By Climate Guest Blogger on Aug 18, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Below is a round-up of Joe Bastardi’s worst clips as a climate change “expert” on Fox News put together by Media Matters. Warning: Do not view this without putting on multiple head vises. For debunkings of Bastardi, click here. See also Tamino’s evisceration.
Fox News and Fox Business Network frequently host Joe Bastardi to comment on climate change. But Bastardi, who is a weather forecaster, not a climate researcher, has made inaccurate claims about climate science on multiple occasions and is not seen by experts as a credible source of climate information.
Bastardi Has Discussed Climate Change On Fox At Least 18 Times Over Past 2 Years. Bastardi often appears on Fox to report on weather events but he has also commented on the issue of longer-term global climate change at least 7 times on Fox News and at least 11 times on the Fox Business Network since September 2009:
Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate analyzed the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and found U.S. heat records in June outnumbered cold records by 2706 to 251 — nearly 11 to 1:
Monthly total number of daily high temperature and low temperature records set in the U.S. for June 2010 through June 2011, data from NOAA.
I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming. If you want to know how to judge whether the near 11-to-1 ratio is a big deal, see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.”
As for global temperatures, the anti-science crowd had been crowing that this year’s big La Niña — which they called a “Super La Niña” — would drive temperatures way, way down. But even the satellite datasets, which are more sensitive to the El Niño Southern oscillation, show that how modest and short-lived the temperature dip was [click to enlarge]:
Pawlenty Denies Global Warming: ‘The Science Is Bad’ |
Appearing on Fox & Friends this morning, Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty claimed that “the science is bad” on manmade climate change, then saying “the reality is the science indicates most of it, if not all of it, is caused by natural causes.” He “denounced” his former support for efforts to combat this threat to human civilization. Watch it:
This is part two of a three-part series. Read part one here.
Blogging economist J. Bradford DeLong has read the “global cooling” chapter of SuperFreakonomics and has asked six wonkish questions about climate science and policy. Below are responses debunking Levitt & Dubner’s myth of decreasing temperature, and their claim that moving away from “cheap” coal would cause “economic suicide.”
3: “Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased…” As best as I can see from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt, this year is: 1/5 of a degree F warmer than last year, the same temperature as 2007 and 2006, 1/7 of a degree F cooler than 2005, 1/10 of a degree F warmer than 2004, the same temperature as 2003 and 2002, 1/7 of a degree F warmer than 2001, 2/5 of a degree warmer than 1999 and 2000, the same temperature as 1998, and warmer than every single other year since the start of the Industrial Revolution–a full degree F warmer than 1960, for example.
How do you get from that temperature record to the statement that “over the past several years… average global temperature… has in fact decreased”?
The assertion that this “decrease” in temperature is a “little-discussed fact” is nonsensical. A search for “1998 cooling global” returns seven million hits. This “little-discussed fact” is one of the most popular canards among global warming skeptics.
Levitt and Dubner, like Marc Morano, Prison Planet and the Free Republic, are relying on the UK Met Office Hadley Centre temperature set — which has 1998 as the hottest year on record — as opposed to the NASA temperature set DeLong cites — which has 2005 as the hottest record. However, both sets agree that the temperature of every year since 2001 has been within the 95% confidence interval of 1998′s temperature. On a decadal scale, the average global surface temperature is increasing at a quickening pace.
Moreover, this “fact” of “global cooling since 1998″ is an error based on semantic confusion and misinterpretation of data. “Global warming” refers to the radiative forcing from greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. That effect has been consistently rising as emissions accumulate. It does not refer to year-over-year surface temperatures, which are influenced by solar output and atmospheric-oceanic circulation, both of which contributed to raise the average surface temperature of 1998.
The New Scientist, as Joe Romm has repeatedlypointedout, has a comprehensive analysis of the misunderstanding behind claims of recent cooling. The New Scientist also discusses the differences between the NASA and Hadley datasets:
The main reason is that there are no permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on Earth that has been warming fastest. The Hadley record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations.
Based on this exclusion, Romm writes, “it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.” Read more
Last week, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly promoted the conspiracy theories of a weatherman who believes “the globe is actually cooling.” O’Reilly’s guest, Accuweather meteorologist Joe Bastardi, scoffed at the connection between global warming and wildfires in California. Bastardi — who has an undergraduate degree in meteorology from 1978 and no other academic credentials — went so far as to claim that “global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California”:
I’m gonna show you the facts over the last two years. California has been very, very dry. Why is that the case? Well, whenever the Pacific Ocean starts cooling, and the global temperatures start to cool, California gets dry. You see this ocean temperature presentation, all this cold water off California means the air sinks over top of California. When it sinks, it dries out, so global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California, which by the way is a dry climate naturally.
Watch it:
The upswelling of cold waters in the eastern Pacific, known as La Nina events (the opposite of El Nino events), is certainly a factor in California’s epic drought and unprecedented wildfires. However, what Bastardi fails to mention is that temperatures have also been unusually warm during the present drought, despite the cold La Nina airmass:
Bastardi’s claim of “global cooling” is completely unsubstantiated. Even with the upwelling of cold water during the La Nina cycle, average ocean temperatures during the “cool” years of 2006-2008 were higher than any year before 1997. It has been the warmest decade for both ocean and land temperatures in recorded history. This summer, the La Nina event was replaced by its counterpart, El Nino, and average sea surface temperatures are now at their highest in recorded history.
Bastardi also showed a graph he purported was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s forecast for global temperatures to “go up, up, up” against actual temperatures “over the last 10 years” supposedly “coming down”:
Fake IPCC Chart Claims ‘Global Cooling’
This graph is from a climate denier conspiracy website, The Next Ice Age Now, whose proprietor Robert Felix believes global warming is actually caused by “underwater volcanism.” The graph cites SPPI — the Science and Public Policy Institute, a fringe climate denier organization. Actual IPCC estimates find measured temperatures over the past decade to be well within the range of the forecasts. Furthermore, the Ice Age Now chart begins in 2001 — not “ten years ago. Because 1999 and 2000 were relatively cool years for this decade (though extremely warm historically), their inclusion in the denier chart would have ruined the “global cooling” claim. Bastardi, like other fringe deniers, is seeing patterns that aren’t there.
In July, O’Reilly mocked “hard core right-wingers who don’t believe in global warming even though the temperature shows that the earth has warmed in the last 30 years, three times faster than the previous hundred,” saying, “you don’t debate that.” Evidently, he’s changed his mind.
Our guest blogger is Robert Brulle, professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University.
The New York Times’ climate science coverage in the 1970s reflected the lack of consensus among scientists.
In “Climate Science in a Tornado,” George F. Will has completely misrepresented the historical New York Times coverage of the “global cooling” issue. Despite Will’s claim that the New York Times was a “megaphone for the alarmed” during “1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling,” its coverage was actually nuanced and prescient.
On December 21, 1969, the New York Times ran a UPI wire story, “Scientists Caution on Changes In Climate as Result of Pollution,” which reported that scientists discussed the possible threat of manmade global warming at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, with calls for greater monitoring of the climate:
J.O. Fletcher, a physical scientist for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., said that “man had only a few decades to solve the problem of global warming caused by pollution.” Global warming could cause further melting of the polar ice caps and affect the earth’s climate.
On December 29, 1974, the New York Times ran the story, “Forecast for Forecasting: Cloudy.” This article is a long discussion of the state of climate forecasting, and has an extensive discussion of the process of global cooling due to aerosols, and the contrary impact of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and the great difficulty in developing valid and reliable climate forecasting models. The lead paragraph:
In the long term, climate is cooling off — or is it warming up? As for tomorrow’s weather, even the world’s biggest computer can’t say for sure what it will be.
The world’s climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.
On August 14, 1975, the New York Times ran, “Warming Trend Seen in Climate.” In this article, the New York Times discusses two scientific articles that focus on the overall climate patterns. It covers the debate over global cooling due to aerosols and global warming due to CO2 increases:
Dr. [Wally] Broecker’s argument is that the present cooling trend in the north will be reversed as more and more carbon dioxide is introduced into the atmosphere by the burning of fuels.
In the decades since, of course, scientists have come to the consensus that our continued burning of fossil fuels are tied to the warming of the planet. It is not the New York Times that is dishonest in its coverage, it is George F. Will.
Update
Andy Alexander, in his first column as the Washington Post ombudsman, takes on George Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers.” He reviews one of the many factual errors in Will’s column and finds Will misrepresented the Arctic Climate Research Center:
The editors who checked the Arctic Research Climate Center Web site believe it did not, on balance, run counter to Will’s assertion that global sea ice levels “now equal those of 1979.” I reviewed the same Web citation and reached a different conclusion.
