‘Fringe’ or Reasonable? Bastardi on the Firing Line

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 1, 2021

“To think you are smart enough to control nature and you must force people … to obey? That is the same kind of despotic behavior we have seen out of the worst tyrants.”

– Joe Bastardi (quoted below)

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.

Here are the Bastardi quotations in Walderman’s piece:

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.

In a post for the Heartland Institute, the climate denial advocacy group where Bastardi is a senior fellow, he wrote last week that people using extreme weather conditions to justify climate action “reveals a certain kind of narcissism.”

“To think you are smart enough to control nature and you must force people … to obey?” he wrote. “That is the same kind of despotic behavior we have seen out of the worst tyrants.”

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.

Mainstream Climate Misdirection

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 (U.S. Winter Outlook: Cooler North, warmer South with ongoing La Nina).

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. He links to “Future extreme climate changes linked to global warming intensity” [Science Bulletin (December 30, 2017), where the authors state:

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.

But, but … it’s global weirding, John Kerry and the MSM now insist, a catch-all phrase when global warming predictions result in anomalies. Lomborg’s tweet deserves the last word:

How is this science? Global warming is rebranded “global weirding.” CBS & Kerry wants you to believe climate change also leads to *colder* temperatures. Of course, convenient to blame everything on climate But wrong.