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!
Pause to cram gray matter back into skull.
Bastardi is the Secretariat of Gish gallopers.
First off, while Bastardi asserts the Navy agrees with him, in fact it takes a very different view — see Arctic Death Spiral 2010: Navy’s oceanographer, Rear Admiral David Titley, tells Congress, “the volume of ice as of last September has never been lower”¦in the last several thousand years.” Perhaps more telling, while Bastardi’s forecast would have the Navy planning for Arctic sea ice to return to 1970s levels, Titley says he has told the Chief of Naval Operations that “we expect to see four weeks of basically ice free conditions in the mid to late 2030s.” Ouch!
In his retraction, Bastardi did say last month that the scientists of the National Snow and Ice Data Center are “honest brokers.” Well, here’s what their data shows:
Researchers often look at ice age as a way to estimate ice thickness. Older ice tends to be thicker than younger, one- or two-year-old ice.
The death spiral of Arctic sea ice continued this year, according to both observations and modeling. The figure above comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. In September, NSIDC’s director Mark Serreze said, “The volume of ice left in the Arctic likely reached the lowest ever level this month” and “I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover.”
No wonder Bastardi won’t back up his projection on Arctic sea ice with a bet.
Second, while Bastardi is correct that “one of the biggest linchpins in the global warming theory is that the stratosphere is going to cool,” almost everything else he has to say about this subject is utterly wrong.
Bastardi’s way of trying to figure out if there has been a long-term cooling of the stratosphere is to eyeball overlapping daily curves from the last decade. Because he can’t find 2010, that proves “there’s no positive feedback,” and that climate science is wrong.
Seriously. He encourages us to actually look at the satellite data, something which he hasn’t done.
I asked Prof. Scott Mandia to reply to Bastardi’s claim and he directed me to the actual RSS satellite data here, pointing out the “decadal trend image which shows cooling of 0.306K per decade in the lower stratosphere”:
It is true that there has been a leveling off and slight rise in the last year, which, as Mandia notes, “appears to be in response to ozone recovery which is offsetting the cooling.” But the fact is this basic climate science prediction has held true for three decades. For more on the stratospheric cooling see this piece by Mandia.
Third, Bastardi has this absurd bromance with the satellite data:
You know how I love the objective satellite data because you can’t monkey with it. You can’t take the temperatures down beforehand or Whatever. So, yeah, I’m throwing in my little shots on the side. I understand. But the data is all there. And I encourage you, whether I’m right or wrong about this, to go look for yourself.
You can of course monkey with the objective satellite data. Spencer and Christy persisted in multiple mistakes for a decade that just happened to all go in the same direction (see “Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?”). As RealClimate wrote:
We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming , and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing “” indeed encouraging “” the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.
Fourth, by “little shots,” of course, Bastardi is once again questioning of the integrity of the scientists that NOAA and NASA who put together the surface temperature data, suggesting that they are cooking the books “tak[ing] the temperatures down beforehand.” Again, there is no evidence whatsoever that NOAA or NASA have done that, but when has evidence been the basis of anything Bastardi has said?
Bastardi should retract the video and apologize for the “little shots” smear. If he won’t, then he is once again abusing his position at Accuweather to spread disinformation and trying to undermine the efforts of scientists to provide accurate, independent information about what humans are doing to this planet. In that case, InAccuWeather should retract the video and fire him. Of course, if they do, I expect FoxNews will officially hire him as their ‘forecaster’.
If you want to share your views with Inaccuweather, the American Meteorological Society was kind enough to post the contact information for their distinguished Founder, Chairman, & President, Joel N. Myers:
814–235–8600myersj@accuweather.com
Please keep it genuinely civil
Finally, I emailed Bastardi about my bet and he wrote back:
This is not a wager, its forecast. The author crafted it that way.
I have explained it a dozen times…now more.
The forecast was made 3 years ago, that by 2030 the temp as measured by satellite would fall back to levels in the late 70s. I have never, never never played the markets or “bet” on the weather.
Obviously, with the attention that has been created, and the idea I am now betting my livelihood on this, which is way the article has appeared, if wrong, I am driven from the field.And of course, in any thing I am proven wrong on, and since I do know, understand and respect the agw argument, as I have stated countless times, I would be an advocate.
I realize that you have a staked position in this. I also believe that like me, you want the best. But all I care about is nailing the forecast, and that is it. I am not who you portray me to be. In the end, its a forecast, and time will tell what is right and wrong
cheers
JB
As I expected, he wouldn’t take the bet. This notion that he can’t make this bet because he doesn’t ‘bet’ on the weather is a weak defense. He expects people and businesses and governments to bet billions of dollars on his long-range forecasts — do they need to build more power plants, do cities and building designers need to plan for ever-worsening heat waves, should the Navy plan for an ice-free Arctic and so on? Why should anyone make any investment decision or take any action based on Bastardi’s forecast if he won’t make the simplest of bets.
He claims he will be driven from the field if he is wrong. I don’t know what more has to happen to demonstrate how wrong he is, but absent a big volcano, it should be pretty obvious by around mid-decade that his forecast was exactly backwards.
h/t Peter Sinclair
Related Posts:
- Long wrong Joe Bastardi cooks the books to smear NSIDC. Time for Accuweather to fire him: National Snow & Ice Data Center explains Bastardi can’t read graphs and “is unclear as to how standardized anomalies are derived”
- Joe Bastardi can’t read a temperature anomaly map and so spins another conspiracy theory: Says pre-1978 temperatures use “magic readjustment”
- Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi admits, “Earth continues warmest winter since satellite measurements started”: Then he invents a new, self-contradictory theory of warming.
- Meteorological Malpractice: Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi pushes the “70s Ice Age Scare” myth again
- O’Reilly’s weatherman, befuddled Bastardi: “Global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California”
- Joe Bastardi asserts “The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ‘80s”