Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of the climate-denier textbook American Government, responded to criticism on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog with the following claims:

The authors do not provide a history of global warming; rather they use the issue to illustrate “entrepreneurial politics.” As part of this illustration, the book cites a wide range of sources, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore.

Late last year, we released the 11th edition of “American Government,” which included some revisions to the “entrepreneurial politics” section. These revisions reflect current developments in environmental policy research.

Not a single sentence in their response accurately represents the textbook’s content.

Friends of the Earth has a petition to Houghton Mifflin to repair the book’s distortions, bias, and lies.

UPDATE: Local TV and radio stations like KIDK (Pocatello, ID) and KTAR (Phoenix, AZ) are covering the story, interviewing students and teachers who use the book. WIVB (Buffalo, NY) has interviews with Matthew LaClair and a representative from the Center for Inquiry.

Citations for Chapter 21 of American Government, 11th Edition, are peppered with global warming deniers: Read more

… will have to wait until next week. [Note to self: You are starting to sound like Ryan Seacrest on "American Idol".]

I got bogged down in giving three talks and responding to Breakthrough Institute’s mistakes about breakthroughs and finishing my next Salon piece and writing the pieces explaining why the Pielke et al. Nature article is wrong in a variety of respects, most especially its conclusion — and then responding to the latest personal attack on me by Breakthrough Institute that I confess was totally unexpected.

I promise I will run the solution posts next week. And the three pieces on the Nature article, too. Though if Tiger doesn’t get his act together at August tomorrow, I may have some blogging time Sunday….

… though, in retrospect, it’s now clear that they never really stopped being uncivil.

I honestly don’t get the Breakthrough Institute and Shellenberger and Nordhaus. As discussed in my post from early morning on Thursday, “Civility breaks through the blogosphere,” I thought Ted Nordhaus and I had come to an understanding on Wednesday in the back-and-forth comments (here) on an earlier post. Indeed, I had already said as much at the end of this post on Pielke from Tuesday (see here).

But I now realize that B.I. never apologized for all the things they wrote about me — and apparently rather than simply calling this a “no fault” decision to be civil, they have decided to try to portray this as if they are they completely innocent victims of “unfair attacks” and that somehow that means they can just go on attacking me uncivilly over and over and over again, which it would seem to me proves that they aren’t so innocent.

[I could list endless instances of their incivility, but let's just try three, Pielke writing that the "bloggers at Grist ... make up 'facts' to support their critiques of him," and B.I. attacking me in headlines for the "Politics of Personal Destruction" and "Joe Romm's Dissembling."]

And so all this leads up to this post from B.I. Thursday night:

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Exxon Mobil’s CEO Rex Tillerson made $21.7 million last year — admittedly a small chunk of the company’s $40 billion in profits. The skyrocketing price of oil behind Tellerson’s windfall has a very different impact on most people — everyone from school districts to small businesses are struggling to survive. What makes Tillerson’s good fortune particularly galling is that his company is leading the rush to burn up the planet. At a conference for oil and gas executives in 2007, he claimed that most politicians make bad decisions because they don’t take the long view — unlike companies like Exxon:

Most policymakers operate on two-, four- or six-year timelines, while most energy companies operate on two-, four- or six-decade timelines. This is an important point, because acting impulsively in setting energy policy with the expectation of immediate results will likely have negative consequences that will be felt for decades to come.

The truth is Exxon’s policy is based entirely on short-term gains with disastrous long-term consequences. At the recent Congressional hearing with top oil executives, Exxon’s Stephen Simon said his company agrees with the U.S. Energy Information Administration projection that the world will continue to be powered 80 percent by fossil fuels and that “the impact of renewables” will be “very, very small” for decades to come.

Tillerson is trying to make that business-as-usual outlook a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over the next five years, Simon said, Exxon Mobil plans to invest at least $125 billion in oil and gas projects that will last for decades. Unlike other energy majors who have at least some investment in the wind, solar, and geothermal industry, Exxon’s only significant “investment” in renewable alternatives to fossil fuels is a $10 million-a-year R&D partnership with Stanford University — about half of Tillerson’s salary and 0.02% of Exxon’s investment in fossil fuel extraction.

Exxon’s energy policy will send us careening to climate disaster. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has calculated that “global emissions will increase 50% by 2030 and more than double by 2050” if the Exxon-desired future comes to pass, “leading to a global average temperature increase of 1.7 to 4.4°C, with a best estimate at 2.8°C” in 2050, which would cross the “tipping point into truly catastrophic change.” It is certainly true that energy policy decisions being made now could have, as Rex Tillerson said, “negative consequences that will be felt for decades to come” — but he is the guilty party.

That’s the title of an article in Science today (available here with subs.) I’m giving a talk this morning so don’t have a lot of time to comment on it, but here’s the abstract:

The extreme warmth of particular intervals of geologic history cannot be simulated with climate models, which are constrained by the geologic proxy record to relatively modest increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Recent recognition that biological productivity controls the abundance of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) in the unpolluted atmosphere provides a solution to this problem. Our climate simulations show that reduced biological productivity (low CCN abundance) provides a substantial amplification of CO₂-induced warming by reducing cloud lifetimes and reflectivity. If the stress of elevated temperatures did indeed suppress marine and terrestrial ecosystems during these times, this long-standing climate enigma may be solved.

Wow. If climate warming “did indeed suppress marine and terrestrial ecosystems,” which leads to “reduced biological productivity” then we get fewer clouds and more absorption of the sun’s heat. Ocean acidification and widespread drought, wildfires, and pests, anyone?

Oh, what the heck, here’s the rest of this very upbeat article — it’s short and worth a read:

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