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UPDATE:  Joe Bastardi replies to this post in the comments here.

Ah, the anti-science crowd.  Their much-vaunted satellite data shows record smashing temperatures (make your own chart here).  So what’s a disinformer to do?  You either have to tie yourself in knots to explain how a rather moderate El Niño could be to blame — or go after the satellite data.  And the latter is coming, I’m sure.

But Accuweather’s meteorologist Joe Bastardi is a satellite-data-ophile, so he chooses the knot-twisting approach in his must-read stream of consciousness “European Blog,” which certainly wins the gold medal for self-contradiction.  What is so incredible about this blog is that it resides on one long page, so you’d think Bastardi might occasionally go back and look and see if what he just wrote doesn’t contradict something he wrote a little earlier.

Look at Saturday’s post:

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Our guest blogger is long-time commenter Richard Brenne.  He’s an award-winning screenwriter who teaches a NASA-sponsored on-line Global Climate Change class, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Committee to Improve Climate Change Communication.  His previous post was “What can the Winter Olympic sports tell us about climate change?”

Vancouver will never host another Olympics.  Okay, another Winter Olympics.  They could’ve much more easily held the Summer Olympics there these last two weeks.  In uncertain economic times the key to affordably hosting future Olympic games will be to use existing infrastructure and host them again as has happened in St. Moritz, Innsbruck, Lake Placid and Los Angeles.

Global warming is the reason Vancouver will never host another Winter Olympics.  They barely dodged (biathlon) bullets at dozens of events, and the Olympic Committee would rather use Donald Trump’s hair as the Olympic flame than go through this again.  Climate change is all about likelihoods of things like the record warmth Vancouver has had increasing, and the Olympic Committee rolled Jim Hansen’s dice and came up snake eyes.

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People here because of the NYT link might want to start with “An Introduction to Climate Progress” and other “Most Popular Posts” on the sidebar.  My bio is here.

I’m featured in John Broder’s story, “Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze.“  Before getting to the story, I must comment once again on how a dreadful headline mars an otherwise fairly reasonable story for the NY Times.

We are not in a deep freeze.  Quite the reverse.

Let’s see.  The 2000s were easily the hottest decade on record (as NASA and  NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization report).  And 2009 was one of the hottest years on record — tied for second hottest in NASA’s dataset.  And we are now in the warmest winter globally, as I noted in my Monday post, “Massive moisture-driven extreme precipitation during warmest winter in the satellite record — and the deniers say it disproves (!) climate science.”

Heck, even over the tiny fraction of the planet’s surface that is the continental United States, NOAA just reported that January was “0.3 degrees above the long-term average” — notwithstanding the media coverage (and hype by the anti-science ideologues) that might have left you with the serious misimpression last month was unusually cold.

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Memo to anti-science crowd:  Precipitation isn’t temperature!

Another massive mid-Atlantic precipitation event, another piece of nonsense from the anti-science crowd.   Kevin Mooney of the American Spectator actually wrote an article titled, “Snowmageddon” Versus “Overwhelming Scientific Evidence,” which asserts:

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This is a guest repost from Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson.  I may need to add a new category — uber-extreme weather.  The anti-science crowd has been strangely silent about this uber-storm, though they love to tout cold snaps as evidence of nonexistent global cooling (see “Disinformers to media: Please make case for something that isn’t true using data we don’t believe“).  For more on the records set by this story, see Capital Climate’s “Strong Pacific Coast Storm Breaks Rainfall, Low Pressure Records.”

The “strongest winter storm in at least 140 years,” swept through the Southwestern United States last week, “bringing deadly flooding, tornadoes, hail, hurricane force winds, and blizzard conditions.” Rain dumped on Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix, as mountains received up to four feet of snow. Wind gusts exceeding 90 miles per hour, tornadoes, and water spouts spun off the monster storm. Over 159,000 people lost power in the storm’s wake. Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters wrote on Friday that the storm was “truly epic”:

We expect to get powerful winter storms affecting the Southwest U.S. during strong El Niño events, but yesterday’s storm was truly epic in its size and intensity. The storm set all-time low pressure records over roughly 10 – 15% of the U.S.–over southern Oregon, and most of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah.

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I’m just saying (see “Paging Neil Cavuto: UAH global satellite data has record WARMEST day for January“).

Yes, the UAH satellite data just keeps going up (click to enlarge):

This shouldn’t be terribly surprising:  Long-term global warming trend + moderate El Niño = record temperatures, as predicted by NASA climate scientists, among others.

But it has the anti-science crowd scrambling for alternative explanations, since it just seemed so friggin’ cold out for a few days, which everybody knows is the best way to figure out climate trends.  Anyway, here’s everyone’s favorite Czech anti-science guy:

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Another excellent video by Peter Sinclair, the guy who proved former TV weatherman Anthony Watts knows as much about copyright laws as about climate science.

More “Climate Crock of the Week” videos here.

Yes the anti-science crowd, from WattsUpWithThat to FoxNews, have been touting cold snaps over a small fraction of the globe as evidence of the non-exist cooling trend (see “disinformers to media: Please make case for something that isn’t true using data we don’t believe“).

Well now even they have been forced to acknowledge that the global record that’s going to be set this month is, in all likelihood, for warming — because it is showing up on their beloved satellite data (click to enlarge).

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Last week I went on FoxNews so Neil Cavuto could diss global warming because it was cold outside.  Shockingly, I failed to persuade him that no one ever said global warming would turn January into July — though at least he seems to have internalized my message as the “Duh!” part of his opening in the above compilation.  Think Progress has the whole, sad story in this repost:

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It was relatively cool over CONUS in December, but not closet to record-shattering, as NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reported (see below).  And, as Capital Climate notes, this 14th coldest December followed the third warmest November.

Also, Alaska had its 17^th warmest December.  It’d be nice if NCDC would combine the two in reporting, since Alaska is getting baked these days.

It was a relatively warm year (again), part of a long-term warming trend even over the tiny fraction of the Earth that CONUS covers, as NCDC reports:

So, no, we’re  not cooling, as inaccuweather meteorologist Bastardi asserts, not even in the contiguous United States.  If you’d like to see just how non-record-breaking December was for CONUS, here’s the chart:

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Climate change is taking place as the earth continues to warm up.

In the UK, 2009 as a whole was the 14th-warmest on record (since 1914). This above-average temperature trend was reflected globally, with 2009 being the fifth-warmest year on the global record (since 1850).

It [the recent cold snap] doesn’t tell us anything about climate change, which has to be looked at in a global context and over longer periods of time.

The UK’s Met Office, part of its Defence Ministry, has an excellent post, “What’s causing the cold weather?”

They explain that unlike the usual weather pattern of the last 20 years, “over the past three weeks the Atlantic air has been ‘blocked’ and cold air has been flowing down from the Arctic or the cold winter landmass of Europe.”   They also note that December wasn’t record-breaking in terms of cold, but merely “the coldest for 14 years and colder than the long-term average.”

More significantly, the Met Office notes (and yes the figure above is their posting of last week’s land-surface temperature anomalies):

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Accuweather’s meteorologist Joe Bastardi likes to push anti-science global cooling conspiracy theories, which is no doubt why Fox News extremists like Bill O’Reilly love him (see O’Reilly’s weatherman, befuddled Bastardi: “Global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California”).

Now Bastardi has a new video, “Worldwide Cold not Seen Since 70s Ice Age Scare,” pushing a very old conspiracy theory.  Of course, he doesn’t actually talk about “worldwide cold,” but just some cold over maybe 20% of the Earth.  Nor does he explain there’s plenty of warmth elsewhere — see Australian weather bureau: “Central Pacific Ocean surface temperatures are now at their warmest level since the El Niño of 1997-98.″

The video truly becomes meteorological malpractice when Bastardi compares today to the 1970s, utterly misleading viewers into thinking that a few days of cold weather over parts of the word somehow undoes the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth’s climate system that has been demonstrated through direct scientific observation in recent decades.  In fact, “The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record,” said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. “Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming” (see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous”).

Bastardi’s supposedly Accuweather’s expert long-range forecaster, but he’s predicting “we’re going to see more and more of the cold trending here over the next  20 to 30 years”!  Perhaps we should call him Inaccuweather meteorologist.

Since he repeats his old falsehoods, I’m going to reprint my old debunkings — Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus and The NYT’s climate coverage in 1970s was a megaphone for science, not ‘global cooling’ alarmism.

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… experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all — it’s just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

“It’s part of natural variability,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, “we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.”

Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880.

Leave it to the Associated Press to state the obvious starting with the blunt headline.  They’ve been doing some of the best straight reporting on human-caused climate change (see AP analysis of stolen emails: An “exhaustive review” shows “the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”)

In fact, 2009 ranks among the 5 warmest on Earth, and the entire planet just keeps warming thanks to human emissions (see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous”).  It’s not just the surface that’s warming, but we’re also seeing it where climate science said more than 90% of the warming would end up — the oceans (see “Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid!“)

Robert Henson, author of The Rough Guide to Climate Change also has a good piece in the UK’s Guardian, “Snow, ice and the bigger picture“:  The cold snap tells us little about climate change, but if you want something to blame it on, try the Arctic oscillation,” which notes:

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