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Tuesday, March 2, 2021

"Fringe’ or Reasonable? Meteorologist Bastardi on the Firing Line"

 Source:

"A recent E&E News article, “Fringe weatherman advised Abbott before deadly Texas storm” (February 25, 2021), is the latest marginalization job on a “climate science critic.”

Author Scott Walderman begins his piece as follows:
"Days before a historic snowstorm crippled his home state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) sought advice from an unusual source: Joe Bastardi, the go-to weather forecaster of Fox News host Sean Hannity".

The hit piece (against Bastardi, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Abbott) goes downhill from there with ad hominem.

"By Bastardi’s telling, the conversation with Abbott wasn’t groundbreaking or controversial. “I said this is a winter version of a Category 5 hurricane,” Bastardi told E&E News."

"Bastardi has claimed that carbon dioxide is not the “control knob” for the atmosphere.

He has said that teaching children about climate science is “indoctrinating” them.

He has suggested that burning more fossil fuels will benefit the planet by increasing carbon dioxide levels.
 
On Tuesday, Bastardi said he wants to emphasize to Cruz and Abbott in
future conversations that the electrical grid should not be so reliant on renewable energy … "

“Wind and solar power are supplements to the main diet,” he said.

... Scott Walderman ends his piece by quoting Andrew Rosenberg, Director, Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists:

“When these guys are talking to Bastardi,” Rosenberg said, “they’re trying to come up with maybe aliens did it or it’s sunspots.”

At this point in the not-so-grand debate, it’s all about sound bites and PR, with no quarter given to any person or view that challenges the climate orthodoxy of alarmism/forced energy transformation.

An important takeaway from the Great Texas Blackout is that weathermen and weatherwomen are the experts, not climate scientists whose warmer-winter predictions proved to be a great distraction.

It was supposed to be a warm 2020/2021 winter Texas-way, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ...

And winters in general are supposed to be warmer with less extreme cold events, according to climate models.

As flagged by Bjorn Lomborg, all climate models predict fewer cold days and cold nights.

... Based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) daily dataset … under the Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario … [c]old extremes decrease and warm extremes increase in a warmer world, and cold extremes tend to be more sensitive to global warming than the warm ones.

 How is this science ...
( when John ) Kerry wants you to believe climate change also leads to *colder* temperatures.

Of course, convenient to blame everything on climate

But wrong."