A news item and an opinion piece by Dr Jan Lieser in The Mercury has generated some discussion . While the reasons why the Antarctic sea ice may be increasing may seem fairly straight forward, many commenters have cherry-picked this bit of information (including misreading a sentence about the ozone hole) and used it as proof that global warming does not exist.
This neatly fits with their ideology, but it doesn't fit with the facts. Dr Lieser even gets accused of making it up to secure funding.
The level of debate we have here in Hobart is not particularly high or informed so I do hope not too many outside the Mercury commenting circle actually read this.
By way of supporting evidence, some of those slandering Dr Lieser mention Steven Koonin's latest editorial for the Wall Street Journal (complete with Koonin's self-qualifying quote "My training as a computational physicist", which should work wonders for climate science).
Of course, the WSJ being a well known Murdoch publication, has some history on this topic.
Climate Science Watch published its own response.
