Speaking on November 1 at COP26, the UN Conference on climate change, U.S. President Joe Biden proclaimed: “Climate change is already ravaging the world … It’s destroying people’s lives and livelihoods and doing it every single day. It’s costing our nations trillions of dollars. Record heat and drought are fueling more widespread and more intense wildfires in some places and crop failures in others. Record flooding and what used to be a once-in-a-century storms are now happening every few years.”
When Pennsylvania-based weather expert Joe Bastardi hears such nonsense, it triggers him into action – he blasts out another article on the realities of climate change and extreme weather, does radio and TV interviews, and then adds another 50 heavy-duty bench presses to his already intense workout routine. For not only is Joe one of the world’s leading meteorologists, but he is also an outstanding amateur bodybuilder having won the NABBA American Bodybuilding Championships.
One of our nation’s most prominent and talented weather/climate experts and a sterling example of how to stay fit as we age, 66-year-old Joe Bastardi has a long background in both meteorology and athletics. His father was a meteorologist and Joe had his own weather forecasting station at Penn State University by his junior year where he was also a standout wrestler arming him for the abuse he would take. All of us who see the climate as beyond man’s control must put up with that abuse from a nation whose media and educators lean left. We have no agenda, only science for support. Joe uses science as few do in weather because he is Chief Forecaster for WeatherBELL, an organization that is paid to forecast the weather by companies whose economic futures depend on it. He would be a great and funny TV weatherman whose 7-day forecasts are right only 56% of the time but has to be much better than that to bring back paying clients.
Joe has just published a new book titled The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War. He frequents Sean Hannity’s Fox TV show as a resident expert so Sean, having learned so much from Joe, was kind enough to write the Forward. In it he says:
“Joe has rightfully come to the conclusion that this “phony war” is a smoke screen to push another agenda——the destruction of the very system that made this nation successful. We fight not over the climate but to preserve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We fight not because we are unconcerned about the environment but because we believe a top-down system of government is deleterious. The battle isn’t over climate change. It’s over our way of life.”
Joe Bastardi makes exactly this case through his encyclopedic knowledge of weather and climate.
We all know today whenever a potentially damaging weather event occurs, the alarmists, radical liberals all, quickly blame it on man-caused climate change. More and more folks are beginning to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It would be even more helpful were they to recognize, for example, that among the 10 worst flood disasters in the US, only two occurred after 1940 (see graph below of all-time extreme weather records in the US). And that those who promote alarmism and sea-level rise ignore their own warnings like former President Obama building a mansion on Martha’s Vineyard 3 feet above sea level.
Good scientists, like Joe, rely on knowledge of the past to frame the future, but the alarmists ignore it on purpose. No stretch of weather as extreme as that which occurred between the 1930s and 1960s has occurred since. Be it hurricanes, droughts, heat, or cold they all were before our large increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Everyone needs to watch Joe’s superb key-note presentation, “Weaponizing Hurricanes” at the 13th International Climate Change Conference that can be viewed here. His conference call with “President Donald Trump” from the Trump Hotel in Washington DC is especially entertaining. Joe concluded his talk:
“Nature is in control, not man and hurricanes are a way of showing that. Don’t be fooled when they’re weaponized!”
Climate alarmists know that there is something exciting weather-wise happening somewhere every day and they cherry-pick them to scare the public about man’s role in worsening weather. Below is a diagram that explains how unethical scientists choose only data to support their scare scenario. When one looks at the trend line among all the data relating Variable A to Variable B, only Trend line 1 can be correct, but choosing very selective data you can choose any trend you wish.
What the alarmists do not do is predict significant weather in real-time where their forecasts can be judged as accurate or failures. Your TV weather person does a good job for a few days out but recognizes he or she is just slightly better than 50% beyond one week. Real weather scientists like Joe Bastardi must be right the vast majority of the time. They learn how painful it is to be wrong when their livelihood depends on it. But once the scars heal, they are stronger for it. They learn the lessons of humility and open-mindedness and the fact that the atmosphere is a chaotic system. They realize the futility of trying to predict climate decades out with mathematical equations. Yet students are likely, when taking an Italian language class, to hear a professor tell the class they “have 20 years to visit Venice before it goes underwater.” Yes, this drivel is included even in language classes.
Although one of our best competing weather analysts, Joe does not have a Ph.D. in meteorology but does have 45 years of experience putting his knowledge on the line about 3,000 hours a year. He finds it completely incredible that alarmists tell us that we are approaching a climate emergency that is worth spending trillions of dollars to attempt to thwart nature in some minuscule manner. All this, when the facts say we are experiencing a climate optimum.
Joe is not opposed to acting in opposition to nature when it makes sense. But that does not include trying to affect the temperature of the planet decades in the future. It does include attempting to reduce the furor of a hurricane by seeding it with chemicals to wring out some of its intensity before it hits populated coastal areas.
America needs more weather scientists like Joe Bastardi who appreciate how nature behaves in the real world, instead of the conn artists who rely on hopelessly-flawed computerized climate model predictions while feeding at the government trough.
Jay Lehr, Ph.D., is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.
This article was originally published on America Out Loud and is republished with permission.