Fox’s favorite climate skeptic, Joe Bastardi – a meteorologist, not a climate scientist – visited the Your World show last week where he insisted the planet is getting colder, not warmer. Host Neil Cavuto gave him a seal of approval by saying he’d believe Bastardi over the consensus.
In a lengthy, well-documented post, Media Matters wrote about Bastardi:
Fox News and Fox Business Network frequently host Joe Bastardi to comment on climate change. But Bastardi, who is a weather forecaster, not a climate researcher, has made inaccurate claims about climate science on multiple occasions and is not seen by experts as a credible source of climate information.
But on Your World last week, Cavuto introduced Bastardi by saying, “Leave it to Joe Bastardi to whip up another storm of his own. He’s tweeting holy hell because the Antarctic is not as hot as hell as alarmists predicted.”
In a lengthy interview which unquestioningly presented Bastardi as a credible expert on climate science, Cavuto helped validate Bastardi’s theory that the earth is now in a cooling cycle – by suggesting we’re headed for an ice age. Cavuto said, “I can remember as a kid, …all those Time magazine cover stories, documentaries, New York Times stories on the global cooling, the big freeze to come, Leonard Nimoy scaring the you-know-what out of us about being ready for the great winter that was going to grip the world. Maybe they were right, they were just 40 years early. …What’s going on?”
Bastardi replied, “We were in a cold cycle, and I said this several years ago, on this network, that we were going back to where we were, by 2030. The global temperatures, measured objectively by satellites - remember we’ve only been measuring temperatures objectively since 1978 - would return back to where it was in ‘78 because we went through the cold cycles in the Pacific and on into the Atlantic. …It’s all cyclical in nature.” He finished with a smirk on his face.
Cavuto said supportively, “I think what you just said is that you can’t buy the consensus. …Forty years ago, we were talking about great global cooling and I guess it goes back to who do you believe?”
“Twenty years from now, we’re going to be hearing about the next ice age coming again,” Bastardi insisted.
“Wow, amazing!” Cavuto said. “So what are you going to do? The French climate commission or Joe? I’m going with Joe. That’s me, that’s just my bias. Good seeing you my friend.”
How about both men read that climate change is getting worse? The 97% of scientists who believe we’re causing climate change would laugh Bastardi off the premises.
Watch the denial from the July 1 Your World below.