The publisher of a NSW year-10 history book has rejected complaints from the federal Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly that it misrepresents facts about climate change.

Kelly took issue with the characterisation of climate change in the textbook Pearson History New South Wales.

Kelly has written to the NSW education minister, Rob Stokes, saying the book’s description of Tony Abbott as a climate change denier was “an offensive slur equating it with Holocaust deniers”, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The book says: “Climate change is noticeable in Australia, with more extreme frequent weather events such as the 2002-06 drought or the 2010-11 Queensland floods.”

“That is simply an inaccurate statement that is in a school history book,” Kelly told parliament’s federation chamber last week.

“What chance do we have of forming the best policies in this nation to deal with fire, floods and drought if we have children being misled by incorrect information in our history books?”

He quoted Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country to argue contemporary natural disasters are nothing out of the ordinary: “I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains,” the poem says.

“We need to understand that we live in that same country that Dorothea Mackellar wrote about over a hundred years ago,” Kelly said.

“That is why we need to prepare and help people recover from their resources instead of wasting money pretending that we can change the weather.”

The Australian Bureau of Meterology says “one of the greatest impacts of climate variability and climate change occurs through changes in the frequency and severity of extreme events.”

It describes the 2011 Brisbane floods as the second-highest flood level of the last 100 years, after January 1974.

The bureau and CSIRO’s latest State of the Climate report said Australia was experiencing more extreme heat, longer fire seasons, rising oceans and more marine heatwaves, consistent with a changing climate.

A spokeswoman for the publisher Pearson backed the book.

“Pearson builds textbooks to support the Australian curriculum and we stand by this text book and its author,” she said.

Nonetheless, Stokes said he was writing to Pearson about Kelly’s concerns.

“It is very important that texts present information in a balanced way so that students can make up their own minds on important issues,” he said in a statement.

Stokes has previously criticised Abbott’s climate change stance, warning against “populist anti-intellectualism” from public figures.

The NSW school history curriculum does not specifically mention climate change and there is no mandatory textbook set.

While the state government sets the syllabus, it does not write or set the textbooks.