Advertisement

Joe Bastardi, worst long-range forecaster on Earth, asserts “The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ‘80s.”

More BS: “The vast majority of the long-range private sector meteorologists can see what is coming down the road and agree with me.”

Joe Bastardi is “the chief hurricane and long-range forecaster at AccuWeather and a national bodybuilding competitor.” I can’t speak to his physical strength but he bench-presses a staggering amount of anti-science disinformation (see “Joe Bastardi can’t read a temperature anomaly map”).

To switch metaphors, he has now snowed his readers with a blizzard of inane predictions.

At StageCollege.com, his piece, “The Weather Year of a Lifetime,” argues he will never live to see another summer like this one. At his European blog, he says, “And for the ministers of propaganda on this matter that don’t understand how this works, you will see NEXT SUMMER has the highest amount of sea ice since the early part of last decade.” Seriously!

His predictions are based on his love of the satellite temperature data, which he simply doesn’t understand. He uses Roy Spencer’s plot of the UAH data:

Advertisement

Yet even eyeballing this data you can see the long-term trend is upwards. And NOAA points out that both satellite data sets show about the same amount of warming as the land-based record, “which increased at a rate near 0.16°C/decade (0.29°F/decade) during the same 30-year period” “” once you remove the expected stratospheric cooling from the satellite records (see NOAA discussion here).

But here is Bastardi:

This past winter, now this summer and this hurricane season… well, I will never get a chance at hitting such major extreme weather events in the U.S. again. I don’t plan on dying anytime soon; it’s just that as far as the overall pattern recognition skills I use to come up with my ideas go, they will never line up like this again.

I realize there may have been individual events that outstrip individual events of this past year: bigger hurricanes, higher record highs, lower record lows, a snowstorm that might be bigger for a place, etc. But in terms of the frequency of headline-grabbing weather, it won’t happen again in my lifetime. Here I am with 35 years of experience with the weather (45–50 if you count all the schooling my dad gave me with his insight when I was younger) that has reached its peak.

This is it folks. We’ve peaked in extreme weather!

The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. And less heat over such a large area means less potential for the fight-backs that occur to cause the extreme in such a prolonged focused manner.

Now, I have often defended people that disagree with my global warming ideas because if I were looking at what they were looking at, and nothing else, then I would believe it too! But I have read and respect the other side of the argument, and it leaves me with the chance to make the forecast knowing not only what they know, but also what I know.

To me, it’s a matter of who is right and wrong. But in the circle of competitive forecasters I am in, the vast majority of the long-range private sector meteorologists can see what is coming down the road and agree with me. Many of these people have masters and Ph.D.s, but they are involved in work that requires them to prove enough merit, that they are restrained. It’s very competitive.

We all understand the same thing: The Pacific is cooling. The Atlantic will start doing so in 10–15 years. Then the global temperature come down and we have the satellites to measure it without data readjustment.

Yes, Bastardi apparently not only believes this nonsense, he believes the vast majority of private sector meteorologists agree with him, which is almost certainly not true — see “TV weathercasters know which way the wind blows” — but it does suggest that in private conversations with Bastardi, many of his colleagues humor him, perhaps because they don’t want to listen to his Bastardi-zations of Shakespeare (see bel0w)

Advertisement

For the record, the satellites most definitely need data adjustment. How does Bastardi think Spencer and Christy screwed up the satellite data for so long in the first place (see “Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?”).

And for the record, the PDO [Pacific Decadal Oscillation] and AMO [Atlantic multidecadal oscillation] are “oscillations” and the data make clear that neither of those can explain a long-term trend “” hence the “O” for oscillation.

There is simply no serious (or non-serious) possibility that the planet will “return” to the temperatures of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s in anyone’s lifetime as a matter of climatology — and the chances it would do so for even one year shrink with every passing year (absent a supervolcano):

It is incomprehensible that Accuweather has Bastardi as their chief long-range forecaster.

Back to the European blog, home of the weirdest mixed climate metaphors, like “The Pickett’s charge of global warming heading for its high water market”:

And for the ministers of propaganda on this matter that don’t understand how this works, you will see NEXT SUMMER has the highest amount of sea ice since the early part of last decade. Sad to say the ice will rebuild… two steps forward one step back.But I have observed the cackling of delight at the demise of the ice cap this summer with amusement. Because 1) The THICKNESS OF THE ICE is greater and 2) The Polar temps, courtesy of the cooling that is starting are lower than normal this summer.

The prediction is almost certainly going to fall flat. We may well seeing more sea ice extent in 2011, but it would be exceedingly unlikely to return to levels seen a decade ago. He is just wrong about thickness — he must be reading WattsUpWithThat (see When things were rotten: Arctic sees record sea ice shrinkage, headed toward record low volume: On a streetcar named denial, Watts and Goddard assert: “Arctic Basin ice generally looks healthier than 20 years ago”). There is essentially no chance that we would return to volume levels seen a decade ago — see Arctic death spiral: Naval Postgrad School’s Maslowski “projects ice-free* fall by 2016 (+/- 3 yrs).”

As an aside, here’s an analysis questioning Bastardi’s long-range forecasting ability.

What’s most fitting is to end with some excerpts from his European blog’s ‘poetry’:

Friends, Romans, Citizens of the World, lend me your laptops.For I come to bury the notion of cyclical warming, not to praise it”¦.When there was no air conditioning, we created themIt saved lives, did this cause too much warming?But the Models say Caesar caused Global Warmingand the Models are all honorable and always right”¦.And they would go and kiss dead Caesars woundsand dip their napkins in the oil of his SUVYes beg a hair of him for memories,which can be beautiful and yetwhat’s too painful to remember, we simply must forget(Apparently Barbara Streisand assisted Shakespeare in this parallel Rome in writing this. How else could exist that last line?)

That is too painful to remember. I hope you can forget it.

Did I mention he’s Accuweather’s expert long-range forecaster?

Related Posts: