A high school student thinks his textbook is biased...and James Hansen agrees with him:
LaClair said he was particularly upset about the book's treatment of global warming. James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, recently heard about LaClair's concerns and has lent him some support. Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain." The edition of the textbook published in 2005, which is in high school classrooms now, states that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."
The irony here is that just this week Hansen said that the threat from global warming was worse than anyone thought. Of course there is disagreement, even among alarmists. And given that global temperatures haven't risen in the last decade, textbooks should be a little skeptical. And what kind of scientist refutes the notion of uncertainty in a system as complex as climate? If Hansen's so certain, why can't he give us a single metric by which to judge his predictions. Hell, I'd settle for an accurate five day forecast.