New York Under Water?

Several "environmental science" text books carry illustrations of what New York might look like if the polar ice caps melted due to global warming. In the pictures, only the tops of the tallest buildings stand above the water.

But wait ... could that be real? Since ice has more volume as an equal amount of water, is there really enough water in the polar ice caps to flood New York to a depth of several hundred feet? Turns out, the answer is no. Defrost the poles, and the oceans would rise somewhere between six and 40 inches.

That's just one of the fascinating points made in "They killed trees to make my bed," an op/ed by Jane Shaw of Property and Environment Resource Center (PERC) in today's OCRegister (not yet posted, but try here or on Shaw's link later).

Shaw and her colleagues at PERC studied high school textbooks for history, bioology, civics and envirnmental science to evaluate how environmental issues were presented. The work led to a book, Facts not Fear. In addition to the misstatement about post-global warming water depth, the op/ed related the following fearmongering in the schoolbooks kids read as "fact:"

• Statements that world population is inexorably climbing, when in fact growth rates have declined and may level in as little as 50 years
• The perception that forestry is gobbling up forest acreage when in fact the forested land in the US has been stable since 1920, and we plant more trees every year than we cut. I have seen pictures of the Sierra forests taken by the first photographers to reach the area, in the mid-1800s. The forests were considerably sparser then than they are now.
• That because of "deforestation," populations of elk and antelope have declined over the last 50 years. In fact, their populations have increased.
  

What we're getting from all this is a second generation of kids who have been indoctrinated in the "human advancement bad/nature good" protocols. Hart has a solution:

"Perhaps instead of 'environmental science,' we should just teach science."