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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Many of the key Arctic sea ice records fell this year (see “Record Low Sea Ice Volume, Area and Extent*).

In short, the Arctic death spiral continues.

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi has always made nonsensical forecasts like “The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.” No doubt that’s a key reasons he is no longer AccuWeather’s chief long-range forecaster.  But before he left, Bastardi made a prediction that reveals how his anti-scientific views destroy his forecasting credibility.

On September 20, 2010, Bastardi predicted that Arctic Sea Ice extent would return to 2005 levels:  “We are going to recover dramatically here with a cold that is coming over the next 9 to 12 months“!

I know you are wondering where that cold was (see “Third Hottest Summer Globally, Second Warmest for U.S. With Stunning Weather Extremes, Texas Drought Worst in Centuries“).  And for those who find it hard to believe anyone could have made such a ridiculous forecast, let’s go to the videotape [put on those head vises]:

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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:

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Joe Bastardi has become the go-to anti-scientist for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.  But normally Bastardi doesn’t dress up his disinformation in this much blatant Charlie-Sheen-esque pseudoscience.

by Jocelyn Fong, in a Media Matters repost.

Those who watched Fox News over the weekend were treated to a brief but ambitious science lesson on “Why CO2 Can’t Cause Warming”:

Oh boy. Let’s take these one at a time.

During the segment Fox’s global warming expert, Joe Bastardi, who is employed by the WeatherBELL meteorological consulting firm, declared that the theory of human-induced climate change “contradicts what we call the 1st law of thermodynamics. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. So to look for input of energy into the atmosphere, you have to come from a foreign source.”

It’s not clear what to conclude from this except that Fox and Bastardi are not familiar with the greenhouse effect. Climate scientists aren’t claiming that humans are creating energy. They’re saying that humans are trapping more energy by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Duke University scientist William Chameides, who called Fox’s claims “utter nonsense,” explained via email:

It is true that global warming requires a source of heat. In this case it comes from the sun. What CO2 does is trap a larger amount of the heat from the sun, preventing it from escaping and thus driving up temperatures. To argue otherwise is to argue that the greenhouse effect does not exist. In fact the existence of the greenhouse effect was established by scientists more than a century ago. It would be impossible to explain the temperatures of Mars and Venus, as well as the Earth, without invoking this effect.

Bastardi went on to claim Le Chatelier’s Principle “says that any system in distress, physical or chemical in the atmosphere, tries to return toward normalcy. And that is why you’re seeing temperatures level off.”

In fact the notion of a system moving toward “normalcy,” or more accurately, toward a new “equilibrium,” explains why greenhouse gases do cause warming, rather than “Why CO2 Can’t Cause Warming.” By preventing infrared energy from efficiently escaping to space, increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make it more difficult for the earth to maintain its previous energy balance, and thus its previous temperature.

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In response to the fourth hottest July in U.S. history — the hottest ever in Oklahoma and Texas — Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is reheating climate denier myths. Saturday’s Fox & Friends show featured climate zombie Joe Bastardi, a wrestler and weatherman who believes the rapid global warming since the 1950s is a natural blip in the climate. Hosts Alisyn Camerota and Dave Briggs claimed that a “new NASA study” debunks man-made global warming. Bastardi then cited “the first law of thermodynamics” and “La Chatelier’s principle” to argue that the greenhouse effect from a 40 percent increase in a “trace gas” isn’t physically possible:

BASTARDI: When you look at carbon dioxide, it increases 1.5 parts per million each year. We contribute 3 percent of that, which means means that the human contribution is one part per 20 billion. Do you realize how small that is for a trace gas necessary for life on the planet? it is almost incomprehensible that this has taken off the way it has, the whole argument, it contradicts what we call the first law of thermodynamics: energy can neither be created or destroyed. So to look for input of energy into the atmosphere, you have to come from a foreign source and it is already out there. Carbon dioxide may be a part of it. May be the sun.

CAMEROTA: And what is that principle of Le Chatelier? Have I pronounced zat propairlee?

BASTARDI: I don’t know, but making a mistake his name isn’t as bad as making a mistake with mine. That any system in distress, physical or chemical in the atmosphere, tries to return to normal. That is why you see temperatures leveling off. We have warmed up overall the last 20 to 30 years, over the last two hundred years, because of sun spot cycles, you can trace it to the sun spot cycles, and you can trace it to the oceans. Look, in the next 20 to 30 years global temperatures should return to where they were in the 70′s.

Watch it:

The paper that Camerota and Bastardi claim is a “NASA study” is no such thing — it’s a mathematically and scientifically flawed paper by climate denier Roy Spencer, a University of Alabama professor.

Most of Bastardi’s lies and obfuscations are so trite that one can simply refer to SkepticalScience’s list by number: #2, #7, #21, #32, #62, #78, and #132. Bastardi’s appeal to the first law of thermodynamics is actually a new one — usually deniers try to claim that the greenhouse effect violates the second law of thermodynamics (#59). The invocation of Le Chatelier’s principle has some merit. Once humans stop adding fossil-based greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet’s geochemical systems will restore an equilibrium — in many hundreds of thousands of years.

(HT: Michael Cote)

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In a surprise move, former Accuweather meteorologist and body builder Joe Bastardi has joined one of the most extreme, anti-scientist organizations in the world, the “American Tradition Institute.”

Many of us had expected he would sign up with the denier crowd in some sort of forecasting capacity.  But few could have imagined he would join an anti-science group so extreme that it was denounced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributing to an “environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas.”

Back in February, Bastardi resigned from Accuweather after 32 years.  It’s hard to imagine that his increasingly absurd and anti-scientific pronouncements played no role [see "How many major scientific misstatements does Joe Bastardi have to make before In-Accuweather fires him as their chief long-range forecaster?"].

Shortly before he resigned, for instance, Accuweather wrote, “Bastardi thinks this La Niña will last into next year” and “Bastardi is also predicting the long-term climate to turn colder over the next 20 to 30 years with global temperatures, as measured by satellite, returning to levels they were at in the late 1970s.”  Not and not.  In December, Bastardi predicted that Arctic sea “ice will increase back to those [1970s] levels in the N hemisphere.”  Not.

My forecast back in 2010 was that if he did leave Accuweather, the anti-science crowd, especially Fox News, would hire him as their ‘forecaster’.   Fox has had him on a few times since he moved on, but he landed at WeatherBell, a weather consulting firm, as “Chief Forecaster.”  To ensure no one would take them seriously, WeatherBell also hired another well-known science denier Joseph D’Aleo as “Chief Forecaster.”

[Note to WeatherBell:  Too many denier chiefs....]

But the real shocker is that Bastardi recently joined the American Tradition Institute as Senior Adviser.  The ATI is about as extreme as you get, even among hard-core deniers.

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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:

California Temperatures During La Nina Droughts

Previous events during 1949, 1954, 1964, 1970, 1973, 1975, 1988, 1995, 1998

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.

Transcript: Read more