A new children's book on global warming by Hollywood political activist Laurie David makes a critical scientific error in its attempt to demonstrate evidence for catastrophic climate change, according to a researcher.

David and singer Sheryl Crow headlined a "Stop Global Warming College Tour" last spring that was heavily covered by mainstream media, notes Newsbusters.org.

But Robert Ferguson, president of the Science and Public Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., published findings today that reveal a "glaring scientific error."

On page 18 of "The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming," the book has a graph 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."

"You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph," the book says.

But the graph is "dead wrong," contends Ferguson.

"In order to contrive a visual representation for their false central claim that CO2 controls temperature change, David and co-author Cambria Gordon present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that falsely reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature," he wrote.

David, who was married to "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David, tells children:

Deep down in the Antarctic ice are atmosphere samples from the past, trapped in tiny air bubbles. These bubbles, formed when snowflakes fell on the ice, are the key to figuring out two things about climate history: what temperatures were in the past and which greenhouse gases were present in the atmosphere at that time.

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:

Original chart

What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution and global warming.

Ferguson asserts, however, the actual temperature curve in the chart was switched with the actual CO2 curve.

Ferguson's "corrected chart"

"The authors mislabeled the blue curve as temperature and mislabeled the red curve as CO2 concentration," he explained.

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

"This fact may have been too inconvenient for David, who instead presented young readers with an astoundingly irresponsible falsehood," Ferguson said. "Parents and teachers of these children should be concerned."

Ferguson said Al Gore's widely acclaimed documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth" also "got this wrong."

Gore's film said, "The relationship is very complicated. But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more CO2, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun."

Ferguson argues the peer-reviewed literature is "unanimous" in finding that in climate records CO2 changes historically have followed temperature changes and cannot have caused them.

"The book is mischievous for concluding that this deceptive graph has anything to do with 'discovering' a link between additional CO2 concentrations and 'global warming,'" Ferguson declares.

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