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Bad Chart Thursday: Fox News on Ice

All that hype about the arctic ice melting and how we’re all going to live in water cities built on the backs of dead polar bears? Total bullshit, according to Fox News. I’m sure you’ve seen it by now, the chart showing an INCREASE in polar ice from 2012 to 2013.

FoxArcticIce

That’s right.

polar bear 3

You may have also seen the various rebuttals pointing out that 2012 was a new low for arctic ice, so the small increase from that the next year still puts the ice at the low end of a long downward trend, as illustrated in this chart by Skeptical Science.

So who are we supposed to believe? The consensus of virtually every single climate expert and the results of looking at all the evidence or the cherry picked evidence to support doing absolutely nothing about the “supposed” human-caused harm to the environment?

Before you answer that, let me put it to you another way. What if you had been taking money from Fox News since its inception, but some years you gave a little back. So the first year, you took $100,000. The next year, you gave Fox $50,000, and the next you took $60,000, and the next year $70,000, and so forth for years, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars over the whole period, as shown in the chart below.

Giving back to Fox.final

Every time Fox News accuses you of stealing and demands that you return the money, you can point to all the years when you gave them more money than the year before to prove them wrong. In fact, by doing this, you could demonstrate that Fox News in fact owes you money for, say, 2013, when you paid them more money than you took in 2012.

Fox 2012-13

Applying Fox News’s logic, clearly there is money to be made in denial. Also: they owe you forty twenty grand. Deadbeats.

Melanie Mallon

Melanie is a freelance editor and writer living in a small town outside Minneapolis with her husband, two kids, dog, and two cats. When not making fun of bad charts or running the Uncensorship Project, she spends her time wrangling commas, making colon jokes, and putting out random dumpster fires. You can find her on Twitter as @MelMall, on Facebook, and on Instagram.

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