“Get them while they’re young, Evita, get them while they’re young,” sang the Che Guevara figure in the hit musical Evita, based on the life of Eva Peron. It’s a lesson Laurie David and the whole climate alarmist crew have learned and apply with some force.

The latest example of the alarmists propagandizing to kids comes in their manhandling of children’s book publisher, Scholastic. That company often hands out curricula and educational material to kids, and often gets sponsorship to do so from industries involved in the subject. So when Scholastic produced one called The United States of Energy, which happened to have backing from the American Coal Foundation, the alarmists went ballistic. Leading the charge was the anti-business Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. How dare Americans learn that coal is a vital part of the energy mix of the country and that thousands earn a good livelihood in otherwise poor areas because of it!

The fact that the curriculum contained information not just about coal, but about nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, solar and natural gas power as well didn’t figure into their reasoning at all. Coal is the forbidden subject — all children should be allowed to learn about coal is that it is evil. Eeeeeviillll.

The intimidation worked, of course. Scholastic pulled the curriculum. But to make matters worse, since 2008 Scholastic has had a plan called Celebrate Earth Day that is based on Laurie David’s book for Scholastic entitled The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming. Unfortunately for the children, however, this book is factually wrong. As the Science and Public Policy Institute reported:

 A new SPPI paper briefly examines a cardinal error, found on page 18 of the David book, where she mousetraps children: “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. What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution (sic) and global warming.”

The SPPI paper states, in part:

What really makes the David-Gordon graph “amazing” is that it’s egregiously counterfactual. Worse, in order to contrive a visual representation for their claim that CO2 controls temperature change, the authors present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.

The manipulation is critical because David’s central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes.

Case in point, on page 103 of their book, David cites the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005). However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite, that CO2 lags “with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles.” 

“Parents and teachers should be concerned enough to demand that the publisher, Scholastic Books, recall, pulp and correct the error before mores copies reach innocent children.,” said Ferguson.

Indeed. David’s book should be pulped, rather than The United States of Energy.

I grew up in a coal mining area of Great Britain, where every morning at school we said prayers for the miners and their continued productivity. That’d probably cause our alarmist friends’ heads to explode.

UPDATE: The original post suggested that Scholastic had replaced the plan with Celebrate Earth Day, which is not the case. The double standard still remains, however.