Tony Heller (aka Steve Goddard) has an amazing talent for misunderstanding arguments. Often basing his entire angry rant on a pedantic misreading of part of a sentence. Whether this demonstrates a lack of reading comprehension, or is a deliberate strategy to mislead, is an open question.
A case in point is Capital Weather Gang : Taking Climate Stupid To Entirely New Levels , archived here. In this he attacks the notion that Antarctic sea ice extent is at a record low for the time of year, by focusing entirely on a single word in a tweet from the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. The tweet in question is a link to an article in the paper, and reads:
Antarctic sea ice levels have shrunk to record low levels for late June: https://t.co/OD1Fa47YC9 pic.twitter.com/Pe1lffqVb0
— Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) June 26, 2017
Even if you don't click on the link, I think it's pretty clear what this sentence means.
Tony Heller also thinks he knows what it means but is wrong.
He doesn't read beyond the word shrunk
and interprets the sentence as just saying Arctic sea ice is shrinking
.
Now to be fair, if the tweet had just said it is shrinking
, there would be some ambiguity, depending on what time frame we were talking about.
Shrinking could mean:
- Sea ice is less than it was a few days ago. This wouldn't mean much, as we would always expect sea ice to be shrinking during the melting season, and would be untrue for June as it's currently winter in the Antarctic.
- Sea ice is less than it usually is for this time of year. This is the obvious interpretation; it's how polar sea ice is usually measured, by comparing it to equivalent points during the year.
- The long term trend is negative. This would be the case for Arctic sea ice which has been shrinking for decades, but would be false for the Antarctic that has been growing over the same period.
In the context of the complete sentence, it's difficult to see how a reasonable person could read the tweet as intending anything other than meaning 2. They explicitly say the extent is for late June, which rules out the first meaning. They say this is setting a record low, which makes no sense when talking about the trend.
This NSIDC chart illustrates the point. It shows the track of each year at the same time of the year. Sea ice is currently growing, because it's winter, but that 2017 is currently at a record low for the time of year.
Tony Heller, on the other hand, ignores most of the sentence and focuses only on the words have shrunk
,
and attacks them on the assumption they were using meaning 1.
He replys:
Antarctic sea ice is growing, not shrinking. It is winter there and the temperature -70. How dense are these people?
It's not clear who he means by these people
, which is probably the point.
Continuing the theme, he rhetorically states
This is what they call
shrinking.
Refering to this graph from NSIDC showing average June extents.
Which is really misleading as the graph doesn't include June 2017. The average June figures won't be out till July, and probably won't show a record low average as it's only been in the last few days that the extent has dropped back to a record low. It will however show a big drop compared to June 2016, the last month in Heller's graph. For comparison here's the average conditions for May up to and including 2017.
It isn't clear if Heller's point with the graph is that last June wasn't a record low, or if he's talking about the general upward trend in the graph. This lack of clarity is, I expect, deliberate.
If Heller had simply said in his post that although it's correct that Antarctic sea ice is currently at a record low, the long term trend is upwards and you cannot assume the record low is due to global warming, or that the upward trend won't resume in a few years time, then there would have been no argument on my part. But instead he has to deny even the reality of an temporary record, and question the intelligence of anyone for merely pointing to that fact.
The sad part is, that if Heller had simply read the Washington Post article linked to in the tweet, he would have had all his questions answered.
The article points out that as it's winter in the southern hemisphere sea ice is growing.
While it is currently the start of winter at the South Pole and sea ice extent is expanding, current levels show the extent is right around 13.1 million square kilometers, far below the average extent at this time of year around 14 million square kilometers. Antarctic sea ice extent has been monitored since 1979.
Washington Post
It points out that the trend is upwards, and that a few years ago they were pointing out that the extent was at a record high.
The original version of this article (see below), published in September 2013, was headlined
Washington PostAntarctic sea ice hit 35-year record high. But there has been a marked decline in Antarctic ice extent ever since.
Illustrated by this graph
And it points out that just as record highs were not evidence against global warming, it is now
unwise to tout the current level as an unambiguous indicator of climate warming
.
I'll end with some of the comments from Heller's post, if only because they illustrate how much little attention is being paid to the original article.
Let me guess:
The Capital Weather Gang — on another activist blog — read about ice loss and none of them have a clue.
Most progressives are just simple Brown Shirts. Useless eaters who hate the rest of humanity .
Yes, the Antarctic ice has shrunk slightly from the record high set a couple years back. In the minds of alarmists, anything less that the record high represents catastrophic warming, requiring a world socialist wealth redistribution scheme to save the planet. The same applies with Arctic sea ice, because it is less than the all time high set in 1979.
The alarmists aren’t stupid, they are diabolical master propagandists praying on the uninformed.
Funny how these clowns weren't too keen to talk about the Antarctic a couple of years ago when there was record satellite-era sea ice. (Although it didn’t stop alarmists claiming even record sea ice was due to 'climate change') So biased it's untrue.
