Joe Bastardi: Idiot, Liar, or Both?

This is simply incredible: Joe Bastardi says, on a major television network:

BASTARDI: CO2 cannot cause global warming. I’ll tell you why. It doesn’t mix well with the atmosphere, for one. For two, its specific gravity is 1 1/2 times that of the rest of the atmosphere. It heats and cools much quicker. Its radiative processes are much different. So it cannot — it literally cannot cause global warming.

This is either profound ignorance or bald-faced lying. Media Matters has some reactions from climate scientists, such as

Kerry Emanuel of MIT: "Utter rubbish. Sorry to be so direct, but that is just the case."

Gavin Schmidt, NASA climatologist: "Bastardi is attempting to throw out 150 years of physics."

Richard Muller, Berkeley physicist: "He seems very confused."

In fact, scientists have measured the distribution in the atmosphere, as William Connolley noted recently on WUWT. Here are some measurement, made over Antarctica (where there are no strong CO2 sources or sinks), from a 1995 paper in Tellus. 

First is the variation with season at different altitudes in the troposphere -- it's at most 2 ppm (parts per million), out of a total of about 340-350 ppm -- less than 1%:

And here's the variation with height, averaged over one full year: about 0.3 ppm at most, or 0.1%

These plots represent the kind of hard, thankless work scientists do to establish what we know -- a result that isn't terribly surprising, either, because you can just measure CO2 levels atop mountains and at sea level and compare (though local CO2 sources might slightly affect the results), something that is done around the world. It involved planning an expedition to Antarctica, with all that entails, and flying instruments in planes, which sounds simple but was surely beset by cold and wind and snow and frozen fingers and teared-up eyes and finicky instruments and pilots blinded by the sun as they tried to fly an exact heading at an exact altitude. Nor is this the only such experiment -- the paper lists others in its References.

And then, after all that hard, careful work, some...creep...goes on television and shamelessly tells the whole world the exact opposite.

Now that is a useful idiot. Or a useful liar. Or maybe both.

(Sorry to be so blunt, but sometimes it's necessary.)