GOP’s Quist says antique map disproves global warming

Hey, I got me a map that says “Here be sea serpents” in the middle of the Atlantic. I better get that to ol’ Al “Pasty” Quist. A real scientist like him will appreciate my discovery.

Clearly, sea serpents are real if it says so on an old map. And if you read this in wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oronteus_Finaeus you can see that Oronteus was all about creative map making.

When true believers resort go to these ridiculous lengths you know they’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing to support their opinions.

Not long after the breakup of Pangea, the Antacrtic continent was much closer to the Equator, so it’s quite feasible that vast quantities of oil and natural gas reside beneath it’s surface. Maybe Quist and his fellow traveler Jim Imhofe could take a little jaunt down there and drill, babies, drill.

The most amazing things about creationists, global warming deniers, moon landing deniers, probably everybody with nutty ideas about science, history, or maybe most things, is their insistence on finding one piece of evidence and thereby claiming everything they believe is proven true. I love Tim’s point about sea serpents. We could also point out the the ice on Antarctica goes back over half a million years, but I guess we can’t have that because it undermines creationism as well as global warming denial. I guess if your worldview requires that something absolutely must be false, then it’s false, evidence be damned.

Quist’s wife Julie is also district director for Michele Bachmann, another creationist and global warming denier.

If (almost) anyone else had made this argument, I would have thought they were trying to be funny.

I understand this is supposed to be about ridiculing somebody-

But this map has actually long been a very interesting mystery,
Find a decent resolution version of the whole thing,and compare with a modern map. what stands out is that the relative level of accuracy of the Antarctic continent is remarkable.

The Ross sea shown ice-free also correctly shows the trans-antarctic mountains
on the right- no mountains on the left.
Also while the Ross ice shelf and Amundsen seas appear melted, the
seas either side of the Palmer peninnsula are frozen (only coastal area with no mountains shown)

I’m not sure it’s all that relevant to global warming, as it is not disputed that the planet was warmer in the past, and areas of sea ice change drastically
with ocean currents/ natural climate changes etc, the mystery is how a map this accurate was drawn 300 years before the first recorded circumnavigation?

Allen Quist, expert cuz God told him he was. So there you heathens, bow down so as I can
kick you in the butt. This is only news because these people get funding from our societies
proto-facist elite and money equals power in our society.

In 1492, Columbus was adventurous.
In 1500,
Who ventured into the southern ,frozen regions?
What is the documentation for voyages to the area?
Are there log books or letters to determine that someone really made the journey??
Am I missing something??
Sasha

This is an appalling and sadly unsurprising error. Finaeus’ map, though remarkable for many reasons, does not depict Antarctica. What it does show is Terra Australis, a theoretical landmass in the Southern Hemisphere that was speculated by 16th, 17th, and 18th century cartographers who embraced the Platonic idea that the world must be in balance. Therefore, according to this theory, the mass of Asia, Europe, and most of Africa in the Northern Hemisphere must be counter balanced with similarly massive landmass in the Southern Hemisphere. Cartographers had some sense of the form of Africa and South America and, though Australia had yet to be discovered, most knew the Pacific to be, for all intent and purposes, empty. That left only the South Pole as the destination for the southern continent. Terra Australis or, as it was also known, the Great Southern Continent, appeared in various incarnations on countless maps from about 1500 to 1800. I deal with this subject in some length on my blog post:

http://www.geographicus.com/blog/?p=230

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The 16th century was smack in the middle of the little ice age. Antarctica should have been covered with more ice than it is today.