Climategate: Stuart Varney "lives with Ed"

Wow! That Ed Begley is unhinged. Scary.

“It confirms suspicions I’ve had in my 30 years of working in climate science. I saw the hijacking of climate science particularly by modellers, and then by a small group of people associated with the IPCC. ….It really is deeply disturbing because what you’ve got here is this small group of scientists, who by the way Professor Wegman who was asked to arbitrate in the debate about the hockey stick- he identified 42 people and said, “look, these people are all publishing together, and they are also peer reviewing each other’s literature”…..about 20 years ago I started to question why they were pushing the peer review process so much and now we realise it is because it gives them control of their own process. That’s clearly exposed in these emails.
On a global scale this is frighteneing because not only do these people control the global temperature data through the Hadley Climate Research Unit, they also control the IPCC – and they have manipulated that, we read in the emails how that was done. “
This was linked to on this very site !!

I used to respect Ed Begley Jr. Even though I never agreed with him, he walked the walk that he talked. If he wants to ride his bike and rummage through back alleys of fast-food restaurants for used cooking oil, that’s fine with me.
But now, he’s imposing his religion.

I’ll use an English colloquialism for Ed Begley……
“what a complete twat”………………..

Interesting!
There are obvious issues here with re-directing the argument that news commentators need to address in this sort of on-air discussion:
Argument – Only look at the Peer Reviewed science
Response – what if the peer review process is corrupt?
The Climategate emails clearly show willful and unethical abuse of the peer review process to skew the literature, by black balling certain authors and publishers.
If the peer reviewed process is corrupt, then the peer reviewed literature is not a legitimate reflection of the real science. If the peer review process is corrupt, then you must go outside the peer review literature to find the truth.
Argument – What degree does he have ? (if he is not a climatologist discount his research)
Response – Climatology is a mulit-disciplinary science, no single individual or branch of science research holds exclusive ownership of the science. Physics is at the heart of all weather processes. The physics of CO2 absorption of energy is fundamental to the global warming theory, as are the physics of conservation of momentum, thermodynamics, density, heat content with respect to mass, are all basic physics problems. Likewise geologists know more about past climate than the climatologists, as they have been studying it for almost 200 years since it was introduced as a specific field of study in 1741. Climatology as we know it today is less than 50 years old, and is a very immature science. In fact most “climatologists” do not have degrees in that specialty, but were originally degree’d in other fields. If you only want to use people who are trained as climatologists, you will also discard most of the major players in the peer reviewed literature of climatology.
Climatologist is a job title not a scientific specialty.
Argument – Merge other environmental issues with global warming as if they are inseparable. Atmospheric pollution (air quality in L.A.) has nothing to do with global warming, it is an air quality issue, not a fundamental part of the global warming theory which asserts that man made CO2 is causing unprecedented heating.
You can deny AGW exists, or is trivial, and strongly support good air quality (low particulate emissions, low sulfate emissions, low NOx emissions etc.), likewise you can strongly support energy security and sustainability issues and deny man made global warming. They are not necessarily tied to each other.
Argument – the government can mandate behavior to protect “the commons”
Response – only if the action they mandate, is a legitimate governmental behavior (see scope of government below) and it will mitigate the alleged harm to the commons (ie if CO2 is not responsible for warming, then the type of light bulb I use is irrelevant, as my carbon foot print [from a global warming perspective] is irrelevant )
Also this argument pre-supposes that the mandate is within the proper scope of governments role. In the case of the Federal government, ask them to specify which of the 17 enumerated powers in the constitution allows the Federal government the right to regulate what sort of light bulb I use?
Larry

Lazy, insecure posers depend on appeals to authority for their decision making.
He sounds very lazy, and very very insecure.

A second issue to the global warming debate is the competence of the models. The climategate release (and other attempts to analysis the data inputs to the models), clearly show that the data is hopelessly corrupt, and has no provenance.
If there is a reasonable suspicion that:
The climate models are coded with such poor code structure and method that they are indecipherable (ie no one truly knows what they are doing to the data), and since they have never been properly audited or documented they and all their output is not trustworthy.
That the data inputs that go into the models are themselves untrustworthy due to their lack of provenance and modification history.
As a result you have an untrustworthy model, doing unknown things to untrustworthy data, and attempting to specify global temperatures to accuracy that is not possible with the data quality used for its input.
Net result is anything that depends on model output for it to be a valid argument is worthless.
Larry

The trouble with Climate scientists as it would appear from what we have learned about CRU is that they don’t consult with the statisticians so their statistics is all over the place. They haven’t done physics and they can’t do the maths so they don’t do any of the fundamental work to establish how climate really works.
Instead they use climate models which they judge on whether they look plausible. Then if reality turns out to be different from the scenarios the models show they adjust the reality.

I don’t know about the peer-reviewed literature but they are certainly having a tough go of it on the beer-reviewed side of things.

“Not yet, the trick is finding the right Fortran compiler.”
Most of the folks I know that use Fortran (both of them, actually) use the Absoft compiler.
http://www.absoft.com/Absoft_Linux_Compiler.htm

The Intel compiler appears to be free for personal use.

The whole issue is now up on our (New Zealand) MSM…titled “Dodgy science gets us all off the hook…”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10611930

I like Ed. Mainly because he lives the talk (as opposed to, say, Al Gore). But he’s lost his mind here….