Meteorologist Joe Bastardi Says Hurricane Michael Has Nothing to Do with Climate Change
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- Bastardi is chief forecasterfor Weatherbell Analytics
Joe, thank you so much for being with us.
You were prescient in this, you forecast
something bad was gonna happen,
how'd you know about it?
- Well this is what I was made to do
and I always tell peoplethat the foundation
you stand on today was built yesterday
to reach for tomorrow, and ifyou study weather patterns,
now look I have no life besidesthe good Lord, my family
and the weather, right,so this is all I do.
If you go back and look at the past
you can see the setupsfor these kind of things
and back on July 16,excuse me, September, well
first of all, pre-season forecasts call
for a big in close season.
In other words, very little activity
in the areas that got hit downin the Caribbean last year
but all further north
and you see where all the storms are going
they're all further north this year.
And so what happens is this.
When we get closer on September 16th
I'm on the air with peoplesaying "I'll see you
"in October, there's going to be something
"coming out of the Caribbeanin the Gulf of Mexico
"and I'll be on again."
And when we got to 10 days, 12 days away
well actually September 20th,
modeling was showing that the activity
in the tropics, in theglobal tropical activity
was shifting to thePacific and Atlantic basin,
Eastern Pacific and Atlantic.
So you can see this stuff moving across
and once we put that together,
we started warning our clients
and then we saw the bigridge build up again
over the Northeast United States.
Alberto, Gordon and Florence all came in
when that ridge went up over the Northeast
and into southeast Canada.
This is known as the Newfoundland Wheel
by the old-timers, I guessI'm getting to be one of them
63, the men that came beforeme, they taught me this
that whenever you gethigh pressure built in
the northwest Atlantic andthe northeastern United States
in the hurricane season folks,
what has to happen underneath?
Think about it, there'sgonna be a reduction
of pressure and whenthe pressure is reduced
in a large scale over that warm water
you're gonna get development.
So it was right there, so what happened,
by Sunday we were forecastinga major hurricane hit
on the Florida panhandle.
So we had a 3, perhaps a category 4
going into Florida from then
it was hardly even atropical storm at that time.
We did the same thingwith Sandy by the way,
on October 21st we hadthat, and the reason is
it's nothing magicalabout it, it has to do
with trying to discernthe long-term patterns,
understanding what happened before
what's going on now, matching them up
and then use the great toolsthat science has developed
to try to help us inseeing things like this.
So that's what we did.
It gets very frustrating, as you know
there's all sorts of distractions today.
The world is full of noise, right?
So there's noise about theSupreme Court nominations
Sunday and Monday so themedia's not paying attention.
Tuesday Nikki Haleyresigns, media is oh yeah
there's a hurricane down there.
Yesterday of course,you saw the market crash
at 800 and so by the timethe hurricane made land fall
you see the media goingto the market, right?
So what happens is Ithink that a lot of people
got caught by surprise.
What happens when there's a surprise?
You've gotta go lookfor something to blame.
Who do you blame?
Climate change.
It all just keeps movingalong in the same circle.
And so you know, maybeI'm just one of those guys
who looks at linkage
actually this is shameless advertisement
I have a book out calledThe Climate Chronicles,
it describes what's goingon today where this is,
very little about this is actually
about science and weather.
Most of it is about other things
and that's what you see with these storms.
- Joe I want to ask yousomething about the winter.
Does this have anythingto do with the fact
that we may have acolder than usual winter
or more mild or what does it say?
- Yeah and I'll tell you why,I actually put this on Twitter
people on my site, Weatherbell,they see all this stuff
that's going on but myprofessors at Penn State
when I was back there in the 70s said
"You have to explainthe why before the what
"so when it happens people know why."
You gotta tell them before.
What happens is this folks.
The same oscillations in the ocean
that you will see in September and October
cause enhanced tropical cyclone activity
what we call the maddenjulian oscillation,
it's indirectly caused by the oceans
and the state of the oceans.
If that repeats itself in the winter
the same pattern that is causing this now
repeats itself in the winter
what will happen is thewinter gets cold and stormy.
So let's go back and look
at when there were major hurricanes
from Florida into theGulf of Mexico in October
you line up those years, you look
it's got a cold winter.
The fact of the matteris that back last winter,
we saw something go on and we said,
"Look, there's going to bewhat we call modoki el nino
"for the next winter."
So this is nine months away.
Predict a big rainfallseason in California
then March and April,hence the wildfire season.
You grow a lot of stuff in California
because of a lot of rain, it dries out,
they get big wildfires.
It also meant a hot summer, right?
So we have all this, we movefrom one thing to another.
Wildfires, summer, thehurricane season all point
at this cold stormywinter because all I do
is line up past years when that happened.
So we'll see it happens,only God knows tomorrow.
- That's right (laughs).
- You know what, it's a humility thing.
The atmosphere teachesand it's a good tool.
- Joe you're terrific, thank you so much.