If Ed Begley’s peers — Hollywood liberals — were to review his performance on Fox, they would probably give it a thumbs-up. I see a zealot who is having his faith tested and unable to keep his composure in the process. The emails in question contain evidence that the climate scientists at East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit have cooked the books on “peer review” literature. They have deliberately made it harder for skeptics to challenge them in peer review publications because they don’t want the challenge. They have also refused, over and over again, to release the data and programming code that drive their models — this is the information that is needed to do a proper “peer review” study of their analyses. So, when Begley is yelling about relying on “peer review” studies by PhD’s he is demonstrating his own ignorance of the email scandal. Consider this excerpt from an email by a global warming alarmist, who also happens to be the head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, to a climate scientist at Penn State, Michael Mann:
This is one of the most damning aspects of all this. The very scientists who have been saying the debate is over are the same ones who have made sure that the opposition cannot have its say in peer review journals. They then turn around and say that because there are no credible criticisms published in peer reviewed journals the debate is over. Talk about circular, and tortuous, logic. Begley’s insistence that only climate scientists, and not meteorologists or physicists or geologists or any other kind of scientists, be allowed to speak to the issue of global warming is another way to maintain the illusion of scientific consensus. Without political support for global warming, climate scientists would see massive cuts to their funding — and salaries. They have an enormous stake in maintaining political support for action on climate change, just as the much, much smaller group of scientists funded by oil companies have a stake in seeing the consensus overturned. Geologists and meteorologists and physicists have much less to lose from the issue being decided one way or the other — they are the closest we can get to independent, objective arbiters. And the people with the most to lose if it turns out that global warming is based on bogus science are lunatics like Ed Begley Jr. who have turned their lives upside down to try and lead the coal-fired masses by their fanatical, compost-powered example. Surface temperatures and ocean temperatures are falling, but Chicago would have to be under a mile of ice before this guy conceded that, yes, he’s wasted years of his life worshiping the false prophets of Britain’s Climate Research Unit.
