Hey Joe, Where You Goin’ With That Dumb in Your Head?

Joe Bastardi holds a BS in meteorology from Penn State University and was an undergrad there while I attended as a grad student. Joe is very good when it comes to understanding weather but his climate science is, well, pretty lousy. For some odd reason, USA Today decided to let Joe show us how little he knows about very basic climate science. Fox News and Hannity love Joe, but I expected USA Today to have higher standards. USA Today has been very good reporting real science so I will chalk this up to somebody missing their cup of coffee this morning and hitting the YES button by mistake.

So here is my devastating take-down of Joe’s op-ed:

#38, #5, #9, #30, #33, #35, #76, #159

So, “what’s with the numbers”, you ask? These represent the myths that Joe dishes out in his op-ed that are corrected at the Skeptical Science Arguments web page. It took me an entire, pain-staking 10 minutes using only my mouse and the CTRL-F key to demolish Joe’s various claims.

Some might argue that this blog post is a hit job on Joe but, of course, Joe has made these same comments MANY times before and has been corrected many times before. You sleep in the bed you make and Joe’s bed is pretty shabby-looking.

Joe is either loudly yelling “lalalalalalalalalalalalala” when he is corrected or he knows he is wrong and is intentionally misleading. Which is it?

Update 08/02: I have removed #18 from the list of SkS links above. After further review, I think Joe Bastardi’s claim that we cannot attribute Irene to global warming, although phrased poorly, is probably not one that can be called “wrong”. I also suggest that those interested in the scientific understanding of the link between AGW and hurricanes download and read the IPCC SREX section regarding the literature on this topic. See Pages 159 – 163 in the Full Report and you will see that linking AGW to recent hurricanes is still a low confidence claim. H/T to Dr. Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) for helpful pointers.