Chemist Martin Cornell has highlighted inaccuracies and omissions in K-12 educational materials produced by major publishers.
These materials incorrectly assert that carbon dioxide — the gas essential for carbon-based life — is a pollutant derived from fossil fuels and is the primary factor controlling global temperatures. Additionally, warming is portrayed as universally and significantly harmful.
"Marty" previously served as vice chair of "The Right Climate Stuff" research team comprised mostly of retired Apollo-era scientists and engineers who have studied and disputed insupportably alarmist climate science.
He and his team of concerned volunteers now actively engage Texas State Board of Education officials to correct false and misleading statements put forth by major textbook publishers which are distributed by other states as well.
While much of the material is solid science, the sections on climate science shift to biased and unsupported claims, telling students what to think instead of how to think critically.
Such indoctrination by error and omission begins heavily in eighth grade, most particularly asserting that effects of fossil fuel burning have warmed oceans, acidified oceans and increased extreme weather.
All these alarmist representations are false; the sun warms the ocean, saltwater chemistry prevents an acidic ocean, and weather extremes have not increased more frequently.
Houghton Mufflin Harcourt misleads students about ocean acidification using demonstrations with tap water to represent sea water, whereas using real sea water demonstrates that oceans remain firmly basic even when exposed to much higher than current atmospheric levels of CO2.
Its eighth grade Teachers Guide states: We can mitigate the global warming trend by significantly reducing our use of fossil fuels.
Following up on this, its eitghth grade Student Activity Guide suggests: Ask students to list things in their daily lives that increase the amount of carbon in the air … burning fuels … breathing (too many people?) … generating electricity (needed for adding more EVs?) … eating beef (fewer flatulent cattle?).
McGraw Hill writes: People can limit future climate change by reducing carbon emissions, reducing consumption, using renewable energy … and developing technology to move carbon out of the atmosphere.
They advise students: We can take action to reduce global warming by influencing the carbon cycle by utilizing renewable energy, making laws to limit carbon emissions, planting trees, and restoring wetlands.
The SAVVAS Learning Company instructs youngsters: With a partner, list your activities that have biggest impact on climate and suggest your alternatives … Use less energy … reduce fossil fuels … pass laws to reduce fossil use … use alternative energy sources.
A common indoctrination theme is that temperatures are warmer today than over the past 1,000 years, and as they continue to rise, we will see more damaging impacts on natural ecosystems and people.
Yes, according to Greenland ice core data, the Medieval warm period about 1,000 years ago was as warm or warmer than today. And the "Holocene Optimum" some 8,000 years ago was several degrees warmer with a subsequent decline consistent with Earth's orbital effects.
Also not mentioned in these materials is that Earth's temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the end of the Little Ice Age in about 1850, with the most occurring before industrialization began prior to the invention of the automobile and end of WWII.
Temperatures began warming between 1910-1940, then cooled in fits and starts until the late 1970s, then slightly warmed again until the present.
The materials tend also to treat CO2 and methane (CH4) greenhouse gases as climate thermostat control knobs, totally ignoring water vapor as the primary greenhouse gas (about 75% influence).
Never mentioned is that 95.7% of CO2 is emitted from oceans and plants, nor ever explained that natural periodic solar ocean warmings produce atmospheric CO2 releases just as witnessed with warming of a carbonated beverage.
Current primary textbooks and teacher guides misleadingly treat accumulating CO2 influences on temperature as linear rather than reverse logarithmic whereby warming effects decrease with higher saturation levels. (A doubling of CO2 from 200ppm to 400ppm produces the same warming as from 400ppm to 800ppm (about 2 degrees F.)
Students also aren't informed that CO2 is a vital plant nutrient injected into greenhouses, that the Earth is greening because of higher CO2 level, or that levels were about 10 times higher during times when huge dinosaurs consumed huge amounts of veggies and were apparently quite comfortable.
Another environmentally scary illusion wrongly suggests human activities are causing oceans to rise more rapidly, whereas they have only increased about 7 inches per century over the past few hundred years, compared with rising than 400 feet shortly following the end of the previous Ice Age about 12,000 years ago.
Extreme weather isn't becoming more frequent or severe either. A review of North Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane patterns shows no worsening pattern over more than a century.
Imagine what the death toll of the September 8, 1900, 120 mph storm that killed between 1,000 and 12,000 residents on Galveston Island in Texas if it had then been as highly populated as today.
Teachers should also comfort innocent, impressionable young minds that their parents' evil SUVs that carpool them to school aren't killing whales either.
Were it not for hydrocarbon-fueled industrial and agricultural revolutions, you and I, along with all the whales that provided blubber oil for lamps, wouldn't likely be around today.
Marty Cornell and his team are doing children, their parents, and yes — those whales — a big favor by urging schoolboards and textbook publishers to cool it on misinformed scare tactics.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.