So what’s up with Jim Cantore, the head hurricane chaser and “Storm Stories” honcho at the Weather Channel? Has he gone “Warmist?”
In a Dec. 14 Newsmaker luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, he appeared to single out “climate change” as the culprit behind this year’s spate of severe weather events afflicting planet Earth’s Garden of Eden.
Asked whether global warming causes weather extremes, Cantore responded: “We are seeing a warming world. I know there are going to be more extreme weather events.”
He then segued into a few gut-instinct observations: “And being a guy who stands out in the rain all the time . . . it’s raining harder out there. And that’s really weird. It’s not scientific, but when I’m out there in it, it just seems to be raining a lot harder. More water vapor means more rainfall,” he said.
Well, OK, Cantore got the “It’s not scientific” part right.
This isn’t the first time Cantore has parroted the official anthropogenic global warming (AGP) – a.k.a. climate change – meme. (Note: we should dump the term “climate change.” The earth’s climate has been constantly changing for billions of years.) In an interview with Brian Williams on NBC Dateline last April, he appeared to blame April’s deadly tornado outbreak on global warming.
“If we have a warmer Earth, and the purpose of the jet stream is to help equalize all of that, well, because it’s warmer, it’s going to have to work a lot harder. And that, in addition to the fact that we have so much instability out there in this month of April, heat and humidity, those two things create this monster outbreak . . . .”
Translation: Warming of the atmosphere [which is not happening] is raising havoc with the jet stream and spawning more tornadoes. Despite Williams’ prompting, Cantore can’t quite bring himself to go full “Chicken Little”:
WILLIAMS:I guess we’re all looking for ways to explain away what happened here.
CANTORE: It’s hard to do that.
So give Cantore credit for not going off the deep end and regurgitating the “man is frying the planet” talking points peddled by the Michael Mann Hockey Stick crowd.
No evidence of human influence
There is, in fact, no evidence that human-induced warming is causing more extreme weather events, says Joe Bastardi, WeatherBELL chief forecaster and the former chief long-range forecaster at Accuweather, calling such claims “Alice in Wonderland forecasting.”
He says the alarmists continue to ignore two major climate indicators that have turned cold – the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the cooling of the mid-troposphere.
“Why do they always blame warmth for extreme weather while ignoring two major events – the fourth-coldest PDO we’ve ever had and the fact that mid-troposphere temperatures are the lowest since we started tracking them 10 years ago? What do you expect the weather to do when cold signals show up?”
Cold air to blame
The Warmists made much ado about the deadly tornado outbreak last spring, fingering human influence as the culprit. But as University of Alabama-Huntsville research scientist Dr. Roy Spencer explains, tropical-type warmth rarely spawns tornadic thunderstorms.
“Instead, tornadoes require strong wind shear (wind speed and direction changing rapidly with height in the lower atmosphere), the kind which develops when cold and warm air masses ‘collide’.
“Anyone who claims more tornadoes are caused by global warming is either misinformed, pandering, or delusional.”
The extreme weather we’ve seen lately is nothing unusual, says WeatherBell Chief Forecaster Joe D’Aleo, who served as the Weather Channel’s first director of meteorology at its launch in May 1982.
“We’ve had extreme weather for centuries. We experienced incredible heat waves and hurricanes during the Middle Ages, Little Ice Age, and throughout modern times. In the mid 1950s, we had five hurricanes hit the East Coast in just two years – 1954 and 1955.
“And in September 1993, Life Magazine ran a cover story, ‘The Year of the Killer Weather: why Has Nature Gone Mad?’ describing the many natural disasters . . . blizzards, droughts, floods, wildfires . . . that year. The recent outbreaks of severe weather are nothing out of the ordinary.”
Scaremongering contradicted by facts
On his Real Science climate blog, Steven Goddard takes the alarmists to the woodshed, with a compendium of graphs, charts and news stories that show that today’s weather extremes are nothing out of the ordinary. A quick glance at the facts exposes the lies behind the Warmist scaremongering: tornado and hurricane numbers are down, arctic ice is rebounding, global temperatures are on the decline, and sea levels are virtually static – even as CO2 levels (the alleged climate change culprit) continue to rise.
Writes Goddard: “Extreme weather occurred at least as often below 350 ppm [CO2]. Newspapers recorded these extreme weather events. Claims that the weather has gotten worse are complete nonsense.”
In his research paper “A Chronological Listing of Weather Events” published in 2010,” James Marusek examines in detail thousands of severe weather events that took place between 1 A.D. and 1900 A.D. His research undermines the claim that severe weather occurrences in recent years are extraordinary and the result of human influence.
Says Marusek: “If one wishes to peer into the future, then a firm grasp of the past events is a key to that gateway. This is intrinsically true for the scientific underpinnings of weather and climate.” Unfortunately, his research has been ignored by those bent on propping up the teetering fiction of human-caused global warming.
Big money behind 'consensus'
This brings us back to Cantore, whose comments, whether he believes it or not, falsely legitimize a theory that is clearly bogus. Is he is toeing the company line, afraid to deviate from the AGW talking points? He must surely know that global warming is a political hot potato, that the “climate change consensus” reigns supreme, and that big money is at stake. Given those realities and in the interests of job preservation, he might not be inclined to challenge the status quo.
By the way, it’s interesting to note that the Weather Channel’s parent company is NBC Universal, whose major stockholder is General Electric, a company that stands to reap big profits from the switch to green technologies.
As Jeff Poor at the Daily Caller writes: “. . .late last year it was reported [that] General Electric (GE), a stakeholder in . . . parent company NBC Universal, received $24.9 million in grants, much of it tied to so-called green energy technology, from the $800-billion stimulus President Barack Obama signed into law in 2009.”
GE also to stands profit from the Obama administration’s plans to push motorists into electric-powered automobiles.
According to the Detroit News, “General Electric will convert half its 30,000 worldwide fleet of vehicles to electrics . . . In all, the Fairfield, Conn.–based company, which makes charging stations, will purchase 25,000 plug-in electric cars by 2015.” It just so happens that each of those charging stations – the GE Wattsation – is eligible for up to $2,000 in subsidies – courtesy of Joe Q. Taxpayer.
The pursuit of lucrative green subsidies by the Weather Channel’s owners could explain its metamorphosis from a go-to source of timely weather reports to a politicized mouthpiece tasked with pushing the global warming agenda. If so, the plan appears to have backfired early, judging from the comments of readers responding to Andrew Freedman’s Capitol Weather Gang column a few years back:
“Many of those who commented . . . said that the mere presence of Forecast Earth on The Weather Channel's programming schedule was so offensive that it had caused them to switch the network off altogether.
"I stopped watching the Weather Channel when they strayed from hard science and started preaching from the Global Warming alter," wrote "Baseball Fan."
Another commenter, "rat race escapee," wrote that Forecast Earth had caused "millions of viewers" to change channels, and this was why it was canceled.
(For those who don’t remember, Forecast Earth was cancelled not long after climate expert Heidi Cullen, one of the program’s contributors, demanded that the American Meteorological Society revoke its Seal of Approval for any TV weatherman questioning the AGW narrative.)
‘Climate change’: the catch-all scapegoat
As their model-driven theory crumbles under the weight of real-world observational data, global warming true believers like the Weather Channel have adopted a new strategy, blaming virtually any severe weather event on human activity. Blizzards, torrential rains, droughts, fires, floods, heat waves and cold waves – every weather extreme known to man – are now the fault of the ubiquitous demon called climate change, a sinister by-product of human CO2 emissions – the grand bogeyman of global warming.
Jim Cantore, whose stormcasts are watched by millions of viewers, should take a long, hard look at the historical weather record. After a fair examination of the facts, one can arrive at only one reasonable conclusion: Ever-changing weather patterns are the norm, not the exception, and there is no evidence linking today’s extreme weather to the burning of fossil fuels.
In a last-ditch effort to salvage their pet theory, global warming zealots have resorted to the most ridiculous “blame all the crazy weather on man” absurdities, says Bastardi.
“If it snows cheese tomorrow will that also be the result of global warming.”
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