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From Katrina to Helene: A timeline of Fox News’ hurricane misinformation, harmful narratives, and climate denial

August 29 marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in Louisiana

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 08/28/25 mma

For two decades, Fox News has weaponized major disasters caused by supercharged storms to attack political opponents, push right-wing narratives, and deny climate change.

Major storms that hit populated areas generate wall-to-wall TV news coverage. At its best, this coverage exposes systemic issues that leave certain populations vulnerable to disasters, keeps a spotlight on both rescue and recovery processes to keep accountable those responsible for disaster response, and discusses the link between our warming planet and the intensification of storms, along with solutions for reducing climate pollution.

At its worst, coverage ignores these issues, downplaying or denying the role of climate change and using disasters to amplify false narratives and misinformation that serve a political agenda. In 20 years of hurricane reporting, Fox News’ coverage has predominately reflected the latter.

Below is an overview of some of the major storms that have made landfall in the U.S. over the past 20 years – and how Fox covered them.

Hurricane Katrina remains the costliest extreme weather disaster in U.S. history and one of the deadliest, with many of the 1,392 deaths likely having come as a direct result of the federal government’s failed response. Over 1.5 million survivors were displaced, making it also “one of the largest forced migrations in U.S. history. … Families were separated, homes were lost, and entire communities were erased.”

The media latched on to unverified stories of violence and societal breakdown, demonizing those most impacted by the storm and further delaying rescue and recovery efforts. Military forces were deployed to suppress the victims rather than evacuate them. Fox pushed this narrative of violence — “robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness” — and supported the Bush administration's reported strategy of blaming the faulty emergency response on Democratic state and local officials.

Superstorm Sandy hit the eastern United States in October 2012, causing at least 182 deaths and approximately $65 billion in damage. Fox criticized the Obama administration's Hurricane Sandy relief efforts by comparing them to the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. In fact, there were few similarities between the responses, and the Obama administration's response to Sandy was widely praised by members of both parties.

Discussing Hurricane Sandy on the November 1, 2012, edition of his show, Fox host Sean Hannity asked: “So where's President Obama? Well, after his photo-op with Gov. Chris Christie, and the help of your tax dollars, he boards Air Force One and he begins his day with a stump speech.” Hannity later said, “And with the horrifying images of Sandy's devastation now contrasted with the president's constant campaigning, this is starting to look like, in my opinion, Obama's Katrina.”

Hurricane Harvey was, at the time, “the most significant tropical cyclone rainfall event in United States history” and was particularly devastating to Black and Hispanic communities in Texas. Discussing Hurricane Harvey on the August 25, 2017, edition of The Five, Fox host Jesse Watters downplayed the impact of climate change on hurricanes, stating, “Hurricanes have been happening since the beginning of time. … These things just happen. It’s called the weather” — a nonsensical argument, as scientists are not claiming that climate change causes hurricanes, but that it makes them stronger and more intense.

Hurricane Irma, which hit Florida, was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic. It claimed 129 lives in the U.S. and Caribbean and cost an estimated $52 billion in damages. Discussing Hurricane Irma on the September 11, 2017, edition of The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld also brought up the frequency of hurricanes while ignoring intensity, stating that “landfalling U.S. hurricanes, they’ve been decreasing over the last 140 years.”

Hurricane Maria killed an estimated 3,000 people in the U.S. territory and caused roughly $90 billion worth of damage. President Donald Trump’s administration was widely criticized for its response and for blocking federal aid to Puerto Rico, which struggled for weeks to return power to its residents. The mayor of San Juan publicly criticized Trump’s response, and Trump drew backlash when he threw paper towels into the crowd at a relief center. Lying about death toll numbers, Trump claimed Democrats had inflated the number to make him look “as bad as possible.”

Fox personalities were among the right-wing media figures who leapt to Trump's defense. Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs called the Hurricane Maria death toll a “farce” and “an amazing tortured inflation.” Fox News’ John Roberts suggested that the dispute over Maria's death toll in Puerto Rico was part of Trump’s “feud with Puerto Rican officials.”

On the October 19, 2017, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the former host defended Trump from charges of racism against Puerto Ricans because “Puerto Rico is 75 percent white, according to the U.S. Census.” Carlson characterized as “unfounded” the charges that the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was racist and added that “the race angle” bothered him because “it makes people hate each other, and it’s just stupid.”

Hurricane Florence caused catastrophic damage to the Carolinas, claiming at least 37 lives. On Fox, climate denier Joe Bastardi and Rush Limbaugh’s former “official climatologist” Roy Spencer dismissed the link between climate change and intensifying hurricanes in favor of the denier argument that the frequency of hurricanes is decreasing. (Climate science does not argue that climate change is increasing the number of storms, but rather that it is making storms “more intense, with higher wind speeds, heavier rainfall, and more severe storm surge.”)

On the September 14, 2018, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Spencer talked about the declining frequency of “hits of the United States by major hurricanes,” claiming there’s too much “natural variability” to determine what influence human actions have had on hurricanes. On Hannity, Bastardi stated, “The amount of hurricanes in the last 50 years, from Florida to New England, is 37% of what it was the previous 50 years, so if there’s climate change going on, it's actually decreasing the amount of major hits.”

Affecting many states in the south, Hurricane Dorian was also the worst storm ever to hit the Bahamas and was responsible for at least 78 deaths. But the lives that Dorian claimed were overshadowed by the spectacle of “Sharpie-gate” when the president altered a map of the storm’s predicted path with a marker. After Trump lied about the path of Hurricane Dorian, using a Sharpie to manufacture a threat to Alabama, not only did prime-time host Sean Hannity defend him, but Fox’s Howard Kurtz attacked the media for covering Trump’s comments. Hannity called the media who reported on Trump’s lie “psychotic jackasses” and claimed that only “Trump derangement syndrome” could explain why reporters would point out that the president was wrong.

Roy Spencer appeared on the September 2, 2019, edition of The Story with Martha MacCallum to downplay climate change’s impact on hurricanes. Spencer stated that there is “no long term trend in either their intensity or in the number of major hurricanes … that have hit Florida.” On the September 4, 2019, edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Ainsley Earhardt again brought up storm frequency in order to downplay the link between climate change and hurricanes, stating, “Hurricanes have been happening since the beginning of the atmosphere.” Later, on September 4, 2019, Jesse Watters appeared on The Story with Martha MacCallum to claim falsely that “there's no correlation between temperature and hurricanes, and there's no trend over the last hundred years about intensity or ferociousness or numbers.”

Hurricane Ida caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., where it brokeprecipitation records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania and caused major flash flooding, killing 95 people and causing an estimated $85 billion in damages. Fox News used the storm to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack then-President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill that contained measures to make communities more resilient in the face of extreme weather.

While discussing Hurricane Ida on the September 7, 2021, edition of The Ingraham Angle, one of the network’s favorite climate contrarians, Michael Shellenberger, said that the frequency of hurricanes is decreasing and that there is “no significant increase” in intensity — a bald-faced lie. On the September 8, 2021, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Joe Bastardi downplayed the intensity of the storm by arguing that other bad storms happened in the 1950s.

On the September 2, 2021, edition of Fox News’ Hannity, Sean Hannity began a segment downplaying the impacts of climate on Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather, and using it as yet another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5, 2021, edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, host Steve Hilton ran a short segment on Democrats supposedly using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.

Hurricane Ian brought a historic storm surge and catastrophic flooding to Florida and was responsible for at least 84 storm-related fatalities. As Hurricane Ian pummeled Florida and the Carolinas, Fox News dismissed, mocked, and outright denied climate change’s impact on hurricanes. On the September 29, 2022, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, former Fox host Tucker Carlson focused on hurricane frequency and downplayed the intensity argument, falsely claiming that “there’s no science behind these claims.” On the September 28, 2022, edition of Hannity, Sean Hannity stated, “During hurricane season, you usually have hurricanes, like we did a hundred years ago.” Later that night on The Ingraham Angle, Michael Shellenberger stated that hurricanes are “not intensifying right now, so any perception that hurricanes are more intense is just a perception fed by that relentless alarmist media.”

Meanwhile, Jesse Watters mocked Biden's disaster response. Watters said, “Maybe the reason Joe [Biden] isn't talking with the leader of the state that's about to be devastated by this natural disaster is because he's already got the whole thing covered with the Inflation Reduction Act. Sen. Amy Klobuchar laid it out for us clearly. There's no need to worry, people, because the Inflation Reduction Act and voting for Democrats is going to stop hurricanes.”

Hurricane Idalia slammed into Florida's Gulf Coast, causing approximately $4 billion in damage to one of the state's poorest and least populated areas. As climate-fueled Hurricane Idalia barreled toward Florida, Jesse Watters Primetime hosted Judith Curry, a climate contrarian who consulted for oil and gas companies during her time in academia, to argue that scientists have “seriously mischaracterized” the threat of climate change. She claimed that the “dominant factor” in climate change is “far and away” Earth’s “natural climate variability.”

On the August 30, 2023, edition of Fox News’ so-called straight news program Special Report with Bret Baier, anchor Bret Baier dismissed comments from Joe Biden connecting the storm to climate change.

With 213 fatalities, Hurricane Helene became the second deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in 50 years, with economic losses estimated at more than $200 billion. Fox used Hurricane Helene to attack the Biden administration’s policies and disaster response while laundering harmful misinformation, even while politicians of both parties representing the impacted areas praised the response and begged media and bad actors to stop spreading misinformation that ultimately disrupted rescue and recovery efforts and put Federal Emergency Management Agency workers in danger.

One of these false and harmful claims contended that FEMA’s hurricane victim relief funds had been drained by aid to undocumented immigrants. In reality, the funding is separate and unrelated. Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity led the charge in repeating the false claim; Watters’ prime-time show repeated the lie in 5 consecutive broadcasts starting October 3, and Hannity managed 6.

Fox News also falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration were ignoring millions of Americans impacted by intense flooding while dishonestly claiming that victims were only entitled to $750 in aid, when in reality that is just the start of federal benefits. Fox’s misleading coverage of the $750 payments was “one of the more dishonest omissions ever seen on Fox News – which is saying something,” Mediaite senior editor Michael Luciano wrote of the misleading attack by Fox hosts Hannity, Watters, and Laura Ingraham.

Fox personalities also complained about the Biden administration’s pledge to give $157 million to Lebanon, incorrectly claiming that the humanitarian aid for Lebanon was being taken from funds that would otherwise be used for disaster relief assistance. Hannity misleadingly suggested U.S. foreign aid was competing with disaster relief for funding. Watters, meanwhile, incredulously asked, “How is it that Biden and Harris can send money overseas faster than they can send it to our own citizens?”

In May, just weeks before the start of the Atlantic hurricane season and peak extreme weather, CNN obtained an internal memo warning that FEMA was “not ready” for hurricane season. According to the internal assessment, preparations for hurricane season have been “derailed” and issues abound at the agency, “including a general uncertainty around its mission, lack of coordination with states and other federal agencies, low morale and new red tape that will likely slow responses.” Fox ignored reporting on the agency's lack of preparation for this year’s extreme weather season. The network was also quiet about multiple states that expressed frustration over delayed or denied disaster relief from the Trump administration.

On June 2, acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson made headlines, first in Reuters, for telling staff in a daily briefing that he had been unaware the U.S. has a hurricane season. Legacynewsoutlets, including cable networks CNN and MSNBC, covered Richardson’s controversial remarks and the wider concerns about FEMA’s hurricane preparedness while Fox News seemingly ignored them.

After the deadly flooding in Central Texas in early July, Fox News personalities attacked the media and prominent Democrats for linking the flooding to climate change and for raising concerns about Trump administration cuts to agencies and services that predict and respond to extreme weather events. When reporting showed that the Trump administration’s response had been delayed, Fox ran defense for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

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mma 1 23 not twt

Right-wing media just can’t seem to quit old-school climate change denial.

Even as fossil fuel companies moved away from directly questioning established science in their marketing in favor of more subtle forms of climate delay and greenwashing, media influencers on the right repeatedly suggested that climate change is a fake crisis manufactured by global elites, using the energy crisis, extreme weather events, and a general mistrust of our institutions to make the case for climate change denial.

The war in Ukraine was convenient for climate change deniers

As gas prices skyrocketed, in part due to the global energy disruption resulting from the war in Ukraine, and American families started to become frustrated, right-wing media took the opportunity to blame climate policies. They insisted that high prices were being caused by a fake crisis manufactured by the government, arguing that climate change was a hoax from the beginning.

AnOctober 6 Wall Street Journal editorial claimed that “the White House blames the industry for high gas prices while it does everything it can to make drilling more difficult and financially risky.”

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Donald Trump went on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria on March 2 and called climate change a hoax while discussing the Biden administration's energy policy, saying that “this climate situation is killing our country.”

He did the same thing in a March 21 segment of Fox Business’s Varney & Co, saying what the left does “is a climate hoax.” When asked by host Stuart Varney whether climate change is caused by human activity, Trump responded: “In my opinion, you have a thing called weather, and you go up and you go down. If you look into the 1920s, they were talking about global freezing. … The climate’s always been changing,” he continued.

Media Matters documented ample disinformation about gas prices and theKeystone XL pipeline extension during that period. Some right-wing media influencers claimed the Biden administration was adding insult to injury by allegedly driving high gas prices and lying to Americans about what could be done to fix the situation in order to carry out its agenda.

Fossil fuel shill Daniel Turner of Power the Future wrote on April 18, “There is no climate crisis and oil is back to $110 because everything@JoeBiden says is a lie.”

Kurt Schlichter, a Townhall columnist and podcast host, alleged that Biden was more committed to “the idiotic members of the climate change hoax cult” than he was to lowering gas prices for families.

Schlichter has been a loud and consistent voice for climate change denial. But for someone who believes it doesn’t exist, he certainly spent a lot of time obsessing over it in 2022. He tweeted “climate change is a hoax” or similar statements at least 145 times in 2022, or an average of nearly three times per week, and penned op-eds like “Don’t Let Them Reset Society To Make You Into a Bug-Eating Serf” and “Climate Hoax Hacks Love Putin” in which he claimed that “you cannot claim to both oppose Putin and fight global warming.”

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was also an influential Twitter climate misinformer in 2022, voicing opposition to climate policy such as the Inflation Reduction Act, and posting climate skeptic and denialist content. “Taxes on energy, subsidies for favored corporations, dangerous drug price controls will increase inflation. And -- Fact check: There is no ‘climate crisis,’” he tweeted onJuly 28.

Judicial Watch is a member of the State Policy Network, which has deep ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-funded lobbying group that has most recently been working to punish fossil fuel divestment. When Biden was considering declaring a climate emergency in July, Fitton wrote, “There obviously is no ‘climate emergency’-- for Biden to dictate otherwise is a desperate abuse of power.”

The right turned reporting on natural disasters into “climate alarmism”

Last year, we clearly saw the impacts of major climate-fueled extreme weather events at home and around the world: Hurricanes Ian and Fiona, a heat wave and drought in Europe, China, and the American West, and massive flooding in Pakistan. As of October, according to insurance broker Aon, there had been 29 billion-dollar disasters in 2022. Additionally, according to the European Union’s statistics office Eurostat, the EU experienced 53,000 more deaths in July compared with that month’s averages for 2016-2019. 

In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, which pummeled Florida and South Carolina in late September,Fox News’ Tucker Carlson implied that humans cannot influence weather events because “they’re called natural disasters. … They’re products of nature. God’s in charge.” His guest Candace Owens, who has a history of climate change denial, reiterated that climate change does not exist because “if there was no human beings that walked the face of the planet, there would continue to be hurricanes, like there would continue to be blizzards, and like there would continue to be tornadoes.”

Carlson responded to natural disasters with climate change denial on more than one occasion. On July 20, he devoted a monologue to undermining the existence of climate change, reducing climate predictions to: “It’s gonna be hot and then it’s gonna rain hard.”

“No one really believes in global warming,” he continued, “and that’s why all of the liberals in the United States live on the coasts – because they don’t believe it. That’s why many of them fly private, because the entire theory is absurd and they know it. … The whole thing is a joke.”

The day before, onJuly 19, Fox News host Dan Bongino questioned whether the planet is getting warmer and whether humanity played a role in it, asking: “What kind of a dunce believes that? Come on. Is it [the planet] getting warmer? The answer is maybe. … The question isn’t is it getting warmer; the question is what’s human beings' role in it.”

Even in the absence of an extreme weather event, right-wing media regularly dismissed and challenged the scientific consensus that warming is making these types of events more severe.

On an October 11 segment of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham brought on climate change denier Tom Harris to falsely claim that the science isn’t settled: “The real underlying thing is that there is no climate crisis. … It's all based on models that don't work. … In fact, we don't even know whether it's going to be warm or cool in the future. … The only sensible approach is to get ready for it, to make our infrastructure hardened, to use solid, dependable sources of energy like coal.”

The “Great Reset” was a magnet for climate skepticism

Also in 2022, some right-wing media framed climate change as a hoax orchestrated by elites to implement the “Great Reset,” using climate policies and other measures to assert dominance and control over the general population.

These ideas got attention in July, when right-wing media attempted to blame a series of complex global conflicts and unrest on climate policy, and in November as the global community gathered in Egypt to negotiate climate action.

Former Australian journalist and key Twitter climate denial amplifier Peter Clackattacked plans made during the conference to provide financial climate support for developing nations, tweeting, “This is the reality of the Great Reset. … COP27 has approved - without dissent - reparations starting at $2 trillion because of climate-caused damage. There is none.”

On a December 12 segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson and meteorologist Joe Bastardi had a nearly unintelligible conversation packed with climate change denial, where Bastardi offered that climate advocates might not want to ban private air travel because “they’ve all got climate vaccines. We don't know about them, but unlike the covid vaccine, they actually work.”

Another cockamamie theory, according to Bastardi, is that climate advocates are trying to pollute the air as much as possible so that they can have an excuse to prevent others from using transportation. Bastardi claimed that another option is that “it's a phony climate war, it's fraudulent,” and it “has nothing to do with CO2.”

Though not explicitly mentioned, these accusations are consistent with the Great Reset narrative of elites controlling the masses through climate and public health policy. Carlson posited earlier in the segment, “Could it be that the climate movement is really about creating a permanent caste system where the people at the top of society, the Brahmins, can do literally whatever they want?”

Right-wing journalist Jordan Schachtel mentioned the Great Reset while celebrating Twitter’s change in ownership, tweeting, “Twitter will now become the network through which we utterly destroy the forces of The Great Reset. … This is why the power-drunk covid addicts, climate hoaxers, commies, etc are furious today.”

On the September 12 edition of Eric Bolling The Balance, host Eric Bolling encapsulated the right’s fearmongering about the Great Reset, claiming that climate change is a hoax being used “in order to make people fear the end of the world, convince us to change everything. They want to control us forever and ever.”

Climate contrarians lashed out against so-called censorship

Sometimes, climate change denial was just a drumbeat regardless of current events. Prominent right-wing culture warrior influencers used climate change denial without any context as part of their rotating script attacking different “liberal” beliefs or simply as a protest against what they view as censorship.

For example, after Twitter initially accepted  Elon Musk’s acquisition offer onApril 25, right-wing contrarians and other influencers were seemingly emboldened to “test” the new environment by making statements that might reasonably be labeled as misinformation or hate speech under previous management. This occured in the days following Musk’s takeover of the platform on October 27 as well, with some tweets garnering tens of thousands of engagements.

[twt]

former Daily Wirecontributor Greg Price and right-wing Twitter troll and self-described political commentator Gunther Eagleman repeatedly pushed climate change misinformation on Twitter in 2022, along with a plethora of other uncouth and conspiratorial statements. Eagleman tweeted about climate change being a hoax, scam, or similar statements 48 times this year.

[twt]

despite right-wing media’s repeated claims that climate change is a hoax, it was among the top voter concerns during the recent 2022 midterm elections, suggesting climate change denial is a losing argument.However, as the phenomenon ramps up on Twitter and “free speech” continues to be a major point of contention in the culture wars, right-wing media may be empowered to continue pushing these types of disinformation in 2023.

Methodology ...

https://www.amazon.com/Weaponization-Weather-Phony-Climate-War/dp/1662903650

what if climate change is naturally occurring and cyclical? What if trillions of dollars will be spent to accomplish nothing? What if the real agenda is not about science, climate and weather, but simply uses this as a tool to disrupt and destroy the foundational concepts of one nation, under God, that have led to the greatest quality of life and liberty the world has ever known?

At 65, Joe Bastardi is one of the most experienced meteorologists in the world today. His knowledge of past major events puts into perspective the extreme weather events seen today, that are nothing new, and in fact, not as severe as before. In this book, Bastardi goes in-depth to document naturally occurring climate and weather events to question those whose agenda it is to weaponize each weather event for the pursuit of a political and social aim. Of course, the climate is changing, and with the many natural influencers constantly in play, it always will. Thanks to an ever-fluctuating level of activity in the large natural drivers that have always controlled it, such as our Sun, the oceans, stochastic events and the very design of the system itself, climate change is natural. “A single attribution to man as the climate control knob in the face of this is questionable, if not a stretch. The reader should at least look at the ideas presented here,” said Bastardi.Joe understands the fear today, given what has been nothing short of public indoctrination. His new book offers an environmentally friendly and inexpensive solution to alleviate those fears, that will not destroy the economic lifeline of this nation as the Green New Deal surely will. It begins with removing the fear that has been pushed to create what is becoming irrational panic, especially with our young.   So, is this book important on multiple levels? You decide.

bot w/

This item: The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War

by Joe Bastardi

Paperback

$9.39

The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won't Hear From Al Gore--And Others

by Joe Bastardi

Paperback

$14.95

American Marxism

by Mark R. Levin

Hardcover

$14.00

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Joe Bastardi is a gifted meteorologist and communicator who has blessed Americans with his engaging and insightful weather reports for many years. As a student of historical weather patterns, he has concluded that much of the dogma from scientific 'experts' is politically driven and grossly inaccurate. In this book, Joe shares his findings, shattering the myth that today's weather is worse than ever, while also exposing the leftist political agenda behind the climate-change propaganda saturating our culture. Finally, an accessible book that sets the record straight. Bravo!"

-David Limbaugh

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"The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War is a surgical dissection of the reality, science, and foundations of climate change, our society, our country, and our freedoms. Joe Bastardi is a well-known national treasure in the field of meteorology, predictive modeling, and forecasting. With this book, he courageously guides us on a journey to the truth of life itself - the truth that the global elites do not want the public to comprehend, let alone have the factual and historical foundations to act upon. Joe provides the foundational facts, data, and analysis to empower every American to enhance their freedoms, liberties, and future."

-David H. Janda, M.D., host of "Operation Freedom"

"In this book, you are in for a special treat with the eternally happy warrior.Joe Bastardi masterfully demonstrates the phony claims on dangerous man-made global warming from rising atmospheric carbon dioxide - that gas from your own breath. A 45-year veteran in the science of weather forecasting, Joe is able to cut to the chase and help those very many climate alarmists and extortionists in digging up a very big and deep - but beautiful - hole for all the bad sciences and flawed predictions to rest in peace. Read and buy many copies of this book, and then share with everyone - especially your teenaged sons and daughters and even grandmas and grandpas in your family. A warning may be appropriate: Joe's love and enthusiasm for the weather science can easily infect everyone. Consider me one of the first few to be graced by Joe."

-Dr Willie Soon

About the Author

Joe Bastardi has been in love with the weather since his first memory and is now one of the most experienced operational forecasters in the world with 45 years of experience and no plans to slow down. He is the son of a degreed meteorologist, Matthew Bastardi (Texas A&M University, 1965), and his son Garrett loves the weather and hopes to work in the field someday (once his golf career is over). Joe has been referred to as a pioneer in extreme weather and long-range forecasting and is often seen and heard on media sites when major storms or climate issues become noteworthy.

He is the author of The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won't Hear From Al Gore - and Others. He graduated from Penn State University (PSU) in 1978, where he wrestled, and is the only known meteorologist since 1950 to letter Division 1 in wrestling. He still applies the work ethic taught to him by his parents and reinforced by his coaches to his job. At 65, he has no intention of slowing down. He has averaged over 3,000 hours a year of work since starting his first meteorological job in March of 1978. He resides in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife Jessica (PSU, 1988), who is a former captain of the PSU women's gymnastics team and has been an assistant coach for 20 years. Their daughter, Jessie, is on the PSU women's gymnastics team. Above all, Joe has a deep belief in a mighty and merciful Heavenly Father and eternal gratitude for having the chance to do what he was made to do.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gatekeeper Press (September 8, 2020)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 114 pages

consulted for what exactly?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/abbott/

no lnx

Greg Abbott consulted an infamous climate change denier before Texas energy debacle: reporter

Alex Henderson March 17, 2021

Gov. Greg Abbott has drawn a great deal of criticism from Texas Democrats, including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, over his response to the Lone Star State's recent energy debacle — which found millions of Texas without heat, electricity and running water during freezing temperatures. And according to Madlin Mekelburg, an environmental reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, one of the people Abbott consulted before the cold snap was Joe Bastardi — a meteorologist known for being a climate change denier.

Abbott, during the crisis, claimed that green energy was to blame for the widespread power outages that Texas was suffering. But as O'Rourke pointed out, only a fraction of Texas' energy comes from wind power — the state is much more reliant on fossil fuels. And the state's power grid, O'Rourke stressed, suffered across-the-board problems because it hadn't been properly winterized.

Bastardi, reporter Abigail Rosenthal notes on the My San Antonio website, is someone who was recommended to Abbott by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Fox News' Sean Hannity. The meteorologist has said that if changes in climate occur, they do so naturally — claiming that use of fossil fuels has nothing to do with it. Scientists all over the world, however, have been warning that fossil fuels are a key factor in climate change.

Hannity, in fact, wrote the forward for Bastardi's book, "The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War" — which has drawn a great deal of criticism from scientists. Bastardi has appeared on Hannity's show more than once.

Mekelburg reports that Abbott and Bastardi spoke on February 12, which was a few days before the freezing temperatures arrived in Texas. And Bastardi, according to Mekelburg, told the Texas governor to expect "a winter version of a Category 5 hurricane."

During the cold snap, major Texas cities like Houston, Austin and San Antonio experienced afternoon highs of around 33F or 34F — which wouldn't be unusual for Pittsburgh or Detroit in February, but was unusually cold for cities in South Texas. Unlike states that were used to coping with icy, freezing weather, Texas did not winterize its power system — and its power grid failed.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-breaks-out-all-tools-denier-playbook-downplay-climate-changes-role-western-wildfires

fox breaks out all the tools in the denier playbook to downplay climate change's role in western wildfires

09/17/20 12:15 PM EDT

Climate denial, conspiracy theories, and misleading information -- Fox recycles old arguments year after year in wildfire coverage

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD

PUBLISHED 09/17/20 12:15 PM EDT

Ignoring the clear scientific links between the climate crisis and this year’s apocalyptic wildfires on the West Coast, coverage on Fox News and Fox Business has downplayed and denied the role of climate change in these devastating fires, deflecting from climate science while pushing President Donald Trump’s perennial claim that forest mismanagement is to blame. At least two Fox programs have even falsely suggested that an organized campaign of arson is responsible for igniting the fires in the Pacific Northwest -- a harmful conspiracy theory that has also quickly spread across social media platforms.

Fox shows are following a playbook that they have used with other major fire disasters linked to climate change, including last year’s catastrophic bushfires in Australia and previous catastrophic fires in California.

The goal of Fox’s coverage is always the same: deflect from the scientific reality of climate change and paint Democratic policies as the true culprits in worsening the wildfires.

Deny and downplay the climate crisis

Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson is leading the network on denying the indisputable connection between climate change and the catastrophic fires burning on the West Coast. On three recent episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host and his guests spread dangerous disinformation about the fires.

On September 10, Carlson claimed that “there’s no evidence” climate change contributed to the western wildfires, instead arguing that state regulations and energy grid mismanagement were the real problems responsible for the blazes. Carlson took this a step further on September 11, when he called climate change “systemic racism in the sky” and stated with a straight face that “there is not a single scientist on Earth who knows whether or by how much these fires may have been, quote, ‘exacerbated’ by warmer temperatures caused by climate change.”

To top it off, Carlson invited Marc Morano-- perhaps the most notorious climate denier in the U.S. -- on the September 15 edition of his show to falsely claim that these fires are “not unprecedented” and that it’s really just “climate ambulance-chasing at its core” and “weaponizing weather events” to link them to climate change.

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The exact same line of “weaponizing weather” was used on an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight last year to dismiss climate connections during the Amazon fires. During a segment discussing those fires in August 2019, climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi claimed that “if humans are causing climate change, it's very, very slight,” and said that any attempts to pin the Amazon fires on climate change was “weaponization of the weather.”

Carlson’s climate-denying rants fly in the face of well-established scientific evidence that climate change is both prolonging the fire season and intensifying the size and scale of the fires. Climate scientists have also called these wildfires “unprecedented” and linked a climate-fueled drought to conditions worsening the fires.

Additionally, Carlson’s claim that “not a single scientist” can link the fires to climate change is also demonstrably false -- and taken laughably out of context. Climate scientist Daniel Swain addressed this point on Twitter, noting that his featured quote from Carlson’s show was “fundamentally misrepresenting climate scientists' public statements on wildfires and climate change”:

Carlson is no stranger to peddling dangerous climate misinformation. Just last year, he invited Moranoto hype a silly, debunked document that claims clouds are responsible for global warming. In March 2019, he stated without evidence that if climate change is affecting natural disasters, “it might be making them in some ways better too.” (Earlier that same month, the Fox host also baselessly accused undocumented immigrants of killing more people in the U.S. than climate change.)

In addition to outright denial, the network has regularly downplayed the connection between climate and the catastrophic fires. A Media Matters study from 2018 found that Fox ran only two segments on California’s wildfires in November of that year that mentioned climate; both of those segments downplayed the role of climate change.

In recent days, Fox shows have attempted to downplay climate’s role by politicizing the climate argument and purposely shifting blame for the fires to other issues. Neil Cavuto did just this on the September 10 edition of Fox Business’ Cavuto: Coast to Coast:

On the September 14 edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, correspondent John Roberts provided cover for Trump’s outright denial of climate change by calling it a “glaring difference of opinion” with California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Later on in the show, Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt attempted to pass off Trump’s clear climate denial as a problem for both sides of the political aisle, calling his response an example of “why people hate our system, because when bad things happen, the two parties want to pick and choose what’s to blame. … Instead, what they hear is politicians picking and choosing the things they like from the menu.”

This strategy of partisan obfuscation also has precedent on Fox: During California’s 2019 fire season, Fox & Friends responded to Newsom criticizing Trump’s assault on climate action by bringing a talk show host with no background in science, Mike Slater, to explain why “liberal policies are really to blame” for that year’s massive wildfires in California.

Jumping to blame “forest management” practices for the fires, while generally ignoring the role of climate change

On the September 14 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Cal Fire Assistant Deputy Director Daniel Berlant dropped a rare example of climate truth on Fox:

DANIEL BERLANT (CAL FIRE): In California, there really is no debate that our fire seasons are getting longer. We are seeing larger fires and more explosive fires. In fact, on average right now, our fire season is on average 75 days longer than they were just four decades ago. And so, you know, we can debate all we want, but I can tell you here on the ground, we are seeing fires that are incredibly destructive and incredibly fast moving.

But right after this segment, guest host Sandra Smith interviewed Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) to downplay climate’s role in the fires and instead promote “sound scientific management” of forests and his Trillion Trees Act, which climate scientists say is absolutely not a way of solving climate change, as the best solutions to worsening wildfires.

Poor forest management has played a role in California wildfires along with climate change and the expansion of people moving into the wildlife-urban interface, which “has increased the likelihood that wildfires will threaten structures and people.” But from watching coverage of the fires in numerous Fox segments, one would probably come away with the idea that it’s been only California’s forest management policies driving the worsening fires.

The jump by Fox to assign blame to the state for poor forest management as a tactic to downplay climate change goes back to at least 2018, when Trump first blamed California’s forestry policies while touring the aftermath of the deadly Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. At the time, Trump’s response was parroted by Fox News host Sean Hannity, who stated that he was “right” to blame California wildfires on poor forest management, and Fox’s Laura Ingraham, who on her radio show cherry-picked a BBC article to claim that “Trump was right” about wildfires and forest management.

Neither of these segments mentioned climate change. Even worse, Ingraham glossed over the major mentions of climate in the BBC article, which specifically stated that “many experts point out that climate change has made things worse” in relation to those fires.

This framing of the fires by zeroing-in entirely on forest management doesn’t hold up to what climate science is saying -- especially this year. Fire scientists have said that “climate change, not forest management, is a driving factor behind the state’s fires becoming worse and more deadly.” Wildfire expert Stefan Doerr has also stated, “The bottom line remains that the extreme meteorological conditions are the main drivers for these extreme fires,” and he specifically noted hotter, drier, and windier conditions with climate change “has now created a tinderbox of vegetation.” Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe also pointed out on Twitter that it’s a myth to suggest that “the only reason wildfires are burning more area is because of poor forest management.”

Fox’s attempts to cast blame solely on the state’s leadership for poor forest management also fall flat when you consider that the federal government owns the majority of land out west -- in California, 57% is owned by the federal government, while the state government only owns 3%.

The network’s discussion of forest management hit a high point during midday of September 14, when Trump visited California and once again blamed forest management for the wildfires, ignoring climate change. In one example on the September 14 edition of Outnumbered Overtime, Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz called Trump “absolutely right” and blamed the wildfires primarily on a lack of clearing brush, saying “Democrats have been the biggest impediment to doing so.” Later on The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld stated that forest management is “the problem in California. It's not climate change. It’s forest management.”

Other examples abound. On two separate occasions in the past week, Fox Business’ Varney & Co. hosted conservative talk radio host Larry Elder to talk up poor forest management. On the September 8 edition, he agreed with Trump’s comments and said, “You can’t do a whole lot about the weather but you can do something about the fuel that these fires feed upon that makes these fires so intense and so serious.” Again on the September 14 edition, he repeated that forest management is the biggest issue in fighting the fires and said that “Donald Trump does not believe in climate change alarmism.”

On Fox News, Environmental Progress president and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on the September 10 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk up the role of poor forest management at the expense of climate change, claiming that the media’s climate coverage of the fires “has been really irresponsible.” He largely dismissed climate change again on the September 14 edition of Fox News @ Night, when he falsely stated that saturated wood fuel “is driving the intensity of these fires. It's not climate change.”

Later that night on Hannity, host Sean Hannity again made forest management the focal point of blame for the fires, calling it “an important piece of the puzzle.”

Advancing the dangerous arson conspiracy theory

While the conspiracy theory that arson is behind the wildfires has not yet been as pervasive on Fox News as it was in January, when the network’s prime-time hosts pushed the debunked idea that arson was driving the Australian wildfires, it has already been pushed by at least two of Fox News’ shows covering the West Coast fires.

As Media Matters reported on September 14:

During the month of September, record wildfires made worse by climate change have raged across California, Oregon, and Washington. As the fires have spread and officials have tried to contain them, a conspiracy theory claiming that “antifa” has been behind the wildfires has spread across major social media platforms. In reality, as NBC News noted, incidents like “lightning, faulty or knocked-down power lines and accidents” have been reported as the cause of many of the fires. Authorities, including the FBI, have been forced to rebut the false “antifa“ claim as people have refused to evacuate and militia groups are getting active.

The use of focus on arson as a counter-narrative to climate change follows the exact same playbook used during Australia's deadly wildfires from late 2019 into early 2020, when Murdoch-owned media and other right wing outlets peddled false claims that arsonists were to blame for the historic blazes, and not climate change. However, this talking point was debunked; as one study found, only a handful of blazes out of 11,000 were deliberately set. Notably, the arson conspiracy theory now not only distracts from the climate crisis, but is also an attempt to vilify activists protesting police brutality. For right-wing media, this false narrative is the proverbial killing of two birds with one stone.

On the September 13 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Jedediah Bila briefly discussed a story accusing a supposed left-wing activist of deliberately setting fires:

JEDEDIAH BILA (CO-HOST): Another man is accused of setting a fire near a Washington highway. A report says he is a regular attendee of defund police rallies in Seattle. That last detail unfolding [is] pretty amazing. It is really incredible to see.

…

WILL CAIN (CO-HOST): These arsonists, as of yet we do not know exactly their ties to any extremist organizations or what their motivations might be, but I think one thing is clear: We now know many of these fires in the West were set intentionally. What does that reveal, Pete? What it reveals is the brazen political monopolization of a tragedy by people like Gov. Gavin Newsom who quickly jumped out and blamed these fires on climate change. There’s no tragedy, there’s no moment too soon to jump and advance your political agenda and pin awful events on your political opponents.

While discussing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s recent climate speech on the September 14 edition of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham brought up arson unprompted, asking, “Did Biden anywhere in that speech lay out his solution to prevent any wildfires in the future or the people who are actually intentionally setting them in California, including antifa?”

Her guest, Victor David Hanson, glossed over this comment and directed his ire at Biden for even considering to blame climate change for the fires.

The mentions by Fox hosts are particularly irresponsible and egregious given that several days earlier both The Intercept and The New York Times reported that these claims were unfounded and that local law enforcement were “pleading with the public to stop calling 911 to pass on unfounded rumors that antifascist political activists have intentionally set the blazes.” On social media, the arson rumors have been pushed by a number of far-right accounts and groups including QAnon, which the FBI identifies as a domestic terrorism threat. It is alarming that Fox is undermining law enforcement and continuing to align itself with dangerous factions in spreading such conspiracy theories.

Fox has, and continues to be, the main purveyor of climate denial in the United States. It’s no surprise that their minimization of climate change’s role in this year’s western wildfires is lazy, cheap, and similar to Murdoch-owned Australian media’s role in downplaying climate change from earlier this year; we can expect to see more of it in the future.

ref

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/03/20/hosting-climate-change-denier-tucker-carlson-complains-about-relentless-propaganda-about-climate/223199 [vid]

CARLSON (HOST): Is it surprising to you that after 25 years of really relentless propaganda beginning in children's cartoons going all the way up, probably, [un]til the moment of death that Americans rate climate change at 2 percent concern -- 2 percent are most concerned about climate change. Are you shocked?

JOE BASTARDI (GUEST): Well, not really that shocked because I think my experience is, is a much greater percentage of people in their 20s that believe what's going on. I think it's because they don't look at everything. I have said hundreds of times that if all I looked at and all that I was told was the global warming issue, I'd say "Well, I believe it too. CO2 is causing this." But when you start looking at the entire picture, the totality of the picture and you put some perspective into it, that the last forty years are the equivalent of six seconds out of an eighty-year-old man's life, you realize that there is a very, very different story here. It is like, it is like one scene in a movie for five seconds determining the whole movie. That's not the case here at all. The foundation you stand on today was built yesterday to reach for tomorrow. It's the same thing with weather and climate, folks. What happens is you have to go back and look at the big picture. In our business, and what I do at weather bell is, we need to supply accurate forecasts for energy companies -- that includes wind and solar, retail companies -- and knowing what happened yesterday, and putting in perspective and say, "guys, this can happen again," is something that we do.

CARLSON: So I just want to be clear. I'm not denying -- and I'm not a meteorologist, unlike you, or a climate expert -- that climate changes. It does change of course and ... has from the beginning,since the planet cooled.Can I ask a question?

BASTARDI: Absolutely.

CARLSON: Why, since more people were killed last year in the United States by illegal aliens than were killed by climate change -- why do you think they are so focused on scaring us,and telling us that we are all going to die? Why did they need to tell us that, when they don't know that?

BASTARDI: Well, I think H. L. Mencken -- and I quoted this in my book, said it best, that practical politics always tries to whip up this kind of thing. Most of them are imaginary, and the urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.

Now, that is a Democrat that said that, he passed away, 1956, but since I come from that kind of background, from an old Democrat background, I knew who H. L. Mencken was. So, I think that's what's involved here. I wrote that book because the purity of what I've loved since I was three -- my dad is a meteorologist, right? This is all I ever wanted to do. I can't believe that this is what it's come to.

CARLSON: That's right.

BASTARDI:It's turned into this political football or whatever. It's really bad.

CARLSON: It is, and it's clearly political, not science speaking.

=

The ocean is warming and expanding. This effect alone will displace millions of people. The effects on agriculture, water supplies, and weather patterns will create a great many problems for a great many of us. By my reckoning, our delay and the reluctance of conservative presidential candidates to embrace the problem and discuss it is a result of the diligent effort of a handful of climate change deniers. They have been especially successful at introducing the idea that routine predictive uncertainty, e.g. plus or minus two percent, is somehow the same as plus or minus one hundred percent. It isn’t, and the deniers are wrong.

Since the presentation of the facts and science concerning global warming and climate change have been heretofore insufficient to motivate enough of us voters, I am now challenging the deniers directly. By showing enough people the techniques and ignorance of the deniers, I believe we can make warming and climate change a campaign issue, which will swing the upcoming U.S. presidential election in favor of a candidate who is not out of touch with our worldwide climate situation.

Both Marc Morano and Joe Bastardi are well-known climate change deniers (Mr. Morano said once that he prefers the term “extreme doubter”). In an opinion piece in the unusual Patriot Post online publication, Mr. Bastardi insisted that there is nothing unusual going on in our Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. In time for Earth Day, I issued a video challenge that was published on The Huffington Post. I offered and still offer to bet Mr. Bastardi $10,000 that this year 2016 will be among the top 10 warmest years on record. I offer him another $10,000 that the decade 2010-2020 will prove to be the warmest on record. Mr. Bastardi wrote a second piece in which he re-stated his belief that carbon dioxide has little effect on global temperatures. Incidentally, despite publishing a “midday digest” every day, no one at the Patriot Post has responded to my enquiries...

Carbon dioxide has an enormous effect on planetary temperatures. Climate change was discovered in recent times by comparing the Earth to the planet Venus. When Mr. Bastardi and I appeared on the Bill O’Reilly show six years ago, Mr. Bastardi said, “[He doesn’t] believe we have the proper measurements of Venus from over 10 billion years ago. So [he] can’t tell the relationship with Earth.” In planetary science we can tell several important things. Venus is extremely hot because of the greenhouse effect (and it’s far less than 10 billion years old). The Earth is warm enough to have liquid water, because of the same greenhouse effect. I remind you that Mr. Bastardi’s apparent belief that carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the Earth’s global temperatures is absolutely wrong.

Incidentally neither Mr. Bastardi Mr. Morano would take either wager I offered. They both admit the world is getting warmer fast. Mr. Morano just said no, he would not take the bets. In complementary fashion, Mr. Bastardi did not address my offers. Instead, he proposed a new wager based on changes that may or may not occur over a single year. You may have seen his article from November 2015 in which he includes two graphs of the world’s temperature over time. I believe anyone able to think critically can see that the graphs and data Mr. Bastardi’s cited in this previous article are irrelevant. In his first graph, the four and half billion-year time scale is too long to reckon temperature changes over the last two and half centuries. In his second graph, the timescale is too short to accurately depict the overall rate of global temperature change. He has hidden or masked the phenomenon of global warming and climate change from the readers, or perhaps even from himself.

Mr. Bastardi suggested that I’ve been brainwashed and that I am irrational. While such claims may or may not be true, rather than address my proposed wager he changed the subject several times. Among the adjacent subjects he included were: nuclear energy, Middle East oil, creationist Roy Spencer’s satellite measurements, veterans’ health benefits, money used to study whether the Earth is flat or round, professors improving fusion [reactor] output, no use of fossil fuels for a year and television commercials for satellite dish service....

==

nye twitter attack

http://twitchy.com/2015/05/27/well-give-you-one-guess-what-bill-nye-not-the-climate-scientist-guy-thinks-caused-the-flooding-in-houston/

==

tag: http://mediamatters.org/tags/joe-bastardi

Background

Joe Bastardi is a weather forecaster and climate change skeptic. He worked for AccuWeatherfrom 1978 until 2011 when he joined WeatherBELL Analytics LLC where he now works withJoseph D'Aleo, the climate change skeptic who founded Icecap.us.

WeatherBELL offers an industry specific package (PDF) for "energy companies, hedge funds, or related businesses," which includes "daily videos produced by" Bastardi, a "daily interpretation" from Bastardi of NOAA's report, forecasts, and a weekly web conference call with Bastardi.

AccuWeatherpreviouslyworked withthe Global Climate Coalition(GCC), a group that strongly opposed greenhouse gas reduction policies when it was active. GCC disbanded in 2002.

Bastardi is also a Senior Advisor at the American Tradition Institute (ATI), a group denounced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributing to an "environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas." [2], [3]

Stance on Climate Change

"We will get our answer in the next 20 to 30 years. And we don't have to panic. We don't have to rush around because if I'm right, the earth's temperature is going to cool a degree to a degree and a half Fahrenheit the next 20 to 30 years. And if it does, then that's a game, set, match. You know [CO2] is not the driver that people say." [4]

Key Quotes

"How do these people have any credibility? How do they get away with this?  It's mind boggling that its gotten to a point where the EPA is dictating policy based on what is an obvious fraud, or if you want to be gentle about it, creates enough doubt to back off." [5]

"Common sense dictates that a trace gas needed for life on the planet would not be the cause for destroying life on the planet. Common sense dictates that what has happened before without man can happen again with man. Common sense would dictate that you not believe me, or any one else, but go look for YOURSELF." [6]

"CO2 cannot cause global warming. I'll tell you why. It doesn't mix well with the atmosphere, for one.For two, its specific gravity is 1 1/2 times that of the rest of the atmosphere. It heats and cools much quicker. Its radiative processes are much different. So it cannot -- it literally cannot cause global warming." [11]

According to Bastardi,  human-induced climate change "contradicts what we call the 1st law of thermodynamics. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. So to look for input of energy into the atmosphere, you have to come from a foreign source."[12]

"The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and '80s." [14]

Key Deeds

Ongoing

Joe Bastardi has repeatedly appeared onFox News and other news networks to discuss his views on climate change.

Media Transparency reported on how Bastardi has "who is a weather forecaster, not a climate researcher, has made inaccurate claims about climate science on multiple occasions. . ." [7]

A sample of his appearances on Fox:

ThinkProgress offers a debunking of some of Bastardi's clips as a climate change "expert" in an article titled"Joe Bastardi is 'Completely Wrong' and ‘Does Not Understand the Very Basics of the Science', Climatologists Explain."

According to Media Matters, Bastardi has repeatedly misinformed the Fox News audience. Bastardi has gone as far as stating that global warming "Contradicts" The 1st Law Of Thermodynamics. [8]

Kerry Emanual, an atmospheric scientist at MIT, spoke with Media Matters via e-mail:

"I might point out that Bastardi's background is in weather forecasting, not climate science. Asking him to comment on the science of climate change is rather like asking a country doctor to comment on the latest developments in biomedical research. The media really ought to know better."

Discussing statements made by Bastardi from multiple Fox appearances, Keith Seitter, the Executive Director of the American Meteorological Society stated, "I have not seen Mr. Bastardi on these programs, but several components of the quotes you provide are scientifically incorrect."

NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt added: "Bastardi is attempting to throw out 150 years of physics." Physicist Richard Muller added, "He seems very confused."[13]

May 21 - 23, 2012

Joe Bastardi was aspeakerat the Heartland Institute's Seventh International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC7).

DeSmogBlogresearched the co-sponsors behind Heartland's :{ICCC7:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and found that they had collectively received over $67 million from ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothersand the conservative Scaife family foundations.

At the end of the conference Joseph Bast revealed that the Heartland Institute has no plans for future ICCCs.

November 29, 2010

Bastardi posted a video on AccuWeather with the potentially libelous caption, "Is the US NSIDC cooking the ice books? Sure looks that way if one is looking at all sites."

AccuWeather took the video down on December 5. Joe Romm of ClimateProgress had posted on the topic the same day, and had asked the NSIDC to respond. NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve had this to say to Romm:

"One problem with Joe Bastardi’s comparison is that with the JAXA data  set he’s comparing to the 2006 line, not 2007.  In JAXA, this year is a bit below 2007 right now (though there’s some missing data).

"It's important to remember that different sites use different algorithms (methods to derive sea ice from the raw data), different cutoffs of concentration (15% vs 30%), and sometimes different sensors (SSM/I vs AMSR-E). Studies that compare different algorithms have repeatedly found that differences between algorithms can be large.  Generally, the largest differences are found in summer, with differences of more than ± 20 %. In winter, differences between the different algorithms are usually less than ± 10 %. No single algorithm has been found to be clearly superior under all conditions. The differences between satellite-derived estimates of sea-ice extent and so-called ground-truth observations are of similar magnitude. Nevertheless, while the absolute differences between algorithms and between with non-passive-microwave data sets are relatively large, they are generally constant over time.

"Hence, trends in sea-ice extent that are estimated from different algorithms agree much more closely than do the absolute values of extent. Hence, trend estimates  provide a rather high level of confidence in estimates of sea ice change and variability. In terms of absolute values, estimates of total sea-ice extent are more reliable than estimates of sea-ice area. For the former, a certain concentration threshold (often 15% ice cover) is defined, and the size of any grid cell covered by more ice than this threshold contributes fully to total sea-ice extent. For ice area, however, only the truly ice-covered fraction of each grid cell contributes, giving rise to higher uncertainty.

"Finally, it seems Joe Bastardi is unclear as to how standardized anomalies are derived. Standardized anomalies are not the same thing as anomalies, which is defined by the actual deviation from the mean (climatology for that day or month). A standardized anomaly is further divided by the climatological standard deviation for that day/month. When seasonal variations are present within a set of data, it is often helpful to express the data in terms of standardized anomalies. They generally provide more information about the magnitude of the anomalies because influences of dispersion have been removed." [16]

September 20, 2010

Bastardi predicted that Arctic Sea Ice extent would return to 2005 levels, claiming at the time, "We are going to recover dramatically here with a cold that is coming over the next 9 to 12 months!" [15]

This forcecast, like many of his other assertions, proved false.

Affiliations

Publications

According to a search of Google Scholar, Joe Bastardi has not published any articles or research in peer-reviewed journals on any subject.

Resources

  1. Joe Bastardi's profile at AccuWeather, archived April 28, 2011.
  2. Joe Romm. "Stunner: Joe Bastardi Joins the Extreme Anti-Scientist Crowd," ThinkProgress, July 7, 2011.
  3. Joe Romm. "American Association for Advancement of Science Slams Harassment and Attacks Aimed at Climate Scientists," ThinkProgress, June 29, 2011.
  4. "Hannity, Bastardi: winter snowstorms prove global warming hoax," Media Matters, December 17, 2009. Original from December 17 edition of The Sean Hannity Show.
  5. P Gosselin. "Joe Bastardi Calls Manmade CO2 Global Warming 'An Obvious Fraud',"NoTricksZone, August 8, 2011.
  6. Tony Hake. "AccuWeather's Joe Bastardi presses case against global warming theory,"Examiner.com, September 11, 2009.
  7. "Why Is Fox Going To Joe Bastardi For Climate Change Analysis?", Media Matters, August 17, 2011.
  8. "Fox's Huddy Falsely Claims Skeptic's Questionable Study 'Seems To Debunk' That Global Warming Is 'Man-Made'," Media Transparency, August 6, 2011.
  9. Jason Samenow. "Joe Bastardi hired by start-up firm WeatherBell,"The Washington Post, March 11, 2011. Archived with WebCite, May 3, 2012.
  10. "Fellows & Advisors," American Tradition Institute. Accessed May, 2012.
  11. "Fox News Science, Again," Media Matters, March 9, 2012.
  12. "A Fox News Science Lesson," Media Matters, August 9, 2011.
  13. "WeatherBELL Chief Forecaster Joe Bastardi Denies Basic Physics: 'CO2 Cannot Cause Global Warming'," ThinkProgress, March 11, 2012.
  14. Joe Romm. "Joe Bastardi, worst long-range forecaster on Earth, asserts 'The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s',"ThinkProgress, July 6, 2010.
  15. Joe Romm. "Is Joe Bastardi the Worst Long-Range Forecaster Ever?", ThinkProgress, September 25, 2011.
  16. Joe Romm. "Long wrong Joe Bastardi cooks the books to smear NSIDC. Time for Accuweather to fire him," ThinkProgress, December 5, 2010.
  17. "Joe Bastardi," Wikipedia.

Tags:

global warming

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global warming blog

denial industry

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Joe Bastardi

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WeatherBell Analytics LLC

==

ati bs

Joe Bastardi, formerly chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, frequently appears on cable news channels, such as CNN and Fox News during storms. He has been a fixture in the private weather industry for over 35 years, starting with his degree in Meteorology at Penn State. He is the only meteorologist to have ever lettered Division 1 in NCAA in wrestling.

Currently, Bastardi is a key player in launching a new cutting edge weather forecasting company, WeatherBELL Analytics. The company plans to build from the ground up, the nation’s go-to private long range and extreme weather forecasting service. His forecast methodology mimics his beliefs, that the foundation of the past must be used to forge the future.

:{Bastardi emphasizes that while the tools we have today are better than many years ago, there is no getting away from the basics. The use of those tools are established in our constitution to help all men have a chance to better their lives. Bastardi is also an avid bodybuilder, winning his height class in a recent “Over 50 Mr. America”. He is also a volunteer strength and nutrition advisor for the Nittany Lion Wrestling Clubs wrestlers, whose members will compete in June for a spot on the USA’ s world team.

}:

- See more at: http://www.atinstitute.org/about/fellows-and-advisors/#sthash.Rr4xk8Kt.dpuf

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An ALEC Version of the Earth Is Flat: It's Global Cooling and That's Cool

Joe Bastardi and Climate ChangeAt this week's ALEC meeting, ALEC lawmakers will be hearing from the fast-talking Joe Bastardi, who describes himself as a long-range weather forecaster and who will be welcomed to the ballroom stage by Heartland's Joe Bast.

Bastardi, a Penn State grad, used to get a lot of mileage in the climate denial world out of being a meterologist for the widely known Accuweather, which was created at Penn State nearly 50 years ago. He's a former college wrestler and a body builder who has made a name for himself as a pugnacious talking head about climate on Fox and other shows. Bill O'Reilly loves him. Bastardi left Accuweather to join WeatherBELL Analytics, a subscription service, in 2011.

According to a Vanity Fair [14] interview that year, "his bread and butter, he says, are his corporate clients, the names of which he won't divulge, saying only that he's 'heavily involved in energy.'"

Bastardi is much more than a global warming denier.

His notorious claim is that the earth is not going to get warmer in coming decades: it is going "to get colder over the next 20 to 30 years." He usually adds something to his spiel about "solar cycles" being partly to blame or volcanoes, not the massive increase in carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuels in the past century.

So, basically the message of the morning is don't worry your pretty little heads ALEC legislators, Joe says it's getting colder, not warmer.

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Another Misleading Fox News Graphic: Temperature Edition

Blog››› March 25, 2013 5:33 PM EDT ››› JILL FITZSIMMONS

Fox News is suggesting that scientists were "wrong" about global warming by using misleading graphics to obscure the long-term global temperature rise.

On his Fox News show, Neil Cavuto suggested that the recent cold weather invalidates concerns about global warming, asking weather forecaster and climate misinformer Joe Bastardi, "How did we get this so wrong?" Cavuto aired a graphic which at first glance appears to show that temperatures are dramatically cooler now than they were last March. But the graphic compares apples to oranges: the map on the left shows whether temperatures were above or below average for the month of March, while the map on the right shows absolute minimum temperatures for last Wednesday, March 20.

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Joe Bastardi

Joe Bastardi is a meteorologist for WeatherBell Analytics, where he provides weather forecasts for energy companies and other corporate clients. He also serves as an advisor to the American Tradition Institute and a Fox News contributor. Although he has no climate expertise, Fox regularly turns to him to analyze climate research. Bastardi, who has called manmade global warming "an obvious fraud," has often been criticized by scientists for his "utter nonsense" on climate change.

Bastardi is not the only dubious source of climate misinformation on Fox News. Fox anchors and contributors regularly mock the threat of climate change and suggest that winter weather invalidates global temperature records. Rather than talking to actual climate scientists, the network turns to industry-funded climate denialists -- including CEI's Chris Horner, the Manhattan Institute's Robert Bryce, Climate Depot's Marc Morano and JunkScience.com's Steve Milloy -- to mislead its viewers on climate science. Fox Nation, a branch of FoxNews.com, regularly cites the British tabloid The Daily Mail and distorts climate research to declare that global warming isn't happening.

vanity fair

Photograph courtesy of Joe Bastardi.

Before Joe Bastardi would agree to speak with me, he wanted to make one thing perfectly clear. “I am IN NO WAY A TV WEATHER ANCHOR!” he wrote in an e-mail, and you could almost hear the carotid artery throbbing on his neck as he typed. If you’re over the age of 18 and writing in ALL CAPS, it’s obviously something you feel quite strongly about. And if there’s one thing Joe Bastardi feels strongly about, it’s that he doesn’t belong in the company of Al Roker. He is, he reminded me in a subsequent e-mail, a “METEOROLOGIST FIRST AND FOREMOST AND ONE TRYING TO BUILD THE GREATEST LONG RANGE FORECASTING CENTER ON EARTH!”

Which isn’t to say he avoids TV entirely. Bastardi frequently appears on CNN and Fox News, arguing against anthropogenic global warming and looking as though he’s about to burst out of his shirt like Bruce Banner. He’s debatedBill Nye the Science Guy on The O’Reilly Factorand gotten into a “Science Catfight ” with Brenda Ekwurzel, a climatologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, on The Colbert Report.Until earlier this week, he was the “Chief Long Range Forecaster” for AccuWeather, a weather-forecasting service based in State College, Pennsylvania. But his bread and butter, he says, are his corporate clients, the names of which he won’t divulge, saying only that he’s “heavily involved in energy. Some of the companies that I work for were very happy that it snowed as much as it did this winter.”

Why should you care about Joe Bastardi? According to a poll conducted last summer by Yale and George Mason University, 56 percent of Americans trust TV weather reporters to tell them the truth about global warming. An impressive statistic, until you remember that 44 percent of Americans also believe that Jesus will return in their lifetimes. Americans watch a lot of TV, and Joe Bastardi (despite what he says about NOT BEING A TV WEATHER ANCHOR) is on TV a lot. While he may not be the only voice in the climate-change debate, he’s definitely the loudest. Why should you care what Joe Bastardi has to say? Because the guy across the street with the Michele Bachmann bumper sticker on his S.U.V. probably does.

I called Bastardi to talk about the historic winter that may or may not be behind us, depending on which groundhog you believe.

Eric Spitznagel: Last year on The Colbert Report, you claimed that you could bench 400 pounds. Is that still accurate?

Joe Bastardi: I can’t bench that kinda weight anymore because I blew my shoulder out. But yeah, for awhile my best bench press was 400 pounds, and I could squat 600. But you know, a bench press is a poor indicator of overall strength. I’ve been obsessed these days with pull-ups. The best way to make your chest big is to get your back big too. Because when you measure your chest, you have to put the tape around your back too. Your lats can be a powerful muscle.

When you’re doing an appearance on Fox News, have you ever been tempted to just rip off your shirt in the middle of a forecast?

Not at all. I can still remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger was on the Johnny Carson show, and Carson said, “O.K., Arnold, take off your shirt,” and Arnold was like [in a thick Austrian accent], “Johnny, I’m an actor now, I’m not a bodybuilder anymore.” I understand where he’s coming from. But I will tell people, “I don’t think you’ll find another 55-year-old man with calluses on his hands because he’s pounding weights so hard.” I think that says something about my ability to push myself very, very hard.

I will pay you $200 if the next time you’re on Bill O'Reilly, you tear off your shirt and stare straight at the camera and say, “Hulk mad!”

No, no. I used to do this thing just to goof around with people. I’d do like an impression of Randy “Macho Man” Savage. “What are you going to do when the biggest arms in weather run wiiiiiiiild over you?!” It’s kind of funny—I’m a volunteer strength coach for the Nittany Lion wrestling club, and some of the guys joke with me, “Damn Joe, why don’t you walk around with a real tight shirt all the time?” But that’s their generation. I don’t do things like that. I’ll only take my shirt off when I’m getting ready to compete.

The way you talk about the weather sometimes, it certainly seems like you’re competing.

That’s true, yeah. My wife is always telling me that whenever I’m on TV, I hunch forward. Look at The Colbert Report I did, and you’ll see that I’m hunching forward in the chair. It’s an attack position, or what we call in wrestling a crouch position. That’s just how I am. If I try to change who I am, I’m going to lose.

Among your weather-forecasting peers, who’s the biggest physical threat? Obviously Al Roker would go down like a sack of flour. But what about Sam Champion? He’s got some guns, right?

Yeah, I see where you’re going with this. A lot of people mistake me for Jim Cantore on the Weather Channel. I like him, he’s a nice guy, but he’s a small guy.

Oh, snap! Are you officially challenging him to a meteorology cage match? Bastardi vs. Cantore, mono y mono?

[Laughs.] No, I like the guy. He lifts a lot of weights. He’s a soccer player. It’s just that, you know, TV of course makes you look bigger. Most meteorologists never wrestle. I’m the only degreed meteorologist in the country to letter Division One N.C.A.A. in wrestling in the history of the sport. The sport is so demanding, and it makes you a little bit mentally tougher, I think.

Why didn’t you just stick with wrestling? Why go into meteorology at all?

Well for one thing, I was a terrible wrestler. At Penn State, I had a one-and-four record; one win and four losses. But the wrestling feeds into the weather. You’re using the same muscle. Weather can be a relentless opponent, and if you don’t compete as hard as you can, it will tear you apart. I’m obsessed with the idea of forecasting the weather, of just nailing the forecast. And wrestling at Penn State, we were taught that you have to prepare, prepare, prepare. If you want to win, you have to prepare.

You’re scaring me a little bit, Joe.

I’ve been obsessed with weather since I was a kid. They had to keep an eye on me ’cause I’d lie out the backyard and stare at the sun all afternoon. You can burn your retinas out that way. I was born on July 18, 1955, and I figured something out. My mom and dad were honeymooning in Atlantic City when Hurricane Hazel hit, in mid-October 1954. You do the math. I was conceived during Hurricane Hazel. The weather’s just in my blood. My father was a meteorologist; my son wants to be a meteorologist. My dad’s great-grandfather in Sicily, during the 1800s, he was the town weatherman.

Let’s talk about global warming. You don’t believe in it. How does climate change compare with professional wrestling?

Meaning what?

What seems more fake to you, the argument that carbon emissions are melting the glaciers, or when the Iron Sheik surprises Hulk Hogan with a camel clutch?

I couldn’t tell you, I’m not into professional wrestling. I watch it every once in a while. I’m more about collegiate wrestling and mixed martial arts and ultimate fighting. That’s as real as it gets. As far as the global warming goes, to me that’s just a big forecast. Who’s going to be right? There are guys saying C02 is driving the whole thing and making the world warmer. Well, for the last 30 years, since we started the satellite era, the globe has been stacked for warmth. Now it’s changing around, so if the global temperature falls over the next 20, 30 years, we’ll know it’s not C02.

My problem with the debate is, it always seems like the people saying climate change is a myth are the same ones who own Hummers.

O.K., hold on. Those kinds of generalizations drive me crazy. You know what kind of car I drive? A Prius. I always have an economical car. Why? Forty miles per gallon sounds good to me. I also have an S.U.V., but that’s because I have kids. Somebody hits the darn thing from the side, with an S.U.V. you have a better chance of living. But it’s not about common sense, it’s about demonizing the other side. Suppose I drove a daisy-mobile, that was fueled entirely on daisies. Somebody would yell at me, “You’re killing all the daisies!”

Not me. I would totally buy your daisy-mobile.

I will tell you this. If I’m wrong about climate change, I will be the biggest cheerleader for the other side. What I resent is the demonization and the shutting down of the debate. When did we get to the point where one side of the debate is shut down completely? When did this happen? I don’t understand it. It’s why I didn’t read any of the Climategate e-mails. You know why? Because it would bias me against these guys. Everybody’s up in arms about the darn e-mails. All I’m concerned about is their work, and whether their work is right or wrong. All of that other stuff gets in the way of the issue, which is a very simple issue.

Let’s make it a little simpler. Are you familiar with theHeat Miser and Cold Miser?

Yeah, yeah. From that Christmas claymation thing? [Sings.] “I’m Mr. Heat Miser, I’m Mr. 101.” What about it?

Explain your theory about climate change in that context. The weather is a competition between the Heat Miser and the Cold Miser. Which brother is winning?

Well, since the early 1800s, Mr. Heat Miser has been doing a pretty good job. Part of it is because of the sun spot cycle. Part of it is because the Earth was abnormally cold in the 1700s and early 1800s, so there was a reaction the other way.

And part of it’s because he just hates Santa Claus so very, very much.

Mr. Cold Miser, he was winning for a time in the 60s and 70s, when the Pacific turned cool. But here’s the thing. Before the 70s, we didn’t have the right referee.

You’re talking about Mrs. Claus?

We didn’t have the satellites! Now we have the right referee. Mr. Heat Miser might be getting more credit than Mr. Cold Miser—we’re going to find out over the next 30 years. I think the cold side of the equation, Mr. Cold Miser, is going to win over the next 20 to 30 years. The Pacific is already getting colder, and the Atlantic will be turning colder in 10 years, like it always does. You’ve got solar cycles getting involved. Some of my colleagues think that not only is Mr. Snow Miser going to win, he’s going to put Mr. Heat Miser out of business.

That’s just elf lies!

There are a lot of reputable people who think another ice age is coming. I go to conferences where there’ll be a thousand PhDs who don’t believe any of this stuff.

They don’t believe in the Heat Miser?

They think it’s all about the Cold Miser. Generally, I find the more in love with weather you’ve been since you were small, the less likely you are to believe in global warming. Because you’ve seen the power of the weather. Look at what happened in California this year. All that crazy stuff went on in December, and since then, nothing. What happened?

Al Gore seems like a big Heat Miser guy. He got a Nobel Peace Prize for being all, “Look out for Mr. Heat Miser!”

I believe Mr. Gore has the best intentions. But come on, how many weather forecasts has he made where he actually gets paid for them?

You’re saying he isn’t trustworthy because he doesn’t make Al Roker’s salary?

Listen, I don’t get paid for research. I get paid for the correct result of my research. You understand that? Nobody’s saying, “O.K., here’s a million-dollar grant to study this.” That’s not what I do for 8 to 10 hours a day. You get paid because of the result of your work, not because of your work. I do not believe that the means justify the ends; I believe that the ends are because of the correct means. I didn’t come to save the planet; I came to forecast the weather. I guess that’s the difference between Gore and me. I don’t have that burden of worrying about whether I’ve saved humanity. That’s a lot less pressure on me, even though being a weatherman is a high-pressure job. [Long pause.] That’s a joke there, get it?

I get it. But I’m trying to understand what you’re telling me about Gore. You think he’s a jerk because he believes he’s saving the planet?

No, not a jerk. I personally believe that Gore, after the disappointment of the election, he thought to himself, O.K., I can’t be president of the United States. How can I help out more? And he latched onto this issue. He really rattled me a few weeks ago, when he tried to blame snowfall on warmer weather.

You mean the Heat Miser?

Yeah, yeah, the Heat Miser. He said it was another one of the Heat Miser’s tricks. But that’s not right, and I’ll tell you why. We’ve had the third snowiest weather in Northern Hemisphere history, but moisture in the snow pack is below normal. Which means it’s not because there’s more moisture but because it’s been colder. He’s just not looking at the facts. With the global temperature collapsing, you can’t be saying, “Well, it’s getting colder because it’s getting warmer.” That’s the opposite argument they were using when the temperature was going up.

Forget about Al Gore. What about groundhogs? Can we trust them as weather forecasters?

Sure we can trust them.

The groundhog consensus is that we’ll have an early spring. Do you agree?

I absolutely agree. I was saying that long before the groundhogs. I predicted that back in mid-January. I said that for most of the country, south of the Mason-Dixon line, south of the Ohio River, winter is over.

Did your prediction have anything to do with seeing or not seeing your shadow?

Not at all! And I can give you more details than the groundhogs. I can tell you that the winter’s going to stubbornly hang on in the Great Lakes and New England, exactly the opposite of last year. In the South there are going to be a whole lot more tornados than there were last year. In the West, you’re going to have a hard time pulling out, but when you do it’s going to be a hot summer. It’ll be a very hot summer with a drought in Texas. But a cooler summer in the Great Lakes.

Why do we put so much faith in groundhogs like Punxsutawney Phil when clearly you provide a much better forecast?

Well first of all, I love Phil. I’ve spoken twice in Punxsutawney, so I don’t want to insult their guy. But let me say this. We have groundhogs in my backyard, and I saw one of them just the other day. He was lying on his back, not moving at all, just staring up at the sky.

Just like you as a kid.

Right, yeah. He might’ve been hit by a car, I don’t know. I do believe animals have an instinctive way of figuring out what’s going on. The groundhog has its value. Who am I to challenge such a fur-bearing competitor? We actually have a lot in common besides accurate weather forecasts. As an Italian, I’ve got hair all over my body. In the right light, I kinda look like Punxsutawney Phil. I probably have some genetic linkage to the groundhog.

Fringe weatherman advised Abbott before deadly Texas storm ...

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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.

It was a big deal for Bastardi, who had never counseled a governor ahead of a storm. But he came highly recommended. Both Hannity and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested that Abbott talk to Bastardi, a veteran meteorologist and climate science critic who has appeared several times on Hannity’s show.

"I reached out to Gov. Abbott and said, ‘Listen, this guy knows his stuff, and you ought to talk to him,’" Cruz told Hannity during a recent visit to Hannity’s nightly Fox News program.

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.

But the move has raised questions among some scientists as to why Abbott consulted with an outside meteorologist — particularly one with inaccurate climate views — when Abbott had the option of touching base with weather experts in the government.

"That just confuses the information environment," said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientistsand a former senior NOAA official.

Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

How Bastardi put himself in such a position says a lot about the polarization of U.S. science and politics.

Bastardi is the author of "The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War."(Hannity wrote the book’s foreword.) He frequently appears on Fox News to mock Democratic climate policy, and he likes to publicly spar over global warming with television personality Bill Nye.

He has claimed that the Earth will be in a cooling pattern by 2030 despite a library’s worth of science asserting the opposite is true. One time, Bastardi, 65, won a National Amateur Body-Builders’ Association contest.

Notable, too, is that Bastardi works for the private weather forecasting company WeatherBell Analytics LLC, which has clientele including many energy companies. After talking to Abbott, Bastardi said he wants Texas to do more work with private weather forecasting companies such as his.

That’s in spite of evidence that Texas had plenty of official warning of this month’s crippling snowstorm, which knocked out power for millions and killed 80 people.

Days beforehand, state and national forecasters said a historic and potentially deadly storm was about to hit the state. The National Weather Service started sounding warnings about the cold temperatures 10 days before the storm, according to a forecast analysis by the Capital Weather Gang of The Washington Post.

And those warnings became increasingly dire leading up to the cold snap. The Texas Division of Emergency Management was holding statewide conference calls before the storm, and Texas’ weather service was hosting webinars.

The senior meteorologist of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the Texas grid, noted the historic nature of the storm.

"This period will go down in Texas weather history as one of the most extreme events to ever impact the state," ERCOT senior meteorologist Chris Coleman wrote in a blog post.

Though meteorologists are experts in short-term weather forecasts, whereas climate scientists study long-term weather patterns, Bastardi has a long history of claiming that humanity is not warming the planet at a dangerous pace through the burning of fossil fuels.

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.

Scientists at NOAA, NASA and the world’s top science agencies have said such claims are not true.

In the days after the storm, Bastardi — like Abbott and Cruz — has placed much of the blame for Texas’ power outages on renewable energy sources, even as the bulk of facilities knocked offline were fueled by natural gas and coal.

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, which he compared to supplements he takes for competitive weightlifting.

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

In fact, Texas’ outages were largely the result of a lack of preparation of the electrical grid for winter weather, and the widespread failure of equipment not protected against low temperatures.

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 you believe you are smarter than to obey?" he wrote. "That is the same kind of despotic behavior we have seen out of the worst tyrants."

Rosenberg, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, took a much different view.

Bastardi is a font of misinformation about climate science, so there is a risk that politicians will further confuse the public by repeating his falsehoods, he said.

All of the early forecasting from the National Weather Service was accurate so there was no need for Abbott and Cruz to turn somewhere else for information, Rosenberg noted.

What’s more, he said, Cruz, Abbott and Bastardi have falsely put much of the blame for Texas’ outages on renewable energy sources. And they’ve ignored climate modeling that shows more frequent breakdowns in the polar vortex could lead to similar disasters in the future.

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

NO LNX

The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War ...

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" The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War is a surgical dissection of the reality, science, and foundations of climate change, our society, our country, and our freedoms. Joe Bastardi is a well-known national treasure in the field of meteorology, predictive modeling, and forecasting.

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The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War ...

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The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War - by Joe Bastardi The new book by one of the World's most experienced forecasters on climate & weather. Factual tour de force of Past Weather Revealing what is Being Covered up, and the reasons behind it! About The Book What if climate change is naturally occurring and cyclical?

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The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War - Ebook written by Joe Bastardi. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Download for offline reading,...

The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War ...

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In this book, Bastardi goes in-depth to document naturally occurring climate and weather events to question those whose agenda it is to weaponize each weather event for the pursuit of a political and social aim. Of course, the climate is changing, and with the many natural influencers constantly in play, it always will.

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" The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War is a surgical dissection of the reality, science, and foundations of climate change, our society, our country, and our freedoms. Joe Bastardi is a well-known national treasure in the field of meteorology, predictive modeling, and forecasting.

The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War ...

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The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War Quotes Showing 1-7 of 7 "The simple, undeniable fact is that life is better when it's warmer. Yet the fear is that today's warming will simply keep feeding back, turning the earth into a hellhole.

The 'Weaponization' of Weather: Meteorologist ... - YouTube

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The 'Weaponization' of Weather: Meteorologist Joe Bastardi Challenges the 'Phony' Climate War-----SUBSCRIBE to the CBN News Channel for more: http://youtube...

'Climate Emergency'? Environment Experts Debunk Narrative ...

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Chief Forecaster at Weatherbell.com and the author of "The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War" Joe Bastardi warns of the "weaponization of each and every weather event," saying that "The weather is always changing. It's the very nature of our creation...change and reaction.

Fringe weatherman advised Abbott before deadly Texas storm ...

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Bastardi is the author of "The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War." (Hannity wrote the book's foreword.) He frequently appears on Fox News to mock Democratic climate policy, and ...

Another Example of the Media's Escalation of the Phony ...

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(Another shameless plug for the Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate war. The reason for all this, the refutation, the link to Covid, and the way to get rid of it, is all in there) But for now read the article on the link above and then ask yourself how is it what has always been a climate optimum in the geological record of the planet ...