Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Joe Bastardi, the charismatic meteorologist and forecaster with AccuWeather who has more recently become a prominent global-warming skeptic. I wrote about my conversation with him here. Here’s a sample of the piece:
[Bastardi] proposes a wager of sorts. “The scientific approach is you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,” he says. “That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.” Bastardi’s challenge to his critics — who are legion — is to make their own predictions. And then wait. Climate science, he adds, “is just a big weather forecast.”…
And appeals to academic authority seem misplaced. The politicization and groupthink exposed by the Climategate scandal, the self-selection problem (those already inclined to think of the climate as imperiled are most likely to choose climate science as a field), and the newness and inestimable complexity of the science (climatologists can’t experiment with the weather as, say, a chemist can experiment with chemicals) would all seem to cast doubt on the conclusiveness of today’s climate science.
Bastardi has been strongly criticized for his views by environmental-advocacy groups and some academic climate scientists. I don’t claim to know who’s right and who’s wrong in the climate-change debate. But Bastardi makes a strong case that today’s academic climate science is imperfect, hence inconclusive. More importantly, he’s done the thing that could make or break his scientific credibility: a concrete, testable prediction for the next decade.
UPDATE: Zeke Hausfather, Chief Scientist at Efficiency 2.0 is willing to take Bastardi’s bet. Hausfather wants to put down $10,000 against Bastardi’s prediction that global temperatures will decline over the next 10 years. See it here.
Your article was linked on the front page of Slashdot. Great job!
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Imperfect, hence inconclusive" is a silly standard. Every science is imperfect; is every science inconclusive?
Then again, if this IS to be the new standard my phlogiston and luminiferous ether textbooks should sell well.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWho do you trust?
Opportunist, Al Gore, is James Hanson's mouthpiece. They forecast the demise of cold snowy winters. Now we experience the worst winters in decades or centuries, they say.. oh, this is part of Global Warming.
William Gray, Joe D'Aleo, and Joe B. on the other hand, work in the forecasting trenches. They spend a lifetime making long range forecasts and are held accountable. It is real science vs. pseudo science.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe alarmists are so full of contradiction, it would be funny, if not for the immense waste of energy (Time and Tax Money) being put into Climate Change Mitigation.
We are able to adapt to climate change, but we will likely never be able to determine change in climate.
(Edited to get the name through the language filters)
(B) astardi made an evidence free assertion that, by definition, can't be validated for a decade. That's rhetoric, not science. Ignoring the hand-waving ad hominem (Al Gore!) what's left is a contest between the people trained to do the science (e.g. Hansen) - who are remarkably consistent in their general judgments - and people who seem to have a political axe to grind. Issues regarding the data have been subjected to closer scrutiny than (B) astardi's extremely broad arguments imply. His dismissal of the importance of CO2 effects is based on what? Raw quantity? That's an argument? Does he believe he knows more about the ambiguities represented by historical data than the people who have been gathering that data? Clearly there are real issues with it, but he simply presents an argument from ignorance and then conveniently assumes the conclusion he likes. If you look at the actual studies, there are error bars associated with the data. It's perfectly fair to question how valid the assumptions underlying those calculations were, but that requires a much more detailed argument than he presents.
There's plenty of reason to disbelieve any particular prediction regarding the future of the climate. (As nearly any climate scientist will tell you, if you bother to ask.) What's remarkable, and ought to be convincing, is that the vast majority of such predictions agree in their broad outlines. Vilifying an entire profession because their conclusions are politically unpalatable is irrational. Conservatives like to complain about "political correctness." Here's a canonical example of it. Jim Manzi has a far better argument.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse" Ignoring the hand-waving ad hominem (Al Gore!) what's left is a contest between the people trained to do the science (e.g. Hansen) - who are remarkably consistent in their general judgments - and people who seem to have a political axe to grind."
AemJeff,
And you don't think Joe B., who earns his pay by making annual forecasts (ie going out 365 days and beyond) hasn't examined the data? Any long range forecaster who attempts forecasts beyond seasonal timeframes is more acquainted with the data I argue than climate scientists who spend more of thier time applying escoteric statistical analysis (of which they don't fully understand (see Wegman).
And speaking of the most famous Climate Alarmist, Dr Hansen, his 1998 infamous temperature projections is now 0.6 deg C too warm. Dr Trenbeth (another famous Alarmist) tells readers in a recently released pre-published to ignore this temperature divergence. In other words, Hansen's 1.0 C warming per century is now beyond the error bars. With such an offset, there is no way Hansen and co. can claim that thier temperature projections are anything but wrong. In ordinary physics or chemistry, the scientist would declare failure and move on. But not Climate Scientists. Trenbeth himself admitted as much when the famous climategate emails were released. He emailed Phil Jones despairing of finding any warmth. Now the meme has changed to "hidden warming", which is out there and will explode on the scene at any moment. This isnt' science, but fantasy.
Joe B. lives in the real world. His reputation depends on him being correct. Whether it is commodity traders farmers, gas and electric utilities, paying customers would abandoned him if he was wrong. Unlike Joe B. and other operational meterologists, Climate Scientists are secure in thier tenured and endowed chairs. They live in an echo chamber and peer review eachother's work and excommunicate those who do not toe the line.
In the mean time, the earth is cooling little by little. Everyone realizes this, but the experts.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI attended a commencement address for which Energy Secretary Chu was the keynote speaker. Most of his remarks were predictions of epic catastrophes unless everyone put their full support behind President Obama's policies. If we did not, he emphasized that summers here in St. Louis would get "even warmer" over the next thirty years.
I don't recall whether Secretary Chu cited some of the computer data he based his conclusions on, but what I remember thinking was, "We'll have to wait thirty years to see if these models are correct." (Unless cap-and-trade is passed, in which case we'll have to adjust those models to incorporate the rate at which global temperature is expected to change based on x amount of new carbon restrictions.)
Contrast this article's meteorologist concluding from his satellite data that the global temperature will soon be cooler. At least we have to wait only ten years to see if he's right.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Then again, if this IS to be the new standard my phlogiston and luminiferous ether textbooks should sell well."
I'd buy one!
If only they could finally solve the perpetually vexing problem of whether light is a wave or a particle!
Not that I haven't seen the question decided in the lab.
Problem is, I've seen it proved BOTH ways.
Mock phlogiston all you want but I think that we truly lost something when we gave up on the lumeniferous ether theory.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"I don’t claim to know who’s right and who’s wrong in the climate-change debate."
What a wishy-washy statement.
Great, more NRO Conservative opinion leaders championing our cause. I can sleep safely in my bed tonight. :(
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJPK,there's very little evidence that B. has examined the data in any detail in what we've been privileged to read so far. Has he written any papers on the topic? Can he provide confidence intervals for his assertions? How much competence does he have with statistical analysis? If he has deep insights, why did he go to a political journal and have them reported by a non-scientist who admittedly doesn't have the technical chops to make a judgment?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAemJeff: "what's left is a contest between the people trained to do the science (e.g. Hansen) - who are remarkably consistent in their general judgments ..."
Do you mean consistently wrong, like Michael Mann and his Hockey Stick?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGreat to see a climate post in the corner. Maybe some day Derb will learn something about climate science. It is shameful that the Corner regulars are so ignorant about this critical issue and that they bury the wonderful contributions of the Planet Gore guy. BTW, it is time to include the Planet Gore material in the normal Corner postings.
Joe B. is an awesome guy. The great thing about meteorologists is that their predictions can be verified or disproved in the short term. These long term predictions by climatologists have been a joke, way, way off. The budget for meteorology research needs to increase, the budget for climate research needs to be drastically reduced (except for basic data collection such as Argos sensors).
Speaking of jokes, Hansen's predictions have been awful. His predictions for both surface temperatures and ocean heat content were hilariously wrong. Hansen is an example of what has gone wrong in climate science specifically and science in general. Hansen practices post normal science, that is, his political and societal objectives inform his science. The fact that such a grossly biased, nonobjective fanatic has anything to do with temperature collection/predictions is a shame and travesty.
Having said that, there is no doubt that rising CO2 does warm the planet a bit. When CO2 is doubled, there is a primary effect of raising global temp by 1 degree C. Current CO2 level is 390 ppm and is going up 2 ppm/year. Thus, to double CO2 level at current rates will 390/2 (i.e. 195) years (i.e. nearly 2 centuries!). This, of course, is such a slow rise as to be inconsequential.
The feedbacks to this very, very slow rise in temp may either increase or decrease the effect of the direct CO2 effect. There is no consensus on the effect of feedbacks but there is consensus (see Trenberth IPCC comments) that the confidence intervals for IPCC climate model predictions are going to get much larger. This means that the confidence of IPCC climatologists in the accuracy of their models' prediction has declined a bunch. This is a step forward in truth telling that is many, many years overdue.
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