Renowned meteorologist Joe Bastardi, a friend of The Heartland Institute who spoke at our most-recent climate conference in May, graced the pages of USA Today on Tuesday.

According to Joe: “The argument that global warming is causing more extreme weather is problematic because it presumes the globe is warming.”

Joe explains that the planet is not warming, but stable. Besides, if carbon dioxide emissions are supposed to be responsible for catastrophic man-made global warming, the data doesn’t add up:

In fact, the global temperature trend line has been stable for more than a dozen years, while carbon dioxide has increased 7%. If CO2 was the driver, then why have global temperatures stopped increasing?

Keep in mind that CO2 represents 0.0395% of the Earth’s atmosphere. Arguing that CO2 is driving the small temperature variations in our climate as opposed to the oceans, which cover 70% of the planet and have 1,000 times the heat capacity of air, or the output of our sun, is scientifically disturbing.

Joe continues, explaining why the media — and the public — confuse “weather” with climate change.

Weather is more publicized nowadays because of its impact on society and the constant push of the global warming agenda. Increases in population result in more people being in the path of Mother Nature‘s fury.

Global warming activists attribute every major weather event to man because they are either uninformed about history, or choose to ignore it. The latest claims resulting from this series of hot and dry summers ignores the fact that more state heat records were set in the 1930s than all other decades of the last century combined. Anyone remember the Dust Bowl?

Joe’s got a lot of great non-alarmist facts in his USA Today piece. Read it.