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

The 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.

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A 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:

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Duh!

… experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all — it’s just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

“It’s part of natural variability,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, “we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.”

Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880.

Leave it to the Associated Press to state the obvious starting with the blunt headline.  They’ve been doing some of the best straight reporting on human-caused climate change (see AP analysis of stolen emails: An “exhaustive review” shows “the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”)

In fact, 2009 ranks among the 5 warmest on Earth, and the entire planet just keeps warming thanks to human emissions (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”).  It’s not just the surface that’s warming, but we’re also seeing it where climate science said more than 90% of the warming would end up “” the oceans (see “Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid!“)

Robert Henson, author of The Rough Guide to Climate Change also has a good piece in the UK’s Guardian, “Snow, ice and the bigger picture“:  The cold snap tells us little about climate change, but if you want something to blame it on, try the Arctic oscillation,” which notes:

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E.P.A. Announces Strict New Health Standards for Smog

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed stricter health standards for smog, replacing a Bush-era limit that ran counter to scientific recommendations.

The new limits — which are presented as a range — will likely put hundreds more counties nationwide in violation, a designation that will require them to find additional ways to clamp down on pollution or face government sanctions, most likely the loss of federal highway dollars….

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No CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t have a lot in common with the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill — except perhaps that his company shuffled off the nano-Chamber of Commerce over its ‘frustrating’ global warming denialism.  But the bill is still alive and kicking, as I’ve been saying (see here and here).  Bradford Plumer, Assistant Editor at The New Republic has a must-read analysis, “Hold Off On Those Climate Bill Obituaries….“ that makes the same point, which I reprint below.

Seems like the conventional wisdom in Washington right now is that there’s no way the Senate passes a climate bill in 2010″”especially after that long, gory health care battle we just saw.

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“I am convinced that reason, logic and good business sense, and good environmental policy, will trump the status quo.”

When we last left Lindsey Graham, the conservative Senator from South Carolina was being censured again (!) by a SC county party for trying to create clean energy jobs in the state, clean its air and reduce the nearly $1 billion a day we ship overseas to buy oil, “some of which finds its way to extremist or terrorist organizations.”

On Tuesday, he pushed back:

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham renewed his call Tuesday for federal controls on greenhouse gas pollution, despite continued criticism from the Republican Party’s most conservative members.  Graham, R-S.C., backs legislation to crack down on carbon dioxide pollution, which he said will also boost the U.S. economy and reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

He dismissed his censure as the ‘misplaced priorities‘ of narrow interests within the larger Republican Party, asserting, “The man who authored the resolution has never voted for a Republican nominee for president in the history of his life,” and is “the head of the Ron Paul movement in this part of South Carolina.”

Then Graham went on to make a very strong pitch for climate action, while “speaking to more than 100 people at a climate change conference in Columbia”:

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That’s the Politico‘s headline today in a story that concludes, “it doesn’t yet appear that the party’s congressional majorities are threatened.”  Anyway, it’s a good piece if you want to know the conventional center-right “establishment” wisdom these days.

UPDATE:  NYT reports:  “Salazar Won’t Leave Cabinet for Gov.’s Race“:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said today that he would not leave the Cabinet to run for governor of Colorado, and he urged John Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver, to enter the race as a Democratic candidate.

“I have a job to do as Secretary of the Interior to implement President Obama‘s vision for a clean energy economy and to better protect America’s great outdoors,” Mr. Salazar said in a statement aimed at clearing up the speculation that he might leave Washington and return to Colorado.

So that’s good news because for clean energy advocates because Salazar has been one of the administration’s superstars in this area (see “Interior Secretary Salazar, Senator Reid announce ‘Fast-Track’ initiatives for up to 100,000 MW of solar energy development on Western lands“).

And so Hotline was wrong:

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