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Marc Morano is the Andrew Breitbart of the climate science world. Powerful packaging of material that doesn’t stand up well to any serious scrutiny. And, he has been very good at gaining lots of media and other attention with partial truths and utter mistruths about climate issues whether from his current “Climate Depot” hat, supporting Jim Inhofe’s climate denial machine, or otherwise. In essence, Morano is well compensated for his having created a wide network to which he sends out misleading to outright false information in a ‘pretty package’ that captures the slavishly devoted attention of anti-science syndrome sufferers and confuses those who do not have the energy/resources to check behind the false blaring headlines and ever-so convincing lying with statistics.

Amusingly, one of Morano’s recent posting of a title to link to another’s sad post clearly demonstrated that his misunderstanding and misrepresentation is not limited to the physics of climate science but also goes into the social sciences.

Morano’s title — which uses a sad attempt at a pejorative against Forecast the Facts‘ thoughtfully competent Brad Johnson — reads:

Warmist Brad Johnson Adopts Young Earth Creationism: Johnson: ‘As RNC climate deniers party, Arctic sea ice is in free fall, about to go under 4 m km2 for first time in human history‘

Brad’s item links to a chart entitled “A new record minimum of the Arctic sea ice extent was set on 24, August, 2012”

And, following his attacking title, Morano gives his doting followers what is supposed to be the killer line to embarrass and demean Brad:

Reality Check: ‘According to Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC, the Arctic was completely free of ice sometime between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago. Apparently Brad Johnson believes that human history is less than 5,000 years.

And, well, if Brad Johnson “believes that human history is less than 5,000 years” he would only be off by a few hundred years — at most.

There is a very simple guideline when talking about the past — in terms of humanity: history and pre-history.

• When does history begin? With the written record.
• What about pre-history?  Simply put, everything before that written record is “pre-history”.

A complication is that “history” doesn’t begin at the same date for all civilizations and peoples.

From the Wiki entry on Pre-history:

The date marking the end of prehistory in a particular culture or region, that is the date when relevant written historical records become a useful academic resource, varies enormously from region to region. For example, in Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BC, whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently, at around 1900 AD. In Europe the relatively well-documented classical cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome had neighbouring cultures, including the Celts and to a lesser extent the Etruscans, with little or no writing, and historians must decide how much weight to give to the often highly prejudiced accounts of the “prehistoric” cultures in Greek and Roman literature.

3200 + 2012 = 5212. That is roughly the number of years in “human history” on the NIle Delta, for example, according to the basic academic definition of the term.

Since Meier states that the Arctic was free of ice somewhere between 5,000 to 15,000 years ago, it seems likely (if the Arctic was actually ice-free) that this occurred in pre-history and not history.

Chalk up yet another of the sadly unending examples of Morano deception about and lack of understanding of science — in this case, social science.