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Meteorological Malpractice: Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi pushes the “70s Ice Age Scare” myth again

By Joe Romm on Jan 7, 2010 at 7:40 pm

Accuweather’s meteorologist Joe Bastardi likes to push anti-science global cooling conspiracy theories, which is no doubt why Fox News extremists like Bill O’Reilly love him (see O’Reilly’s weatherman, befuddled Bastardi: “Global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California”).

Now Bastardi has a new video, “Worldwide Cold not Seen Since 70s Ice Age Scare,” pushing a very old conspiracy theory.  Of course, he doesn’t actually talk about “worldwide cold,” but just some cold over maybe 20% of the Earth.  Nor does he explain there’s plenty of warmth elsewhere — see Australian weather bureau: “Central Pacific Ocean surface temperatures are now at their warmest level since the El Ni±o of 1997-98.”³

Fig A2The video truly becomes meteorological malpractice when Bastardi compares today to the 1970s, utterly misleading viewers into thinking that a few days of cold weather over parts of the word somehow undoes the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth’s climate system that has been demonstrated through direct scientific observation in recent decades.  In fact, “The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record,” said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. “Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming” (see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira “” “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous”).

Bastardi’s supposedly Accuweather’s expert long-range forecaster, but he’s predicting “we’re going to see more and more of the cold trending here over the next  20 to 30 years”!  Perhaps we should call him Inaccuweather meteorologist.

Since he repeats his old falsehoods, I’m going to reprint my old debunkings — Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus and The NYT‘s climate coverage in 1970s was a megaphone for science, not ‘global cooling’ alarmism.

Read more

Politics

GOP Senate Candidate Rep. Mike Castle Takes Credit For Over $5 Million In Stimulus Funds He Voted To Kill

By Lee Fang on Jan 7, 2010 at 7:14 pm

Mike Castle

Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE)

Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE) has staggered to the right, voting against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the stimulus), financial regulation reform, the recent jobs package, and health reform. Running for the U.S. Senate this year, Castle has cast aside his image of a GOP moderate and joined his conservative colleagues in their reflexive opposition. But despite his right-wing voting record, Castle is attempting to drum up positive media coverage by claiming ownership over one of the progressive measures he voted to kill.

In the past two weeks, Castle has blasted multiple press releases publicizing stimulus funds awarded to his state. In his most recent release, he not only calls the money “imperative,” but in “announcing” the funds, he tacitly claims credit for securing them:

Washington | January 7, 2010 – Delaware Congressman Mike Castle announced today that $5,230,610 has been awarded to the State to assist families and individuals in need. [...] “As we face the coldest season of the year, it is imperative we provide those programs serving Delaware’s most disadvantaged families and individuals with the resources necessary to house, feed, and protect those in desperate need,” said Rep. Castle. “These grants, totaling more than $5 million, will help the invaluable organizations and programs which are working to help the homeless, hungry, and those facing economic hardship throughout the State.”

Nowhere on the release is the source of they funds or the word “stimulus” mentioned. But the stimulus Castle opposed is the source of the “imperative” funds he now champions:

– The Castle release announces $4,735,313 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Continuum of Care program. According to the HUD website, the Continuum of Care initiative is enabled through $1.5 billion in money authorized by the stimulus.

– The Castle release announces $495,297 to Delaware’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). According to Grants.gov, the FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program is enabled by $100 million in funding through the stimulus.

While Castle’s duplicitous release reeks of hypocrisy, it places him firmly within the status quo of Republican lawmakers. Castle’s leaders in the House, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Eric Cantor (R-VA), have lavished praise upon stimulus projects in their districts, while attacking the stimulus as a failure to the DC press corps. And Castle’s prospective leader in the Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has also ridiculed the stimulus as a complete waste, while firing off releases boasting about stimulus-funded construction.

Related Posts

Health

Ben Nelson Responds To ‘Cornhusker Kickback’ By Asking Dems To ‘Fund’ Or ‘Un-Mandate’ Medicaid Expansion

By Igor Volsky on Jan 7, 2010 at 6:10 pm

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE)Responding to the barrage of criticism over the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback” — a special deal added to the Senate health care bill that would have funded Nebraska’s Medicaid expansion for perpetuity — Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) announced that he is “working for reform to treat all states equally on Medicaid expansion“:

“I’ve been in serious discussions with Senate leaders and others to secure changes in the bill to treat all states equally,” Nelson added. “At the end of the day, whatever Nebraska gets will apply to all states.” Among options Nelson has discussed would be for the House and Senate conference committee to change the legislation to provide full federal funding of the Medicaid costs for all states, or allow every state the ability to opt out of the expense they’ll begin to pay in 2017. “My view is: either fund it or un-mandate it,” Senator Nelson said.

While fully funding Medicaid expansion may be unrealistic (given President Obama’s $900 billion ceiling), Nelson’s new plan to allow states to opt-out of Medicaid funding is better than his earlier idea to “ask states to opt in”. The politics of taking away a federal benefit would likely force most states to stay in the program under his new proposal. In fact, policymakers could strengthen the provision by introducing language requiring states to prove that the expansion-population can find affordable health insurance elsewhere before allowing them to opt out. Alternatively, they could design a trigger mechanism that would opt states back in if the uninsurance rate is still too high.

But again, if states opt out of the Medicaid expansion, fewer Americans would have access to affordable health care. Residents below 133% FPL would have to buy unaffordable and unsubsidized coverage from the exchange or the individual health insurance market. Most would likely go uninsured, increasing costs in the long run. In other words, Nelson — who wasn’t too keen on reforming the health care system in the first place — would be undermining two key goals of health care reform: (1) expanding coverage (2) lowering health care spending.

And he’s wrapping his demands in the cloak of “equality.” The word has a nice ring to it, but doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when it comes to determining the federal government’s contribution to the Medicaid program. After all, why shouldn’t the government consider each state’s unique economic conditions and circumstances in determining its reimbursement rates? Not all states are created the same — they have different Medicaid programs, income disparities and poverty levels. Some states need more help than others. In fact, even today, the federal matching formula varies from state to state, depending on each state’s poverty level.

Nelson’s desire to eliminate “unfunded federal mandates” is certainly understandable, but his stance suggests that states either pay for the Medicaid expansion or spend nothing at all. He sets up a false choice.

Under the Senate bill, the federal government is funding the expansion for the first several years and increasing its contribution to Medicaid over the long term. States, which have a certain degree of flexibility in how the implement the Medicaid program, are required to partly finance the Medicaid expansion in out-years of the 10-year budget window. But in doing so, they’re also make an investment towards lowering health care costs. With reform, states would be spending less on health care than they would if they did nothing at all. Without reform, costs continue to rise. States are forced to spend millions on uncompensated care for the uninsured. Residents with coverage are paying higher premiums to compensate emergency room services. State must stretch their Medicaid budgets, particularly during periods of economic recession, and have little to spend on other social services.

From the state perspective, neither picture looks particularly appealing — each requires a certain level of investment. But by opposing reform, states are simply putting off inevitable spending.

Politics

Rove Backs Off His Criticism Of Counterterrorism Center, Perhaps Remembering Chief Is A Bush Holdover

By Amanda Terkel on Jan 7, 2010 at 5:43 pm

In recent days, attention has been turning toward Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), in the failed Christmas Day bombing. Politico’s Laura Rozen wrote that it appears that “knives [are] out” for Leiter. On Tuesday, former Bush White House adviser Karl Rove also jumped on the NCTC during an appearance on Fox News, saying that the agency was “where the problem probably occurred”:

VAN SUSTEREN: But somebody had the job, Karl, to coordinate all this information into one center place. I cannot believe that after 9/11, we didn’t figure out that we have to have some sort of central resource –

ROVE: Well, we did. We did. [...]

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, who’s in charge of that?

ROVE: The counterterrorism center is where the problem probably occurred because, look, there are lots of — we know that the State Department passed on the information. We know the CIA received it. We know the counterterrorism center received it.

It was surprising that Rove pointed the finger at the NCTC, since Leiter served with him in the Bush administration. Leiter became NCTC director in 2007, and then was retained by the Obama administration. But maybe Rove forgot these details and remembered them only after his Fox News appearance, because today during another Fox interview, he tried to shift blame away from the NCTC:

ROVE: In fact, the biggest problem is not within the NCTC and the intelligence community — Look, I want to say one word of defense for them. There’s a lot of information flowing through there. It seems to me this should have been caught, but there is a lot of information flowing through there, and the expectation that human beings are going to be perfect 100 percent of the time or that the system of computers and algorithms of detection software is going to be perfect 100 percent of the time is just wrong.

In both interviews, Rove insisted that the real problem was with the Obama administration, who decided to “treat the Christmas Day bomber as a criminal defendant” (just like the Bush administration did with the shoe bomber). Watch the two clips:

Today, the White House defended Leiter against a New York Daily News article that Leiter “did not cut short his ski vacation after the underwear bomber nearly blew up an airliner on Christmas Day.” National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough disputed the Daily News’ story, saying that Leiter was “intimately involved in all aspects of the nation’s response to the attempted terrorist attack” and took “six days of annual leave” after the event.

Today in his speech on the attack, Obama made clear that he wasn’t interested in playing the blame game. “Ultimately, the buck stops with me. … When the system fails, it is my responsibility,” he said.

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Gitmo “Recidivism”

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 7, 2010 at 5:28 pm

One thing that I don’t think gets discussed enough in the context of former Gitmo detainees doing radical stuff post-release is that being unjustly imprisoned in a legal netherworld for years is exactly the kind of thing that would radicalize someone.

Like imagine a story about Soviet errors in their effort to pacify Afghanistan. The story goes that shortly after the invasion, Soviet forces in some city came under attack unexpectedly. After the attack, they engaged in a somewhat hasty roundup of people who they thought might have been involved. Many of the people rounded up were quickly released after a few days when it became clear they had nothing to do with anything. But one guy in the roundup had stolen this other dude’s girlfriend six months earlier, and so the other dude told Soviet authorities that the one guy was involved in fanatical Islam. Plus there’s the innocent guy who just had a really bad attitude about having been unfairly imprisoned and spat at Soviet soldiers a lot. Those two guys wind up in jail for three years in poor conditions. Eventually, the Soviets let a bunch of people go for one reason or another. Then those two guys end up joining a mujahedeen group and fighting against the Soviets.

Would you call that “recidivism”? And if you were to say that someone had made a policy error here, what would you say the error was?

Climate Progress

Science bombshell explodes myth of clean coal: Mountaintop “mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses.”

By Joe Romm on Jan 7, 2010 at 5:23 pm

MTR smallA stunning new article in the journal Science should once and for all kill the myth of “clean coal.”  The 11-author study, “Mountaintop Mining Consequences” (subs. req’d) on mountaintop mining with valley fills (MTM/VF) is an analysis of “current peer-reviewed studies and of new water-quality data from WV [West Virigina] streams.”

The study revealed “serious environmental impacts that mitigation practices cannot successfully address” and concluded:

Considering environmental impacts of MTM/VF, in combination with evidence that the health of people living in surface-mining regions of the central Appalachians is compromised by mining activities, we conclude that MTM/VF permits should not be granted unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems. Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science.

This study is so important, such a fountain of useful information, that I’ll excerpt the key findings below at length with links to the original studies.  The photo by Paul Corbit Brown is an aerial view of a southern WV MTM/VF.

Ken Ward, Jr., the best WV journalist, has a good post on the study here.  He calls it “without a doubt the most significant paper on mountaintop removal to ever hit a scientific journal.”  He also has a must-hear audio of the authors’ press conference (click here).  One author says it is “the most rigorously peer-reviewed study” she’s ever done — and she’s written 150 studies.

This study comes on the heels of EPA approving one new mountaintop removal coal mine and finding a ‘path forward’ for a second, as Tree Hugger reported yesterday.  EPA needs to rethink is permitting process.  It’s long been unclear that coal with carbon capture and storage was going to be affordable or practical in the foreseeable future, if ever — see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?“  Now we know it isn’t viable from an environmental or human health perspective.

The press release, “Eminent Group of Scientists Call for Moratorium on Issuance of Mountaintop Mining Permits” adds:

Read more

Security

Why It’s Naive For The Leveretts To Discount the Green Movement In Iran

By Max Bergmann on Jan 7, 2010 at 5:22 pm

iran-car-on-fire-protestsFlynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett know Iran very well, but knowing a place well does not mean they have any clue how things will end up in Iran. Their op-ed yesterday in the New York Times argues that the size and impact of the Green Movement is vastly overstated and will have little impact on the direction of the Iran.

A few problems with the Leveretts’ attempts to discredit the influence of the Green Movement:

– First of all, by pointing to the number of protesters on Dec. 27 (which they say may have been as few as as few as two to four thousand), they are taking highly conservative assessments at face value. A look at the videos tells a different story, and attacking 20 armed storm troopers doesn’t just happen with a couple thousand people.

– The Leveretts also claim that the pro-regime protests were larger, therefore demonstrating that the regime is much more popular than the Green Movement. Not only does this overlook the fact that the regime encouraged people to attend their protest, but ignores the fact that it takes considerably more courage to attend a protest in which you could actually die or get imprisoned. Regardless, pitting regime-sanctioned photos designed to demonstrate the size of the crowd, against amateur photos taken under duress is not a fair comparison.

The key point here, however, is that for a pro-democracy movement to succeed it does not have to have near unanimous public support, as the Leveretts suggest.

The Leveretts miss similarities between the Green Movement and other past successful pro-democracy movements around the world, instead attempting both in their op-ed and in response to criticism, to discount the Green Movement by showing all the ways in which it is not the same as the 1979 revolution. But saying something isn’t exactly like something else is not really saying anything. Of course no two movements are the same. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan wrote in their textbook on democratic transitions that there is no set model for democratic transitions (p. 89): “It is well to remember that even the easiest and most successful transition was lived as a precarious process constantly requiring innovative political action.” At the very least this movement has the innovative political action part down.

By trying so hard to discount the movement, come across as politically naive. They write:

Beyond expressing inchoate discontent, what does the current “opposition” want? …Some protesters seem to want expanded personal freedoms and interaction with the rest of the world, but have no comprehensive agenda.

Broad mass-participatory protests movements rarely have a comprehensive agenda. In fact, mass protest movements usually are reactionary in nature. Despite this it seems that the movement is not as inchoate as they claim, as Robin Wright reports in the LA Times the movement now seems to have a manifesto.

Of course, the Leveretts could very well be right about the direction of the movement. The Green Movement may peter out or it may get squashed. But the supreme confidence in which they make this point and their dismissal of what is taking place, denies the obvious dramatic events that have taken place, the remarkable durability of the movement despite months of oppression, and the increasing signs of divisions within the regime itself. It also puts them in opposition to what seems to be the consensus among Iran experts – almost all of whom have struck a cautious tone, saying that what is happening in Iran is dramatic and unprecedented and is a real challenge to the regime, but at the same time noting they have no idea how things will end up.

The Leveretts are correct in saying that US policy toward Iran should be premised on engagement and that the Administration should not bank on the movement bringing down the regime and solving all its problems. However, it would also be a mistake for the Administration to ignore the movement’s existence as the Leveretts are suggesting. Despite their claims, this movement is real. Whether it succeeds or not is another question.

Yglesias

Charles Murray Sees Nonwhite People

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 7, 2010 at 4:44 pm

(cc photo by fortes)

(cc photo by fortes)

Charles Murray thinks things are looking rather dusky in Paris these days:

I collected data as I walked along, counting people who looked like native French (which probably added in a few Brits and other Europeans) versus everyone else. I can’t vouch for the representativeness of the sample, but at about eight o’clock last night in the St. Denis area of Paris, it worked out to about 50-50, with the non-native French half consisting, in order of proportion, of African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians. And on December 22, I don’t think a lot of them were tourists. Mark Steyn and Christopher Caldwell have already explained this to the rest of the world—Europe as we have known it is about to disappear—but it was still a shock to see how rapid the change has been in just the last half-dozen years.

As Henry Farrell says “I rather think that the word that Murray was looking for here is ‘white’” rather than the strange euphemism “looked like native French.”

It’s worth making a few quick points here though:

— In France, French-born children of immigrant parents outnumber immigrants.

— Most French immigrants immigrated from elsewhere in Europe.

— Residents of predominantly black areas like Martinique are citizens of France.

— A lot of the people on the streets of Paris at any given time are tourists.

As a last point, since he’s a racist, I’ll grant that Murray’s eye for ethnicities may just be keener than mine. But in my experience, at least, the difference in skin color between “white” European Mediterranean people (from, for example, southern France) and “brown” Arab Mediterranean is not always obvious, especially in dim light. So at a minimum, I’ll tip my cap to Murray’s diligence in cataloguing everyone’s ethnic origins so precisely.

Politics

Beck: ‘African-American is a bogus, PC, made-up term. I mean, that’s not a race.’

By Ben Armbruster on Jan 7, 2010 at 4:41 pm

Today on his radio show, Glenn Beck wanted to discuss the census. “Apparently the census has come out,” he said. Beck’s co-host then chimed in, “Yeah and there’s a little confusion because there’s three boxes you can check if you’re a certain race. … I don’t know what the race is because there’s three different terms for them. Black, African-American, or Negro.” Instead of having any consideration to take issue with the term “Negro,” Beck launched into a tirade against “African-American”:

BECK: African-American is a bogus, PC, made-up term. I mean, that’s not a race. Your ancestry is from Africa and now you live in America. Ok so you were brought over — either your family was brought over through the slave trade or you were born here and your family emigrated here or whatever but that is not a race.

Listen here:

Previously, Beck has said that he doesn’t have “a lot of African-American friends, and I think part of it is because I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation, and I would say something that somebody would take wrong, and then it would be a nightmare.” And recently on his Fox News program, Beck hosted a group of black conservatives and complained that some of them refer to themselves as “African-American.” “Why not identify yourself as Americans?” he asked, adding, “I don’t identify myself as white, or a white American.”

Update

Media Matters has more on Beck’s racism.

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