As expected, he rejects my bet. He says that if he’s wrong, he’ll be “driven from the field.”

I’ll post Bastardi’s reply to my bet — really, my acceptance of his wager — below.  But first, let’s look at his latest anti-science, anti-scientist video.

Joe Bastardi is “the chief hurricane and long-range forecaster at AccuWeather and a national bodybuilding competitor.”  He is also, based purely on the objective evidence, probably the worst professional long-range forecaster on Earth.

Just last month, he cooked the books in an official In-Accuweather video to smear some of the nation’s leading scientists.   I called for him to be fired and suggested referring to the company as InAccuweather until it does.  Bastardi did ultimately retract the video but couldn’t bring himself to admit that his accusation of fraud against NSIDC was not merely completely unwarranted but totally inappropriate and in fact based in part on his simple misreading of a graph.

Now he has a new official In-Accuweather video, his weekly “Global sea ice and temperature report.”  In it he claims the Navy believes Arctic ice is getting thicker, when in fact they have testified to Congress that it is getting thinner and will continue to do so.  He egregiously asserts the satellite data has falsified the theory of global warming by failing to show stratospheric cooling — without actually checking the satellite data to see that it in fact shows the stratosphere has been cooling for decades.  And he just can’t resist smearing the many dedicated scientists at NOAA and NASA who work tirelessly to bring us the actual surface temperature data so people (other than Bastardi) can make accurate weather and climate forecasts and decisions.

Here is the video — which by itself should forever disqualify Bastardi as a serious long-range forecaster.  Do watch to the end to catch the gratuitous anti-scientist smear, but don’t forget the head vises!

Read more

Monday I wrote $#*! My Texas AG Says: “It is almost the height of insanity of bureaucracy to have the EPA regulating something that is emitted by all living things.” I pointed out this view suggests doing nothing about sewage, too.

Today NYT columnist and Nobel-prize-winning economist Pual Krugman links to my piece and points out that in fact:

hey, there was a time when conservatives did, in fact, argue for doing nothing about effluent of any kind. In the years leading up to the Great Stink of 1858, which finally got the British to build a London sewer system, The Economist editorialized against any such foolish notion (pdf):

Read more

[Climate scientists] need to redouble their efforts to make their arguments, their doubts, and the reasons for both their confidence and their concerns intelligible to the non-specialist citizen. They need to combat, piece by piece, the misrepresentations brought in support of attacks on their scientific integrity, and to show readers why the popular accounts and even the naming of “Climategate” are so misleading. And they need to explain why the expectations of science on which these accounts are based are similarly misleading….

What I am proposing is far from a solution. But if it encourages climate scientists to take the lead in breaking the current impasse, both because they are best equipped to take on the task, and because their responsibility as scientists obliges them to do so, it is at least a start.

That’s from the conclusion of a piece in New Scientist by Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller, emeritus professor of the history and philosophy of science at M.I.T.

The good news is many climate scientists are already following that advice (see “Have you used the Climate Science Rapid Response Team (CSRRT) yet?“).  Here are more excerpts from the piece:

Read more

How to Move to 100 percent Renewables by 2030

What would it take to switch the country’s [world's] entire energy infrastructure to renewables like wind and solar by 2030?

Read more

President Obama ‘reaches out’ to the business community with a Wall Street Journal op-ed “Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System.”  He describes a new Executive Order that initiates “a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.”

Couldn’t hurt — but it’s very unlikely to find much after 8 years of the uber-antiregulation Cheney-Bush administration.  And Obama’s generally strong defense of regulations — particularly the EPA — is not what the anti-science, pro-pollution readership of the WSJ opinion page wants to hear.  Here are some excerpts:

Read more

Today the Center for American Progress, Energy Action Coalition, and Groundswell released a Paper entitled “CLEAN Contracts: Making Clean Local Energy Accessible Now.” CAP has also released an “Ask the Expert” video of Richard Caperton explaining how CLEAN Contracts work.

The paper looks at the one policy that has brought more renewable electricity to the marketplace than any other:  CLEAN contracts (sometimes called “feed-in-tariffs”).  These national, state, or local policies allow renewable energy project owners to sell their electricity to utilities at a pre-determined, fixed price for a long period of time.

Read more