By Brad Friedman on 10/1/2013, 6:35am PT  

Oh, noes! I've been blocked on the Twitters by Eric Bolling, the pretend journalist, pundit, propagandist or whatever he calls himself, of The Five on Fox "News"!

Never mind that I've never followed him there, so I'll probably survive having been "blocked" by him, but it seems thin-skinned li'l Eric doesn't like it too much when folks point out the wildly inaccurate "facts" he presents to viewers on his afternoon Fox "News" show.

The Twitter exchange between the very handsome Bolling and me is posted below. In full. It's brief. I correct his long-ago debunked falsehood about Arctic ice, he calls me a name and links to a long-ago debunked article in a British tabloid to support his long-ago debunked nonsense, I call him a name and link him to actual facts, he calls me a "d-bag", announces he'll be blocking me, and then offers me and my "miserable life" a warm farewell. It's fun.

For the record, the exchange started after he misinformed his viewers on his The Five show Monday, in an effort to pretend climate change isn't happening, that "Arctic sea ice is approaching a record high level this year!" But it isn't. Not by a long shot. In fact, the Arctic sea ice minimum extent is at its 6th lowest level ever recorded this year, as those know-nothing, d-bag, loser "scientists" at NASA noted last week, based on satellite imagery.

We (and a whole bunch of actual scientists) completely debunked demolished Bolling's canard about this year's Arctic sea ice minimum a few weeks ago, after a British tabloid first put it forward, falsely declaring that the increase in sea ice this year over last year's all-time low, meant that the globe is now "COOLING!"

As NASA explains, that's not even close to true...

The 2013 summertime minimum extent is in line with the long-term downward trend of about 12 percent per decade since the late 1970s, a decline that has accelerated after 2007. This year’s rebound from 2012 does not disagree with this downward trend and is not a surprise to scientists.

The same article also notes that "The remaining Arctic sea ice cover is much thinner on average than it was years ago. Satellite imagery, submarine sonar measurements, and data collected from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, indicate that the Arctic sea ice thickness is as much as 50 percent thinner than it was in previous decades."

But Bolling and Fox "News" have never let facts get in the way of some good fossil fuel-industry propaganda. Greg Gutfeld, one of Bolling's similarly fact-free co-hosts on The Five, used the same Arctic ice canard on the show a few weeks ago to trumpet: "Global warming, yes, it's finally dead!" (Video here.)

Inaccurately citing the increase in this year's sea ice over last year's all-time record low, Gutfeld went on to declare (also inaccurately): "That means all predictions, computer forecasts have been wrong! Thank you." The same nonsense was wildly repeated and linked and tweeted, etc. by the incurious dupes, stooges, pawns, chumps, rubes and suckers of the Climate Change Denial Industry, including Rush Limbaugh who lied to his millions of listeners that "the Arctic ice sheet is at a record size for this time of year. They told us the ice was melting in the Arctic Ice Sheet. It's not. There's a record amount of ice, in the modern era, for this time of year."

And the thanks I got for trying to help Bolling out by tweeting to him that he was wrong, and that, in fact, Arctic ice was "at its 6th lowest recorded rate ever"? He sent me the link to that long-ago debunked Mail on Sunday article, called me a "twitter troll", a "d-bag", an "angry little man" and blocked me because, it seems, I called him "hateful names". (He later told someone else on Twitter who was critical of him for blocking me, that he doesn't "block for opinion," but "for name calling/personal attacks."

You be the judge of how "hateful" I was. Admittedly, using the word "dolt" is pretty rough stuff for a sensitive fella like Eric.

* * *

My brief Twitter exchange yesterday with the fact-challenged, Fox "News" dolt Eric Bolling follows in full below...


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Article Categories: Fox 'News', BRAD BLOG, Mainstream Media Failure, Environment, Climate change, Eric Bolling, Greg Gutfeld