Joe Bastardi

For years America's media have been enthralled by anything that supports the theory that carbon dioxide is warming the planet leading to an imminent cataclysm if governments don't regulate this partially man-made gas.

By contrast, reports that might undermine CO2's importance in global warming, like the following released Tuesday by the AAS Solar Physics Division in Las Cruces, New Mexico, predicting a sharp decrease in solar activity in coming years, typically get either little attention or are downplayed:

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert on Tuesday actually moderated a debate about global warming.

In fairness, it was less of a debate and more a vehicle for him to make fun of his guests Joe Bastardi of Accuweather and Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Regardless of the comedic intent on the part of the host, there were indeed some wonderful moments, in particular Bastardi pointing out that we're going to know in the next five to ten years whether there really is a connection between increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures (video follows with highlights and commentary):

"A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore."

So wrote the New York Times's Leslie Kaufman in a rather surprising piece published Tuesday.

Shhh. Wait. It got better -- A LOT better:

On Monday's The O'Reilly Factor, FNC's Bill O'Reilly hosted a debate between global warming skeptic Joe Bastardi of Accuweather, and Bill Nye of PBS's Bill Nye the Science Guy, known for recently declaring that it was "unpatriotic" to dispute global warming. Bastardi argued that recent winter weather patterns are connected to El Nino, not global warming. He also linked sunspot activity to warming and cooling trends. Bastardi:

You want to bring up the CO2 argument. Why don’t we just look at the sunspots back here – back in 1750 – and notice that they’ve been coming up – and along with it the temperatures. Basically, it comes down to this: If you look at the strength of correlation to warming, and this is courtesy of meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, CO2 since 1895, you can see the .43, the sun .57, the oceans .85, but since 1998 CO2 has gone next to nothing because the Earth’s temperature is flatlining and CO2 is coming up.

He went to sum what he believed to be the implausiblity of the argument made by those who believe in global warming theory:

While the wizards of smart are convening in Copenhagen, attempting to solve what they perceive to be the biggest global societal ill - anthropogenic climate change, one of the things that likely won't be discussed is the possibility of the opposite occurring, global cooling.

But AccuWeather's chief hurricane forecaster, Joe Bastardi warns it is a bigger threat than global warming. He says the phenomenon is coming, based on three priniciple reasons - 1) Natural reversal of ocean cycles, 2) Low sun spot activity and 3) An increase in volcanic and seismic activity. Bastardi made this case on the Fox Business Network's Dec. 11 "Imus in the Morning" program.

"I have something behind me here called the ‘Triple Crown of Cooling,'" Bastardi said. "I'm just as worried that in the next 30 years that we are going back into a period back in the early 1800s which was a mini-Ice Age. We have the natural reversal of the ocean cycles going on. We have very low sun spot activity, increased volcanic activity. I have to tell you something, after this winter in the eastern and southern part of the United States and in Europe - this winter here - a lot of people aren't going to want to hear about global warming because there's already signs that things are turning around."

It's not often that meteorology intersects with geopolitics - but Europe could be in store for another Cold War, literally.

Accuweather.com's chief long-range and hurricane forecaster Joe Bastardi observed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's recent cut of gas flows to Europe via Ukraine may have been done so in anticipation of a global cooling cycle on the Jan. 6 "Glenn Beck Show" radio program. Bastardi has a solid reputation among Wall Street traders for understanding weather's impact on energy commodities.

"The thing I want to bring up here - very interesting - most of the solar cycle studies that we know about and that guys like me read have come out of the Russian scientists," Bastardi said. "But when Glasnost developed, the Russian scientists, a lot of their ideas on the coming cool period that a lot of us believe is going to occur - ice, rather than fire is the big problem down the road here 2030, 2040, and the reversing cyclical cycles of the ocean - it came out of the East."

Although Joe Bastardi is likely not a household name, most Americans probably know his face as one of the meteorologists interviewed whenever a serious climate event like a hurricane hits the mainland.

Despite such regular airtime, the senior AccuWeather.com meteorologist's open letter to presidential candidates concerning anthropogenic global warming will likely be thoroughly ignored by media far more interested in spreading the unproven junk science of Nobel Laureate Al Gore than advancing the discussion concerning this controversial issue.

This is especially true given Bastardi's suggestion that Obama "can [Gore] as an advisor on the environment."

Since green press members are almost guaranteed to boycott Bastardi's marvelous plea for some climate sanity, here are the highlights of his letter published Monday (emphasis added):

History seemed to repeat itself on Monday's World News with Charles Gibson, as substitute anchor Dan Harris introduced a story, filed by ABC correspondent John Berman, which highlighted the view of "some scientists" that global warming is responsible for an increase in the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes in recent decades. Not only did the same Harris/Berman team file a similar story over two years ago on the July 9, 2005 show, then known as World News Tonight, but Monday's report also recycled soundbites of two scientists from the earlier story. Berman, from Monday September 3: "Across the globe, the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled over the past 30 years.

On the Tuesday August 21 The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, AccuWeather senior meteorologist Joe Bastardi poured water on claims that a global warming trend has been the cause of hurricanes of increased intensity as he contended that the Northern Hemisphere similarly saw periods of increased hurricane activity in past decades, going back to the 1890s. Bastardi: "We're back in the '30's, '40's and 50's. This back and forth cycle that occurs, we saw it in the 1890s to 1910. ... And people are just getting carried away and fascinated when, if they go back and look at what happened before, you can see the similarities." (Transcript follows)