Should Laurie David’s new kids book be renamed "An Inconvenient Error?"

WorldNetDaily reported yesterday that a new children’s book on global warming by Hollywood activist Laurie David makes a critical scientific error in its attempt to demonstrate evidence for catastrophic climate change. Fortunately, there’s a new book out for kids that gets the science right.

"The Sky’s NOT Falling: Why It’s OK to Chill About Global Warming" (Holly Fretwell,Kids Ahead Books, ISBN: 978-0-976726-94-4, $17.95, paperback, kids 8-12, Sept. 2007) is the antidote to the hysteria and misinformation being bandied about by people like Laurie David and Al Gore.

Written by natural resources policy expert Holly Fretwell, "The Sky’s NOT Falling" takes a balanced view of our ever-changing environment and climate, and shows how human ingenuity and resourcefulness, not the mindless fear of change that so characterizes global warming zealots, will bring about a healthier, cleaner world.

"We published ’The Sky’s NOT Falling’ to counter just the sort of indoctrination we knew that any book by Laurie David about global warming would contain" says Kids Ahead publisher Eric M. Jackson. "But even we were shocked to read the report from Robert Ferguson, president of the Science and Public Policy Institute in Washington D.C"

That report revealed what Ferguson called a ’glaring scientific error’ on page 18 of the Laurie David book, called ’The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming’. Thanks to meticulous vetting by peer reviewers, ’Sky’, which replicates the graph in question, gets the interpretation right.

In the Laurie David book, the graph on page 18, which purportedly shows how CO2 and temperature go together, is accompanied by the statement, "The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell" The book then says, "You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph"

But the Laurie David graph is "dead wrong" contends Ferguson. "The authors mislabeled the blue curve as temperature and mislabeled the red curve as CO2 concentration"

That "manipulation" is critical because the central premise of the book argues that CO2 drives temperature, "yet the ice core data clearly reveal temperature increases generally precede increasing CO2 by several hundred to a few thousand years"

"The Sky’s NOT Falling", on the other hand, shows the correct correlation which, according to Eric Jackson, "is so critical in getting the climate change story right"

And it’s just this sort of blatant manipulation of facts found in Scholastic’s book that makes Eric Jackson proud of "The Sky’s NOT Falling" "Across the nation, teachers and parents are deciding the best way to approach the topic of global warming. Is it the end of the world as we know it, a catastrophe created by evil industrialists and a planet full of pesky people who won’t stop breathing, or is this just a natural phenomenon that humans can adapt to" Having reviewed the science, Jackson votes for the latter, and he believes that millions of parents and teachers will too.

But ultimately, there’s even more at stake. "Led astray by the global warming lobby, legislators are considering anti-global warming measures that, if implemented, will devastate the American economy. Apparently that sort of thing is fine by multi-millionaires like Al Gore and Laurie David, but for average Americans, these measures would be a disaster"

"The Sky’s NOT Falling: Why It’s OK to Chill About Global Warming" is a critical first step in making sure that the next generation gets the story right.

About Kids Ahead:
Kids Ahead books are published by World Ahead Media. To learn more, visit www.worldahead.com

To interview the Author:
To interview Holly Fretwell, contact Maria Sliwa at 973-272-2861, or marketing@worldahead.com

Contact Information

J. Abarbanel

Marketing Director

World Ahead Media

Contact via E-mail