Joe Bastardi is a weatherman.  He works for Weatherbell, a US-based forecaster, that provides global weather reports and forecasts through its website, http://www.weatherbell.com/.  Joe also has a number of corporate clients, for whom he prepares specific detailed forecasts tailored to their weather information needs.

If one judges a weatherman by the success rate of his seasonal forecasts, then Joe is a super-weatherman.

When my wife and I came from New Zealand to live in the Haarlem in the Netherlands in 2008, we needed local weather information.  My Dutch language skills were non-existent, so I went looking in the internet for English-language reports on current conditions and forecasts.  The most accurate forecasts for Haarlem at the time were on the website of Accuweather, another global weather forecasting company, at http://www.accuweather.com/en-gb/nl/north-holland/haarlem/quick-look.aspx.

I had long been interested in the Anthropogenic Global Warming debate, which had wide publicity in New Zealand.  My interest (and suspicions) had been aroused by the way in which every weather event was described as evidence of human-influenced global warming.  However, the concept behind the idea seemed worthy of investigation, so I was interested in finding out more.

A Dutch television channel showed a film called “An Inconvenient Truth” featuring Al Gore showing a PowerPoint presentation which presented Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph and argued in apocalyptic terms that the earth was in danger of a runaway greenhouse effect, caused by human beings, and specifically, the CO2 that we produce.

That film was a tipping-point for me.  ”An Inconvenient Truth” was far from being a reasoned, scientifically-based presentation.  It was full of half-truths and special pleading, presented by a salesman.  For the first time, I began to suspect that the AGW scare was a textbook real-life example of the behaviour illustrated by the classic fable of Chicken Little.

One of the blog links on the Accuweather site that caught my attention was also hosted by Accuweather.  Joe Bastardi’s European Weather blog.  Bastardi is no Shakespeare, but his postings were always entertaining and well-argued.

Now Joe Bastardi has left Accuweather, and resurfaced at the Weatherbell site.  Inexplicably, his blog posts are behind a paywall – they are in the premium section of Weatherbell.  That is tragic.  One expects to pay for premium services – after all, they are a big part of the income of a web-based service.  But to pay for blog-posts?

Bloggers blog to be read.  They blog to communicate, to give their ideas the widest possible coverage.  Including pensioners who cannot afford the premium subscriptions. I am over sixty-five years old, and at the end of this month, I too shall be a pensioner.

So long, Joe.  I shall miss your posts.

On Accuweather.com on March 1,  Brett Anderson’s and Joe Bastardi’s blogs coincidentally carried Al Gore’s NY Times Op-ed of 27 February 2010.  Here it is.

Thanks Brett and Joe.   This kind of stuff needs debating.

None more than this Gorey drivel.  He gets the big guilt thing going – our grandchildren will one day look back on us as a “criminal generation”.  And he even beats the tobacco drum – “industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution … are ferociously fighting …  just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes.”

Man, the skeptics are evil.  They refuse to buy into having their cost of living ballooned, and their taxes increased.   They refuse to have to pay for carbon credits and have the money sent to developing nations to finance their coal-burning power stations and their industries that produce windmills and solar panels with cheap labour to sell back to us.  They refuse to be taxed on carbon emissions.  Why do they exhibit this “criminal” behaviour?

First: AGW is a theory no better than any other theory about climate change.  Actually, it’s worse than some – Richard Lindzen has some very specific criticisms below.   (Thanks JB for the tip).  So it’s not that skeptics blindly and stubbornly refuse to believe something unpalatable, it’s just that they are genuinely skeptical!  Skeptical of a religious crusade based on bad science, argument from ignorance, wilful exaggeration and personal attacks.  A crusade that is already leveraging the power of the state to impose its charges by force of law.  Hmmmm.   I believe it was the founder of Scientology who wrote that if you would be rich, start a religion…  http://www.herkinderkin.com/2010/01/anthropogenic-global-warming-as-organised-religion/

Second: Even if AGW was proven and not merely a theory, increasing costs by carbon credits, taxes or whatever would not reduce our consumption of fossil fuels any more than the savage cost increases of the 1972 oil shock.  All such measures do is cause inflation.  (Maybe Gore counts on the fact that most of his audience were not even born in 1972, or were too young to remember.)  So the cure for the unproven AGW is as illusory as the malady itself.  Gore and the rest of the leaders of the AGW religion probably feel that they cannot lose.  When we have paid and paid and become impoverished, the earth will not overheat and they will say “See, together we saved the earth”.  And we will be so grateful…

Reference:

Richard Lindzen on AGW  http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/02/dr-richard-lindzens-talk-at-fermilab.html If you’re scientifically minded, click on the archive bit at the bottom and go through Lindzen’s full presentation.

The satellite temperature record shows that January 2010 was the warmest January since satellite temperature measurements began in 1979.

Yep. The data don’t lie.

They didn’t lie about the cooling from 1998 to last year, when the published global temperatures by the AGW lobby said the earth was still warming.

And they didn’t lie about the extra warm January in 2007.  And they don’t lie about January 2010.  It’s warm – very warm.

The Grumpy Old Man is in the mood for sooth-saying.

First prediction:  Many of the AGW lobby will now temporarily forget their distrust of satellite-measured temperatures and insist that this result supports their belief that the earth is warming as a result of man-made CO2.  They will forget that distrust, that is, until the satellite-measured temperatures fall, just as they did from 1998 to last year.  If the data don’t support their beliefs, then the data will be obviously wrong, and will be supplanted by carefully homogenised temperatures from an AGW-friendly source.

Second prediction:  Some of the responses to the Accuweather Global Warming blog post that reported the January record temperature will provide supporting evidence of the truth of the first prediction.

First Speculation:  The warmer Arctic temperatures caused by the negative Arctic Oscillation will result in thinner than usual sea-ice.  Spring and Summer will therefore bring a collapse of Arctic sea-ice, similar to the one that occurred in 2007.  Which will be cited as further evidence of AGW.

Second Speculation:  Global temperatures will drop dramatically in 2010, just as they did in 2007 after the record January temperatures of that year.  And the AGW lobby will suddenly mistrust the satellite record once more.  NASA will publish their own terrestrial records, homogenised and averaged beyond all recognition, which will diametrically contradict the satellite record.

We’ll be able to assess the two predictions after reading all the responses to the Accuweather post.  The speculations will take the rest of 2010 to assess.

Brett Anderson, in his Global Warming blog in Accuweather, reports that the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have explained why they adjust temperatures to “remove bias”.  Wow.  Wherever they look, the nasty recording devices and processes produce a cooling bias that they have to correct for the sake of accuracy.  And even when they use the raw data, they still show warming.  Here are their warming rates:

1.6552 deg C per century (“corrected”), or 1.6539 deg C (uncorrected) based on analysis of temperatures from 1979 – 2009.  Should we be alarmed?

Nope.  The Accuweather hurricane forecaster Joe Bastardi, in his European blog, points out that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has just switched over from its warming cycle to the start of a thirty-year cooling cycle.  The Northern hemisphere similarly has just switched over – here in the Netherlands, the negative Arctic Oscillation has brought the coldest winter for thirty years, and there are more cold winters to come.  Now even the IPCC admits that we are headed for thirty years of global cooling.  From 1979 – 2009, the Atlantic and the Pacific have been in warming mode.  The warming rate in the last thirty years is completely normal in those circumstances.

In his blog entry for Saturday 16 January 2010, Joe Bastardi rhetorically addresses the NOAA people.  This is how he puts it:

“Its not like the 80s and 90s guys ( and gals) you were running the table with warm warm warm. Kick in the Atlantic switching to its warm cycle and what did you think would happen. Cmon now.. 75% of the worlds surface is water… the ice caps are surrounded by water…. the two biggest oceans in their warm cycle together.. Folks, if you bet warming, you have a free shot on goal, NO GOALIE!”

Right on, Joe!  To publish per century rates based on three decades of natural oceanic warming conditions, without mentioning those warming conditions is mischievously misleading at best, and downright malicious alarmist poppycock if I am to be less polite.  You can bet your shirt that when they publish the cooling trend during the coming years, the NCDC and the IPCC will shout about the negative PDO at the top of their lungs!

The NDCC warming rates based readings from 1880 – 2009 are 0.5911 deg C per century (“corrected”) or 0.5621 deg C per century (uncorrected).  That’s more believable.  One has only to look at environmental changes like the retreating glaciers in a number of locations like New Zealand to find evidence of warming.  Perfectly natural warming – the earth has warmed much more rapidly many times in its long history.  The rate of warming in the last century certainly does not indicate that we are warming the planet by our activities.  Sorry, chicken lickens.  The sky is not falling.  The earth will cool again.

You can read the whole story by following the link to the NCDC/NOAA report in the References section at the end of this grump.  I leave it to others to criticise the way they massage data, and their selection of temperature records.

You can access Brett Anderson’s and Joe Bastardi’s blogs from the links section of this website.

References:

NCDC Article http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/temperature-monitoring.html