UPDATE: Bastardi doubles down on his anti-science BS in the comments — but then why won’t he put his money where his mouth is? That suggests this is just disinformation he doesn’t believe — see the bets I offered here (which he rejected).

by Jocelyn Fong, reposted from Media Matters

“Completely wrong.” “Simply ignorant.” “Scientifically incorrect.” “Utter Nonsense.” “Very odd.” These are words scientists have used in the past to describe the nationally televised ramblings of weather forecaster Joe Bastardi, who Fox News hosts from time to time in an apparent effort to dismantle whatever its viewers might know about physics.

When we last saw Joe, he was breaking the news that the world’s climate scientists had overlooked the first law of thermodynamics. (He was wrong.) After a thorough round of mockery in the blogosphere, we thought surely Fox would throw away Bastardi’s phone number. But here he is on Fox Business this morning, declaring that carbon dioxide “literally cannot cause global warming”:

BASTARDI: CO2 cannot cause global warming. I’ll tell you why. It doesn’t mix well with the atmosphere, for one. For two, its specific gravity is 1 1/2 times that of the rest of the atmosphere. It heats and cools much quicker. Its radiative processes are much different. So it cannot — it literally cannot cause global warming.

Asked about Bastardi’s statements, Kerry Emanuel of MIT said: “Utter rubbish. Sorry to be so direct, but that is just the case.” NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt added: “Bastardi is attempting to throw out 150 years of physics.” “He seems very confused,” said physicist Richard Muller.

Bastardi may be hoping that when delivered confidently, terms like “specific gravity” and “radiative processes” can convince Fox’s viewers that he knows what he’s talking about. But don’t be fooled; he is again garbling the very basics of climate science. Schmidt explained:

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We need to start aggressively deploying all forms of carbon-free power if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming, starting with the lowest cost ones.

That’s what makes the events of March 12, 2011 so tragic. It (once again) shattered the myth that you can do nuclear power on the cheap.

Smoke rises from Fukushima Daiichi power plant’s Unit 1 in March 2011. Via AP

As CAP’s Richard Caperton and I wrote in a CNN piece 2 days after the tragedy:

New nuclear reactors are phenomenally expensive, costing up to $10 billion dollars apiece. Exelon CEO John Rowe said recently that the combination of low natural gas prices and failure of Congress to put a price on carbon dioxide pollution pushes back any significant nuclear renaissance by a “decade, maybe two.”

The U.S. nuclear industry has long argued that new reactors are prohibitively expensive because of an overly burdensome site selection and permitting process, which they say unnecessarily drives up costs. But, in fact, new nuclear plants have seen soaring prices not just in Florida, Texas and other states — but in Finland, Turkey and Canada.

New reactors are intrinsically expensive because they must be able to withstand virtually any risk that we can imagine, including human error and major disasters. Why? Because when the potential result of a disaster is the poisoning — and ultimately, death — of thousands of people, even the most remote threats must be eliminated.

Insurers know that the results of a nuclear catastrophe would be ruinous on a scale that would overwhelm any private company, which is why they won’t insure nuclear plants. Instead, the U.S. government — which is to say taxpayers — takes on the liability for nuclear reactors.

I have always included about one wedge of nuclear power in my “full global warming solution” for stabilizing at 350 to 450 ppm. Of course we need 12-14 of those wedges (and we need to deploy them in 4 decades not 5), so nuclear power is unlikely to be even 10% of the answer. That’s why I don’t put it in the “major climate solution” category, especially in the near term, which is what counts the most.

Based on a 2007 Keystone report, even one wedge of nukes by 2050 would require adding globally, an average of 17 plants each year, while building an average of 9 plants a year to replace those that will be retired, for a total of one nuclear plant every two weeks for four decades — plus 10 Yucca Mountains to store the waste. It is increasingly unlikely it will be among the cheaper options (see below). And the uranium supply and non-proliferation issues for even that scale of deployment are quite serious. See “An introduction to nuclear power.”

The Fukushima disaster, however, accelerated the phase out of nukes in Germany and “all but two of Japan’s 54 commercial reactors have gone offline.” Given the need to keep climate forcings as low as possible, I wouldn’t shutter existing nukes until the clean energy replacements are online, and would prefer to spend big bucks to make them safer. But I can understand where the Germans and Japanese are coming from.

The UK Guardian reports, “Dramatic fall in new nuclear power stations after Fukushima,” noting “Italy and Switzerland have also voted against nuclear energy.” In this country, E&E News (subs. req’d) reports:

Seventy-two percent of those asked answered “no” to the question, “Do you think taxpayers should take on the risk for the construction of new nuclear power reactors in the United States through billions of dollars in new federal loan guarantees for new reactors?”

Again, I don’t think safety in and of itself is the issue, though that is clearly what the nuclear advocates want the debate to be about. The issue is cost — and the need to take the time and spend the money to ensure we don’t have another partial meltdown (or worse) in this country, the need to avoid turning a billion-dollar asset into a 10-billion-dollar liability.

Strikingly, the literature suggests that “nuclear power has a negative learning curve“:

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Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green

A slanted Washington Post story by Peter Whoriskey attacked the innovative $50 light bulb that won the Department of Energy’s $10 million L Prize for lighting innovation as being “costly,” “exorbitant,” and “too pricey” in comparison to a $1 incandescent bulb — based on faulty math. The Philips LED bulb, which is assembled in Wisconsin with computer chips made in California, is a technical breakthrough, with high-efficiency natural-color light. At no point does the article — which appeared online with the tendentious headline “Government-subsidized green light bulb carries costly price tag” — compare the lifetime cost of the super-efficient (10-watt), long-lasting (30-year) bulb with that of traditional 60-watt light bulbs. An accompanying infographic prepared by Patterson Clark and Bonnie Berkowitz compared costs, asserting that the lifetime cost of the $50 bulb plus electricity would end up being $5 more than traditional bulbs:

Washington Post graphic incorrectly claims lifetime cost of $50 LED bulb is $5 higher than traditional incandescents.

Unfortunately for the Washington Post’s credibility, the cost calculation was extremely wrong. Clark and Berkowitz’s assessment assumes that the kilowatt-hour price of electricity is $0.01, instead of actual average retail price of $0.12 and rising. This factor-of-ten error demolishes the entire premise of Whoriskey’s article. ThinkProgress Green has prepared a corrected graph, based on a low-ball estimate of $0.10/kWh electricity:

A corrected version of the Washington Post lightbulb cost comparison shows $50 LED bulb over $100 cheaper than incandescents. Prepared by ThinkProgress Green.

Instead of issuing a correction, the Washington Post silently excised the false section of their infographic online.

Whoriskey’s attack on the innovative, money-saving light bulb was promoted by the Drudge Report and picked up by right-wing blogs as further evidence that American clean-tech innovation is an Obama boondoggle. At Michelle Malkin‘s blog, Doug Powers complains about the “$10 million in prize money taxpayers are on the hook for in order to pay a company to create light bulbs people either can’t afford or won’t want.” Gateway Pundit screams: “It’s an Obama World… Gas Reaches $5 a Gallon & “Green” Light Bulbs Cost You $50 Each.” “The same people who can afford to drive a Volt (and have the limo pick them up when it runs out of charge) will be the ones purchasing this idiocy,” Pirate’s Cove blathers. American Enterprise Institute scholar Kenneth Green blasted the “Ludicrous Prize” as one of “epic energy-failures.” At Ricochet, George W. Bush speechwriter Troy Senik asks, “What lost? A bulb powered by the hoofbeats of unicorns?”

One of the strangest phenomena of modern-day politics is the right-wing antagonism toward American clean-energy manufacturing, a consequence of the fossil-fuel industry’s stranglehold on our nation’s conservatives. The Washington Post shouldn’t be aiding and abetting this ugly trend.

This piece was originally published at ThinkProgress Green.

You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course. So daylight saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever was.

I’d also note that it isn’t actually spring yet, so we can’t “spring” forward. We can “winter” forward, although with global warming, we are moving up the effective start time of spring.

The general pointlessness of DST was the subject of a 2010 Rachel Maddow interview  (video below) with the author of a whole book (!) on the subject.

What’s germane here is that DST saves about as much energy as light, according to most studies.  In fact, a 2008 study found DST “may actually waste energy“:

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