There are still people out there who think that climate change isn’t real. These people have chosen to listen to malcontented Fox pundits over actual, real-life climate scientists. But it’s not really their fault, because when they click over to Hannity at night, they think they are watching the news. And those anti-scientists that Hannity puts on his show keep saying things like, “Look at Antarctica! Antarctica is gaining in ice! Ipso facto, there is no global warming. Also, Al Gore is dumb.”Pretty sure that’s verbatim. Those guys are terrible, and their paychecks come from oil companies, but this particular point they raise is actually worth exploring (it is practically the only one). The Arctic is melting, and fast, and it’s scaring the shit out of scientists. The entire ice cover could be gone during the summer as soon as 2016. That’s fucking nuts. That’s not in doubt.But Antarctica is doing fine. It isn’t gaining ice cover by any incredible margin, but it’s not withering, either. And nobody really knows why the hell not. The world is warming, no doubt about that. So why isn’t the biggest hunk of ice on the planet shrinking faster than the GOP electorate?There are some guesses; it has do with the westward-blowing winds that perpetually encircle the continent and the hole in the ozone layer. But I’ll leave the explaining to the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. In the above video, produced by longtime climate change denier-debunker Peter Sinclair, we go in-depth with a whole swath of climate scientists to better get a handle on this most confounding of global ice issues.
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