News: US school book: "Global warming will avoid high heating bills"...
Friends of the Earth is calling via an email campaign on one of the US largest textbook publishers to correct a school book containing a discussion of global warming "so biased and misleading it would humble a tobacco industry PR man."
"American Government", 11th edition is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and approved for use in high school Advanced Placement courses in the United States. On page 559, the textbook's authors write that "it is a foolish politician who today opposes environmentalism. And that creates a problem, because not all environmental issues are equally deserving of support. Take the case of global warming. (..) On the one hand, a warmer globe will cause sea levels to rise, threatening coastal communities; on the other hand, greater warmth will make it easier and cheaper to grow crops and avoid high heating bills." (Full)
Whether or not global warming is a proven scientific fact (see this post), I can not imagine what a simplistic mind would even think of putting this in a student's text book.
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
13 comments:
Pretty stupid. What about Phoenix Las Vegas, Houston etc? The COOLING bills will be much greater, so as a whole the country is not really saving... DUH
Most of the climate control fuel goes to heating, as cold is more deadly than heat.
Which leads us to the most ironic part of the Global Warming scare, that warming will actually save more lives with heat than are killed with cold.
I'm surprised that the author of the textbook was able to slip that one in there. I thought the liberals already owned public and higher learning institutions?
It seems a terribly sensible statement to me and just the sort of thing that should be in a textbook. Sensationalism aside actual warming trends predict a fairly mild rise in global temperature over the next few centuries. It will nicely expand growing zones for crops and will indeed take the edge off winters in many areas. Should we not teach the truth of things?
"Cold is more deadly than heat" is just as oversimplified as the original statement.
It depends what level of heat (it's as difficult to live in Sahara as in Syberia)
And what about droughts? What about tropical dieseases?
What the textbook says is true and needs no correction.
Ah, well, I have been lectured by my college graduate daughter. The freak snow storms this year? (A couple my son got caught in the middle of, driving across country, working for B.O.) are the result of GLOBAL WARMING. As the earth heats, it tries to cool itself off, thus freak storms! I guess, as a human, it's like putting an ice pack on someone with a fever, and then the sweating begins.
In America, we have questionable education standards, and no reason why "reputable" books should not be included in "questionable". It wouldn't be the first time their version of history was somewhat fictional, or "edited".
As for the earth making it warmer, and saving heating bills - Bull!
I seem to recall that Houghton-Mifflin, along with most US textbook companies, was bought up by Bertelsmann which published instruction manuals for the Nazi troops... big to-do about them offering MEIN KAMPF online in 2000... so says Dave Emory at spitfirelist dot com, anyway...
Its not so simple- crops wont "grow better" just because the earth overall is warmer. The theory is that there will be greater extremes in cold and warmth: bad for crops. Any lowering of heating bills will be offset by more extreme changes in weather.
hopefully students are tought to quesrion the things they read and wont take everything for fact just because it is in a book, not to mention if the teacher is doing his job the students wont be going around blindly repeating that global warming is all good. yes cold kills more people a year than heat, it is more dangerous. but a lot of places will experience severe drought with global warming and last time i checked that is not conducive to growing crops..
Drought, food shortages and tropical diseases (which are exacerbated by increases in temperature) cause far, far more deaths than cold in a given year. This passage is utter bs.
It's like telling people that we should be growing more corn in the midwest because it will lower fuel prices, while ignoring the skyrocketing price of other agricultural products (not to mention that all of the exogenous energy that goes into growing that corn actually makes bio-ethanol more expensive than gasoline).
Simple minds don't take into account the far-reaching consequences of these situations and settle instead for preaching one possible (and highly unlikely) upside.
Pretty stupid. What about Alaska?
Don't the Eskimos deserve a day in the sun?
The majority of the posts on here are jaw-dropping to me. Apparently no one takes any Biology classes in America. The cause and effect of global warming is far more complicated than some places getting hotter and others colder. The change in global temperature, no matter how minute, has major repercussions on weather patterns (i.e. the jet stream, etc)and most important, ecosystems. Ecosystems are what keep the earth habitable and we are mucking them up; many beyond repair. We don't see or even directly interact with things that affect our quality of living, yet we are very good at destroying them due to blatant ignorance.
Please take a biology class, you don't have to have a PhD to understand what is happening to the earth and why.
And by the way the Inuits (eskimos) are losing their homes and food supply due to global warming; so I'm pretty sure they don't want "a day in the sun."
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