The 52 passengers trapped since Christmas Eve on a research ship mired in the Antarctic sea were successfully rescued Thursday morning. The whole disaster was ironic, according to known climate denier Donald Trump, because the ship's mission was to study the region's changing environment.
Get it? Their research was related to global warming, and they were stuck in ice.
Trump tweeted:
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This isn't the first time Trump has confused cold weather with larger climate patterns. Several years back, he suggested the Nobel committee take Al Gore's prize back because it had been a particularly snowy winter.
He was correct that Antarctica recently set a record for lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth: a chilly 138.5 degrees Farenheit below zero. But over at the Guardian, Tony Press, chief executive of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre, explained why neither that nor the the trapped ship is likely to damage the overwhelming scientific understanding of climate change. “There has been an increase in snowfall in parts of the Antarctic, especially the east Antarctic where the ship is,” Press said, which can actually be attributed to warming temperatures. And the presence of sea ice there, he added, is dependent on "wind patterns, storms, tidal activity and ambient temperatures" -- all of which are "variable, local conditions.”
What it comes down to is that Antarctica is cold. Reading anything more into the incident is, as Trump would say, bullshit.
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