Watch the Arctic’s Old Ice Not So Magically Disappear

Ice reflects the sun's heat. No ice...well, of course, that means heat not reflected and more heat absorbed instead, quickening the pace of warming…

We just saw how climate change deniers hijacked Apple’s board meeting to demand more pollution. We learned how they hate the idea of “so-called climate change” and “the amorphous concept of environmental sustainability.” This National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) video is anything but amorphous. It makes very clear that climate change is taking place by revealing the profound and continuing loss of old arctic ice from 1987 to 2013:

Naturally, this sort of thing does not go into the Earth’s Big Book of Good Things. Ice reflects the sun’s heat. No ice…well, of course, that means heat not reflected and more heat absorbed instead, quickening the pace of warming. Ultimately, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could be affected. AMOC is the reason Europe has a mild climate.
For now.
The repugicans are very fond of ignoring the fact that the amount of ice changes, so that if there is, at a particular moment, more ice this year than last year, they jump up and call “hoax!”, ignoring the longer trends that disprove their claims, as the chart below demonstrates:

You can see for yourself that a little extra ice one month (or even year) doesn’t mean anything against the record of 30 years.
We have also recently seen that this past January was the fourth warmest on record. A dunderhead could see why this is important, which leaves out Faux News and its luminaries, who steadfastly stick to their story that anthropogenic global warming is some sort of liberal plot:
On the January 29 edition of his show, Sean Handjob, who had previously said global warming was debunked because it was cold in Iowa, said, “I Don’t Care What Your Liberal Friends Say … I Think Global Warming Is A Hoax.”
And just the other day, on February 28, we learned on Faux News’ The Five, that four out of five co-hosts agree: there is no science to global warming.
And of course, there is David Barton, who, speaking for people everywhere who pretend to know stuff they don’t know, and following up his earlier claim that we haven’t had global warming in sixteen years (despite the fact that all the evidence points to ever increasing temperatures in that time), says our bizarre weather is due not to man’s impact on the environment (anthropogenic global warming) but is due to abortion: we opened a door that lost god’s protection over our environment and that’s our choice”:
Look. Global warming deniers are not the smartest people on the planet. But they are the most dishonest and they have corporate money to burn. And all they have to do is sow doubt. They don’t have to actually win the debate they started in the first place.
But the facts don’t like. NOAA’s 2012 State of the Climate report tells the tale:

In December 2012, NOAA reported that the 2012 record low was 18% smaller than the previous record, nearly 50 percent below average.
Despite all this, despite the consensus of climate scientists and despite the evidences of their own five senses, in January, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to deny the reality of climate change. Never mind man-caused climate change, but climate change period. All 24 Republicans stuck their heads in the sand. As ThinkProgress reported, these Republicans have accepted a collective $9.3 million in contributions from the fossil fuel industry that is, in large part, driving that climate change they say isn’t happening.
Until the water is up around their necks, there will probably be no way to get a repugican to admit to the reality of anthropogenic global warming and, who knows, by then David Barton may have convinced them all that if we stop abortion the waters will recede. Stopping abortion, after all, doesn’t cost corporations. It’s a cheap – if completely ineffective – Bronze Age solution to a scientific problem.
And it is therefore exactly what the repugicans want. Reality is expensive. But god doesn’t cost them a penny.