As President Obama tries to rally the world to embrace his agenda to curb carbon emissions, Weatherbell Chief Forecaster Joe Bastardi is condemning the “prostituting” of climate science by Obama and others to further what he considers a political agenda.
On Tuesday, Obama addressed the United Nations Climate Summit, saying the world needs to confront the effects of man-made climate change and that no responsible nation can sit on the sidelines while the condition of the earth hangs in the balance for future generations. He also says the U.S. is one of the nations most responsible for the rise of carbon dioxide levels and, in turn, global temperatures.
Bastardi believes this is all a smokescreen.
“This is not about the weather. It’s not about climate. It’s not about science. Those things are being used to further another agenda. And as someone who has loved (weather) all his life, it’s really disheartening to see this going on in my country,” said Bastardi.
He believes the real purpose of the climate change movement was on display in the People’s Climate March, which took aim at Wall Street and big business earlier in the week.
“The mask came off. It’s about destroying capitalism, destroying freedom as we know it,” said Bastardi, who earlier this week suggested climate science was ‘prostituted’ by global warming activists.
“I really believe this is an agenda-driven situation, and it’s frustrating to me. People got mad at me because I used the word ‘prostituted’,” said Bastardi.
“Something I love is now being used for a completely different thing. If there was one positive about that climate march, if you go and look at the people marching and the signs they had up, it should be obvious that it’s not the climate they’re concerned about. It’s the destruction of the American way of life as we were taught: the competitiveness, the capitalism, that type of thing where the individual has the chance to pull himself up. That’s what I believe this is about,” said Bastardi.
Bastardi says a dead giveaway that the movement is a fraud can be seen in the evolving terminology of the cause.
“Why would you trust anybody that changed ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’? If you were playing somebody in a baseball game and suddenly he decided to change it to ping pong because he was getting beat, why would you get involved with them?” asked Bastardi.
“If you look at the thirty-plus excuses now that they have for this so-called pause in warming…over two-thirds of their excuses are natural excuses. Oh, the sun’s not doing this. Oh, the volcano. Oh, there’s this or that. It’s hard to believe this whole thing is occurring,” he said.
According to Bastardi, one of the biggest reasons this political movement gained traction is because the media refuse to investigate the basis for it.
“The media is complicit in this. They don’t even bother looking. It’s astounding as a 59-year-old man, remembering all the things that the media uncovered and went after, how they just march along like sheep. I don’t get it. I really don’t,” said Bastardi.
“You have to tell the truth, even if you believe you have the greater truth. You have to look at the facts. The media and everybody else have to get on to this thing because, in the end, what’s going to happen is if you don’t have energy to drive the lifeblood of your economy, your economy’s not going to go anywhere,” he said.
As for the science, Bastardi says it’s pretty well established what causes temperature fluctuations.
“Nature, not man, rules the climate. You can do the math. It’s common sense to understand that the sun, the oceans and stochastic events far outweigh what CO2 can possibly do. It’s boxed in effectively. It’s one-one hundredth of the greenhouse gases, the most prominent being water vapor,” said Bastardi.
Bastardi says the global warming movement’s contention that human activity leads to more carbon dioxide that leads to higher temperatures is already proven false. In recent years, CO2 levels continued to rise even as temperatures cooled, refuting the famed “hockey stick” of Dr. Michael Mann which predicted temperatures would rise with no end in sight.
Bastardi says climate history is even more definitive.
“I’d like the president or anybody else to explain to me how we had an ice age at 7,000 parts per million. If you actually looked at the geological time scale and the relationship of CO2 to temperatures, I don’t understand how you can be driving home this point that the United States, or anybody else on the face of the planet, is to blame for so-called climate change,” he said.
As for the leveling off and even reduction in average temperatures in recent years, Bastardi says actual data is a death blow to Obama and other activists.
“All we need to do is watch the temperatures now over the next 10-20 years. As the Pacific began to cool, temperatures leveled off. The Atlantic’s going to cool. They’ll fall even more. I made the statement back in 2007, that by the year 2030, they’ll fall back to where they were back in 1978, the start of the satellite era and when the Pacific went into its warming cycle,” said Bastardi, who also dismisses the concerns of activists that rising ocean levels threaten the lives of tens of millions of Americans in coastal areas.
“Seven inches a century of so-called sea level rise along our coasts is well within natural realms if you look at how far the ocean has varied up and down over the geological time scale,” he said.
“So when these people say these things, you can sense the frustration in my voice. It takes me ten seconds to refute them. I could go right to something that shows the opposite going on,” said Bastardi.
When confronted by arguments like Bastardi’s, global warming activists contend those are fringe views and that there is near unanimous scientific consensus. In his State of the Union Address this year, President Obama declared that “the science is settled.”
Bastardi says that’s another canard.
“Over 31,000 degreed scientists signed against the Kyoto Accords, 9,000 of them Ph.D’s for goodness sake. Why doesn’t anybody bring that up?” he said.
However, Bastardi says some statistics do tell the story of the impact of fossil fuels and the industrial era have had on the United States, and he urges Obama to examine them.
“Mr. President, take a look. The only true hockey sticks from fossil fuel are in per capita GDP for each human being on the earth and life expectancy, which has shot up. Both those things have shot up in the age of fossil fuels,” said Bastardi.
