Bastardi’s Wager

A former National Weather Service meteorologist has a challenge for climate scientists.

Matthew Shaffer
Friday, January 14, 2011

Joe Bastardi’s great love is atmospheric science. He says he’s been fascinated by it “since I was a baby. My dad’s a meteorologist, his great-grandfather was the town weatherman in Sicily, and my son wants to be a meteorologist.”

And he’s disturbed by how the science, which he values for its own sake, has been infected with politics. According to Bastardi, the intelligentsia see new weather developments as an “incessant stream of confirmations” of global warming: “I just took out the New York Times from ten years ago, saying the reason it’s not snowing is global warming. Now you’ve got guys in the Times saying the reason it’s snowing is global warming.”

But unlike most climate skeptics, Bastardi is in a position to change the conversation. He’s a meteorologist and forecaster with AccuWeather, and he 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.”

What’s his reasoning? Here are some specific topics on which Bastardi disagrees with mainstream climate scientists:

● First, Bastardi thinks climate scientists are too quick to extrapolate from recent trends. “The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says this is the warmest decade ever — well, that’s like you wake up every morning and weigh 175 pounds, and one morning you wake up and are 175.1.” In other words, even a decade-long trend could be a random fluctuation, rather than a reflection of long-term changes. He adds, “Here’s the global-warming argument: Given the best data we have, looking at all the solar sets, Milankovitch cycles, and everything else, the earth is about a half degree warmer than it should be. Why is that? Well, where can you stack the answer? Well, it must be man.” That, he thinks, is a conclusion drawn too hastily.

● Second, even when climate scientists do measure long-term trends, they use unreliable methods: “We started using objective satellite data in 1978. When they readjust temperatures, they do it [on numbers that were collected] before the satellite era. Now, how the hell can you make an adjustment on temperatures back in the Thirties when you’re not measuring it the same way now?” He claims tree rings aren’t decisive, either — because it is impossible to isolate the effect of temperature on tree growth. Bastardi prefers historical weather reports, which, in his view, paint a more complex climate history than tree-ring haruspices admit. “I dig into everything I can get my hands on; the historical foundation of climatology is huge,” he says. “There are times when Michelangelo was snowed in to his apartment in Rome, it was so cold over there. Look at the Roman army getting over the Alps. How the heck did they do that? Those mountain passes go up real, real high. If there wasn’t a time of warming in that area, that wouldn’t be possible.”

● Third, Bastardi sees modern climate scientists as inordinately fixated on carbon dioxide at the expense of other major factors (an example of their narrow, model-focused approaches, versus his tendency toward holistic empirical observation). “It’s almost the equivalent of saying, ‘Your big toe runs your body,’” he says. “Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, a tiny gas, part of this huge system. You’re trying to tell me that’s going to control the system and influence the energy of the system? When you have things like the sun, which is obviously the greatest contributor to the world’s energy? It almost defies common sense.”

Those thoughts don’t seem to be motivated by anti-environmental enthusiasm. Bastardi has some concerns about real pollutants: “It’s one thing with sulfur. Sulfur is the type of the thing where it forms a particulate in the air, and it can really screw things up.” But he notes that in recent years, “CO2 is still increasing, and the overall temperature has leveled off.”

● Fourth, Bastardi firmly believes that the climate tends toward equilibrium, not disequilibrium — i.e., when the global temperature moves away from its natural mean, various processes are activated that push it back. This goes against some climatologists’ more dire warnings of a key temperature cutoff beyond which global warming itself accelerates its own process. “See, what they’re afraid of is a feedback tipping point. And I don’t believe in that. Sometimes in the stock market you get to a point where, ‘boom!’ you’re going to go up even further. That’s not how the atmosphere works — for every step it takes away from the norm, the more likely it is to turn back.” He also points to the norming mechanism intrinsic to carbon dioxide’s function: CO2 enables the bigger and faster growth of plants, which then consume CO2.

● Fifth, today’s weather exhibits no unique patterns that require a unique explanation. They’re nothing we haven’t seen before.

● Sixth, and finally, the climate is just really, really complicated. Bastardi takes me through a half-hour of data about warming and cooling trends in the Pacific Ocean, the peculiar weather patterns of the 1930s, solar cycles, volcanic cycles, and the flaws in measurements of global temperatures (a two-degree change in a hot area is much more significant than a two-degree change in a cold area) — all very complicated stuff. And that’s just Bastardi’s point. It’s disingenuous to say we have conclusive proof of the future of such a torturously complicated system.

Is Bastardi credible? As a former humanities major, I am unqualified to judge the arguments behind climate science, and the answer seems to be “no” if you ask the academics who work in the field. But it’s “yes” if you ask the market, and there are plenty of reasons to doubt the current mainstream.

Whereas a significant portion of today’s climate scientists are politically motivated, Bastardi has only one incentive in his job: accuracy. He won’t be denied tenure or publication if he ends up on the wrong side. He gets paid handsomely — he won’t tell me just how much — for long-term weather forecasts by traders who have an interest in commodities whose production is affected by the weather. And he still gets hired, despite his rising to fame and infamy as a global-warming skeptic. His credential, in other words, is that he’s passed the market test: “Because I know the physical drivers of the atmosphere#…#people see me on TV talking about things, but that’s the tip of the iceberg — I get calls from companies when money is on the line. They want the right answer, the best answer, the quickest answer. Do you realize how much money you save if you get the weather right?”

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 is bearing his cross — “My mom calls me up these days and cries, ‘Who is the Huffington Post and why are they so mean to you?’” he says — but he hates being politically pigeonholed. “People assume ‘this guy’s against alternative energy’ and all that stuff,” he says. “Let me tell you something. If I’m right, we’re going to need all the energy we can get. It’s a lot harder to heat a house than cool it, a lot easier to take clothes off than to put them on. So when it cools, we’ll need a lot more energy.”

Is Bastardi right? An amateur’s answer might depend on his or her skepticism toward environmentalism. But Bastardi has done the thing that could make or break his credibility — offer a way to test his theory. We’ll see if his critics, so certain of the authoritative consensus on global warming, do the same.