A NOAA crew on the R/V Roger Revelle came nose-to-nose with an iceberg floating in the the Southern Ocean near Antarctica in February 2008. Scientists at the federal agency have helped document impacts of climate change in the world’s polar regions.

The views of a significant minority of the U.S. population have proved stubbornly impervious to the findings of scientific analysis of climate change. This wouldn’t matter except that a key element of that minority, the Republican Party—in and out power—has blocked efforts to alter policies that might reduce the ever-increasing impacts of climate change. This approach makes it unique among the major political parties of the developed world.

Even though they, like the rest of us, stand chin deep in a deluge of evidence, they are determined to stop implementation of climate-related policies that would have a detrimental impact on the bottom lines of the fossil fuel-intensive industries that make up a hefty proportion of their campaign contributors.

As veteran climate reporter David Roberts noted recently, their success in blocking changes is not based on facts or even the “alternative facts” cooked up by the fossil-fuel propagandists over the past 25 years. Rather they’ve adopted a strategy of disputing the authority of the vast majority of scientists with climate-related credentials. You can’t trust ‘em is the message they’ve spread, assisted by right-wing radio and traditional media that have, until recently, refused to treat their claims with the disdain they deserve. However, just in case access to relevant information might change a few minds, the Trump regime is determined to curtail the collection of climate facts and expunge already collected ones from government websites.

If facts guided policy, the nation would long ago have taken seriously the conclusions of the first climate model developed half a century ago. Ethan Siegel has written about that 1967 model at Forbes. It was developed by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald “and they got almost everything exactly right”: