For the next twelve months you can expect to hear a lot about anthropogenic global warming. It will no doubt be a huge feature when Rachel Maddow invites all of the Democrat presidential candidates to sit down for an evening of something which we absolutely won’t call a debate. With that in mind, she’ll have plenty of research to do but she might not want to go to the headlines at Yahoo News. I was flipping through them this morning as I usually do and found two back to back stories which should make everything as clear as mud.

The first is the type of coverage which will be near and dear to the hearts of Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders. West Antarctic ice melt could raise seas by 3 meters

Melting ice in West Antarctica is a major concern for global sea levels, and a key area may already be unstable enough to unleash three meters of ocean rise, scientists said Monday.

The study follows research out last year, led by NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot, warning that ice in the Antarctic had gone into a state of irreversible retreat, that the melting was considered “unstoppable” and could raise sea level by 1.2 meters (four feet).

Well, now that we know the world is ending we may as well break out the tequila shooters and party like the apocalypse is at hand. We’ve hit the point of no return, so you’d best start investing in beach front property in West Virginia if you want to find a way to capitalize on this. But wait! No sooner had I finished reading that article than this one popped up right below it. Antarctica is Gaining Ice.

A NASA study finds Antarctica is actually gaining ice cover despite global warming. A study released last week used satellite data to determine the continent’s ice sheet gained 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001, slowing to 82 billion tons from 2003 to 2008.

The gains are in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica although losses have been registered on the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island regions of West Antarctica, said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study published Friday in the Journal of Glaciology.

But… wait. That other guy just said… um…

This is clearly too complicated for me. Perhaps Rachel and I should just turn it over to somebody who observes the climate and reports on it for a living. One example might be Philippe Verdier, a meteorologist with French state run television. Philippe not only covers the subject extensively, but he recently published a book in which he questions some of the assumptions made by the global warming community and breaks down some of the data. Let’s just put in a call to his office this morning and see if he can’t clear things up for us.

Oh, wait… he apparently won’t be able to come to the phone because they fired him.

A weather forecaster for French state television has been fired after releasing and promoting a book criticizing politicians, scientists and others for what he calls an exaggerated view of climate change.

Philippe Verdier’s dismissal from France-2 comes a month before Paris hosts a U.N. conference aimed at the most ambitious worldwide agreement yet to limit global warming. He announced the dismissal in an online video over the weekend in which he described it as an attack on media freedom.

Sometimes the more noble path in science of any kind is to admit that you’ve got a theory you’re working on while others have their own theories, and you’re gathering data as best you can but you simply aren’t entirely sure what’s going on yet. It’s a big planet with an intensely complicated climate which is too big to fully model on any computer. I hope we keep working on quantifying it all but we don’t seem to be quite there yet.