Seeing the environmental forest

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute had a piece on Forbes back in May that escaped my attention when it first came out.  Titled " Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat ", it focused on the single premise that since 2012, total polar sea ice was above the average since 1979.  Taylor then jumped to the erroneous conclusions that a) polar sea ice was not retreating and b) global warming will be entirely beneficial to humans.  His arguments are familiar, as I dealt with them before when a Newsmax article featured them back in 2014 .  He's recycling old talking points, so this post is going to echo the one I wrote a year ago.

for GOP politicians to be completely ignorant of science?  You have Phil Broun, a former physician who called evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang " lies straight from the pit of Hell ."  It's enough to make one wonder how he reacted to bacteria who have evolved antibiotic resistance and/or cared for any potentially pregnant patients, given that an understanding of embryology is rather integral to caring for such patients.  Then there's Ralph Hall, who claimed that climate scientists are essentially committing fraud for grant money , Dana Rohrabacher once claiming that dinosaur farts caused climate cycles in the past, and Phil Gingrey's claims that women's bodies can resist pregnancy arising from rape because a woman's body shuts down ovulation if she is stressed out.  Gingrey is a former OB/GYN.  Who believes that a woman's body can magically shut down its reproductive system if subjected to the stress of being raped....  My irony meter just broke....

2013 was notable in several ways, from the record warmth in Australia to the polar vortex that gripped the Eastern US in November and December due to a weakened Arctic polar jet stream and record drought in the US state of California, along with numerous extreme weather events around the globe .

A childhood acquaintance on Facebook posted a link to a CBN News article that serves as a good example of what is wrong with conservative news media.  Written by Dale Hurd, it is a mash-up of science denier canards with little in the way of actual science or evidence. The first paragraph sets the tone, making fun of the scientists who were trapped in Antarctic ice.  Nowhere does Hurd mention HOW the scientists were trapped: A storm packed sea ice into the bay their ship was in.  Now this can happen at any time of the year but it doesn't mean that the ice is growing.  It's summer down in Antarctica, a time when Antarctic sea ice melts from ~19 million km 2 in September down to ~2-3 million km 2 by March.  That leaves plenty of broken pack ice for winds to blow around, especially in the early part of the melt season such as December when the ship was trapped.  So the irony is that those scientists were trapped by MELTING sea ice, an irony completely los...