Kate at SDA attempts a fisking of the CTV story concerning that giant ice-shelf that has broken away from Ellesmere Island up in the Canadian Arctic. She's concerned that the scientist quoted in the piece (Warwik Vincent) is claiming that the event might be an indication of the onset of anthropogenic Global Warming. So she's interested in showing both that he's incompetent as a scientist and a media craving "climate cultist".
Needless to say, this doesn't go well for Kate. After all, she's just a dumb girl. And there's a particularly juicy example of her scientific illiteracy at the very beginning of the post:
Laval University's Warwick Vincent, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the new ice island and couldn't believe what he saw. 'It was extraordinary,' Vincent said Thursday. 'This is a piece of Canadian geography that no longer exists.'
To which Kate responds (and you can almost hear the the sound of eyes being rolled):
Ice is geography now?
Whoa! Has Kate caught a "so called" climate scientist in a falsehood?
Well, not really, because large ice structures such as ice-shelves have standardly been considered geographical featurers (by, for example, Natural Resources Canada), and the study of ice-shelves has standardly been considered part of the study of geography. You don't study the geography of Antartica, for example, without mentioning the Ross Ice Shelf.
And this is what I find so appalling. Kate knows squat about geography, squat about ice-shelves, and yet she's got the gall to trash a real expert (who in this case has spent 15 years tramping around the arctic getting the lay of the land) with an argument that she would not have dared put forward if she had spent two minutes doing google searches!
This is what we're up against, when arguing with Conservatives over the environment. They are not ashamed of their own ignorance. In fact they feel entitled to it!