Do Not Listen to Right Wing Weathermen

So amazing that public opinion can be such at odds with scientific fact. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, people believe in witches and angels and so forth.

Out of your cloud again

Elizabeth Kolbert, of the New Yorker, writes:

Joe Bastardi, who goes by the title “expert senior forecaster” at AccuWeather, has a modest proposal. Virtually every major scientific body in the world has concluded that the planet is warming, and that greenhouse-gas emissions are the main cause. Bastardi, who holds a bachelor’s degree in meteorology, disagrees. His theory, which mixes volcanism, sunspots, and a sea-temperature trend known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, is that the earth is actually cooling. Why don’t we just wait twenty or thirty years, he proposes, and see who’s right? This is “the greatest lab experiment ever,” he said recently on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show.

Bastardi’s position is ridiculous (which is no doubt why he’s often asked to air it on Fox News). Yet there it was on the front page of the Times last week. Among weathermen, it turns out, views like Bastardi’s are typical. A survey released by researchers at George Mason University found that more than a quarter of television weathercasters agree with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” and nearly two-thirds believe that, if warming is occurring, it is caused “mostly by natural changes.” (The survey also found that more than eighty per cent of weathercasters don’t trust “mainstream news media sources,” though they are presumably included in this category.)

Why, with global warming, is it always one step forward, two, maybe three steps back?

[Click to continue reading Weathermen, and other climate change skeptics : The New Yorker]

Wrap Your Dreams In Troubles

and on the crazy, oft-repeated assertion that somehow a mistake in a United Nations Report invalidated the entire evidence for global climate change:

The e-mail brouhaha was followed by—and immediately confused with—another overblown controversy, about a mistake in the second volume of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, from 2007. On page 493 of the nine-hundred-and-seventy-six-page document, it is asserted, incorrectly, that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. (The report cites as a source for this erroneous information a report by the World Wildlife Fund.) The screw-up, which was soon acknowledged by the I.P.C.C. and the W.W.F., was somehow transformed by commentators into a reason to doubt everything in the three-volume assessment, including, by implication, the basic laws of thermodynamics. The “new scandal (already awarded the unimaginative name of ‘Glaciergate’) raises further challenges for a scientific theory that is steadily losing credibility,” James Heiser wrote on the Web site of the right-wing magazine New American.

No one has ever offered a plausible account of why thousands of scientists at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries would bother to engineer a climate hoax. Nor has anyone been able to explain why Mother Nature would keep playing along; despite what it might have felt like in the Northeast these past few months, globally it was one of the warmest winters on record.

The message from scientists at this point couldn’t be clearer: the world’s emissions trajectory is extremely dangerous. Goofball weathermen, Climategate, conspiracy theories—these are all a distraction from what’s really happening. Which, apparently, is what we’re looking for.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/04/12/100412taco_talk_kolbert#ixzz0kbr0IhSj

Mind boggling, and why worry about the small stuff in our daily lives? We’re all going to drown soon as the morons yell down the scientists and influence the politicians to ignore the problem, and we pass the point of No Return.

One final point: I did not realize this schmuck Joe Bastardi1 worked for AccuWeather. I’m deleting their apps from my iPhone and iPad. Why support this asshole?

Footnotes:
  1. I’m not making the obvious joke about his name as I’m sure so many have before me []

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