Ed Begley Jr. goes ballistic on Fox News. We saw something similarly unhinged with Center for American Progress Dan Wiess, also interviewed by Stuart Varney on Fox News.
From the YouTube description: Ed gets into a shoutfest and can’t stop pointing his finger at Stuart Varney of Fox News: “You’re spewing your nonsense again …” says Begley. We’re talking about Climategate..the recent discovery of e-mails by global warming ‘scientists’ that suggest a cover up..thousands of e-mails and documents (verified by the New York Times) have been released showing scientists trying to cover up the recent decline in temperatures and ‘trick’ the public.
By Ed’s reasoning, excluding everyone who is “not a degreed climate scientist” that rather puts Dr. James Hansen out of the picture, and many others, including Al Gore.
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Do people really write papers about being an actor?
Re Gary Mckinnon:
The significance of his case is the absence of an evidentiary submission to support the request for extradition. This is a result of the reciprocal extradition treaty that GB/USA entered into after the 9/11 and 7/7 events. Designed to speed the extradition of terrorist suspects, who might otherwise have stalled extradition proceedings, the act has been utilised by the US athorities to circumvent the need for justifying evidence in the case of the ‘NatWest four’ (financial fraud) and GM’s case (hacking). Neither of the cases were intended to fall under the scope of the treaty but, as with most hastily written legislation, there have been ‘unintended’ consequences.
Even more galling is that the USA has never ratified its half of the treaty so the same process does not apply to US citizens accused of crimes in the UK.
It’s not all bad news! If someone can convince a US prosecutor that Phil Jones has committed a crime/felony in the US , then Jones can be extradited to the US no questions asked!
You heard it from his own mouth folks … Don’t listen to Ed Begley Jr as he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
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Kevin McGrane (15:52:09) :
Of course, most of the time we have our lights on is the cold part of the year, when the heat from incandescent lightbulbs actually provides heating very efficiently, and only in the rooms we are occupying. And we can use dimmers if we wish. Switching to ‘low energy’ bulbs means we have to heat the house more via central heating, and probably heating rooms that we’re not occupying. That’s more inefficient. For most of the time, incandescent bulbs to not ‘waste’ heat; whatever we ’save’ with ‘low energy’ bulbs we have to make up from some other heater, so in the far northern hemisphere such as UK, there are no realistic savings at all in phasing out incandescents inside domestic dwellings.
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Yes. And not just that, the minute I tried a CF bulb for my “reading” light, I was immediately struck by how unpleasant and irritating it was. Working under fluorescents w/windows allowing natural light in isn’t too bad, but in a dark room w/no other light, it’s almost intolerable. Incadescents are a much more natural, “thermal” light, like the sun.
Really smart to force by law a light-bulb that contains mercury, and ends up in landfills. Another example of government doublethink.
[snip]
Kate, speaking of Al Gore. Paparazzi have spotted Al hastily boarding Leonardo’s DeCaprio’s Gulfstream 4 dragging bulging Gucci suitcases leaking ten-thousand dollar bills. Destination? Unknown, although its rumored Dubai is encouraging super-rich American expats open, customs free, doors in welcome.
It looks a bit like the villian whose just been nabbed by the police and protests his innocence in elaborate lenghts
Hi. Pressed Rat.
Gore and Dubai are welcome to each other.
I happen to like Ed Begley and do not disagree with some of his positions. I especially agree that an easy bake oven is a miniature toaster. Ed also supports the move to electrification of transportation which is happening and sensible for all kinds of reasons.
Stuart doesn’t like government telling him what kind of light bulbs he can have at home. He exaggerates when he says jackboots are coming in to inspect his light bulbs. Stuart is a libertarian, Ed is a real environmentalist. The two can co-exist but only if the one-world-government people butt out. The New World Order agenda has kidnapped the good envrionmental movement and twisted it to its political agenda. Political activists driven by marxist ideology are the ones who lie, cheat and obfuscate the science.
Ed is perfectly right that the air in LA has improved dramatically because of pollution control technology. It is a spectacular success. The same cannot be applied to “climate” simply because we don’t have any empirical confirmation of CO2-based warming. But we do need to cut fossil fuel consumption and the reasons to do that remain even without climate change. So Ed’s evangelizing for electric vehicles and lower energy footprints is perfectly okay in my book.
But I do want to keep my easy bake oven… It’s perfect for my thumbnail pies.
Previously I complemented Bedgley for a sterling performance portraying a demented greenie. After reading subsequent cogent contributions here, I must suggest that he had lousy script writers.
Jack (12:46:34) :
“History is not going to be kind to the pro-global warming crowd.”
Michael E. Mann (0926010576.txt):
“I trust that history will give us all proper credit for what we’re doing here.”
Ric Werme (13:16:07) :
Perhaps Ed would like to refer to this scientist:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/26/bulgarian_space_boffin_aliens/
Or with the astronomers at the Vatican:
http://www.examiner.com/x-2383-Honolulu-Exopolitics-Examiner~y2009m11d12-Vatican-prepares-for-extraterrestrial-disclosure
In light of this kind of discussion I suppose the issue of Easy Bake ovens draws little heat…
Indiana Bones, let me get this straight. Electric vehicles reduce pollution. OK, I buy that. But, where does the electricity come from? It does not just magically appear at your wall socket. There is a fundamental law of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Obstructionist “environmentalists” hate coal and nuclear power generation (for political reasons, BTW). Wind and solar can’t service the demand. They both are simply too inefficient or cost effective to compete with hydrocarbon or nuclear based energy generation.
Check this out: old non-producing oil fields have regenerated, to the surprise of geologists, oil companies and chemical engineers. It’s proving that long-chain hydrocarbon molecules are a result of natural geologic/chemical processes that are still not well understood. In addition, the media reports discoveries of new and massive petroleum deposits on a quarterly basis.
New technologies have been developed for clean coal and reactor designs have been dramatically improved since the fifties designs at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
We’ve got more than enough energy resources right here at home (USA) to provide the power needed for non-polluting electric vehicles until fuel cell or fusion (remember Mr. Fusion in “Back to the Future 2?). It’s the political obstructionists who hate free market Capitalism that are standing in the way.
According to Ed Begley there is no such thing as plate tectonics. Since it wasn’t proposed by a geologist in a peer reviewed paper it can’t exist.
Of course, this just demonstrates pure cognitive dissonance by Begley. Since his favorite religion is now in shambles, this is his way of dealing with it. Pure denial.
Invariant (13:25:58) : Obviously it will take some time to reverse engineer how it’s supposed to work, however a couple of skilled FORTRAN programmers together with a couple of climate experts should not use more than a couple of weeks to determine exactly what has been done. All they need is a FORTRAN compiler and some coffee – it’s not that many files…
And it only took “Harry Readme” three years full time (and we don’t know that he ever did get it to work “right”…)
REPLY: Not yet, the trick is finding the right Fortran compiler. Often a challenge. – A
I’ve had pretty good results with f77 under Linux for the old stuff and g95 for the newer “f90” stuff. It’s not the ‘getting it to compile’ that is the hard part, though. It’s the “how do you glue it all together and make it run – Some Assembly Required ” part…
It only took me about 6 months to get GIStemp to run, and it was supposed to be runnable. This is a semi-random set selected to fulfill a FOIA request (IMHO it was the FOIA archive that got accidentally released) and not supposed to be a fully runnable archive. Still valuable but might be missing a few screws 😉
Optimizer (22:09:19) : Sounds like the FORTRAN angle is being worked, but how is the team doing with the IDL code I’ve heard mention of?
‘Cause I’ve been crunching numbers with IDL pretty regularly for about 20 years, if anybody needs a hand decyphering that stuff. (Before that I used FORTRAN.)
I’ve never used IDL and have no real idea how to use it. I’ve seen comments that Linux includes an analog GDL and that it’s a graphics language of some kind. Given that I’m “graphics challenged” and had planned on learning some kind of graphing package to rectify that:
a) I could use advice eventually, probably best over at “my place” chiefio.wordpress.com
b) Most pressing: Is GDL a good replacement for IDL ?
c) Are my above stated beliefs truthful or am I about to pursue a flock of untamed Canadian aviators?
PR:
Not every environ mentalist rules out clean coal, nuke or conversion to NG.
The Russians have been writing about abiotic oil for 30 or so years. And we haven’t even begun to talk overunity.
What’s interesting is not so much that he has been suckered in to the warming orthodoxy, but that he then so vociferously defends it. He rabidly defends something that he admits he doesn’t really understand.
That’s the difference between science and politics.
Real scientists don’t defend a scientific theory in that manner as they’re open to the possibility it may be wrong, or that new data may change things. He defends global warming so maniacally because it’s a political movement that ties in with his political views.
By the way, there’s nothing wrong with lightbulbs giving out heat, if you live in a cold climate such that you need to heat the house anyway. If turning on all the lights generates, say, 10% of your required heat, then your furnace will run at 90% of the energy level to maintain the same temperature. It’s common sense, which is not common in warmist thinking.
If the real concern is that the heat is wasted, then that would apply to heat from all sources, not just lightbulbs. The real issue then is to raise the thermal efficiency standard of buildings.
If one were living in a house with the high thermal efficiency of PassivHaus, it might actually be desirable to use a few incandescent lightbulbs as distributed heating sources as well as for lighting.
Peer Review
Hey Ed, the “settled fact” that Saddam had WMD’s and could launch in 45 minutes was comprehensively peer reviewed in cabinets, congresses, parliaments, councils and intelligence committees in the US and UK. (In the UK House of Lords it was literally peer reviewed). Ever heard of corruption of the peer review process?
Saddam also had his rather poor choices peer reviewed by the party members, as no doubt did Stalin and Mao. I’m sure Hitler also conducted some peer reviews with Himmler, Goebels and Goering.
E.M.Smith (19:46:49) :
I’ve never heard of GDL, but IIRC “IDL” is for “Interactive Data Language”. You can certainly produce some nice graphical representations, but that’s not what it’s all about.
As an example, you type “plot,x,y” into the user interface, with x and y being vectors of the same length, and a window pops up with a graph of x vs y. That’s the “interactive” part, but equally important is that you can easily operate on vectors and arrays. In fact, you typed “plot,sin(x),y” instead, it would take the sine of each individual element of the vector, x, and plot THAT vs. y instead. No “for” loops, no muss, no fuss.
I believe it’s been popular within some signal processing and image processing circles, because it’s so easy to do operations on data. It’s also almost identical to another language, called “PV-WAVE” whose makers literally bought the rights from the IDL people to create their own “dialect”, of sorts. My impression, however, is that MATLAB may be supplanting IDL, even in those areas.
It’s actually fairly easy for non-IDL users to look at the code and get a pretty good idea about what’s going on with just a little prompting. I have often handed off IDL code to C programmers to translate into C, and there usually aren’t too many things they find too mysterious.
I guess I better check out chiefio.wordpress.com!
Mark Steyn’s column in The Orange County Register “Cooking the books on climate peer, reviewed, climate” rather effectively dismantles hyper-Ed and the peer-review process:
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/peer-221438-reviewed-climate.html