed about the facts and science of global warming, one of the most serious problems that we as a society and a species face.” You can read Dr. …