Jimmy Kimmel called those who question the narrative on “climate change” “insane.” Count his friends and former co-hosts Ben Stein and Adam Carolla among the free-thinking deranged.
But for economist Ben Stein giving Kimmel his start in television, few would recognize the name Jimmy Kimmel today.
On Monday, May 2nd, talk show host Kim
mel aired clips of scientists dropping the F-bomb after hundreds of movie theaters showed CFACT’s film Climate Hustle. Kimmel went on a rant that lasted two nights in which he stated that anyone who questions what they are told about climate change is basically “insane.”
To Kimmel, comparing real world temperature data to computer models, or checking claims that today’s weather is “extreme” against historical weather data is the equivalent of “denying” the existence of “yogurt.”
Kimmel deployed the secret weapon of lazy comedians everywhere, profanity; guaranteed to get a cheap laugh with no danger of the writers working up a sweat.
Hey Jimmy, why don’t you have your friend, mentor and well known climate questioner Ben Stein on your show and ask him?
A young Jimmy Kimmel got his big break in television in 1997 when he was hired to co-host the game show Win Ben Stein’s Money on Comedy Central for the princely starting salary of $550 per episode. Before that Kimmel had tried to get a career going in radio where he never achieved much success.
Kimmel’s got talent, but talent counts for nothing without a break. Win Ben Stein’s Money was the break Kimmel needed. Before long Stein and Kimmel were sharing an Emmy Award for best game show host.
The show was a lot of fun. Contestants would compete against each other, and then Stein himself, to win cash from a pool of money. What they didn’t win went to Stein. Kimmel and Stein would poke plenty of fun at each other, but the underlying premise that made it work is that Stein is both brilliant and a veritable storehouse of knowledge. Stein’s erudition is t
ough to deny.
In 1998, Ben Stein challenged the correspondents of The Daily Show to win his money and soundly defeated them. Stein defeated Stephen Colbert in the final round 6-4. We doubt any would have predicted at the time that two of the three legacy networks future late-night hosts were on Stein’s show that day.
Stein has great admiration for Kimmel’s talent and smarts. The two are friends who remain in regular contact.
However, Ben Stein, the author of numerous books on personal growth and finance, is in no hurry to redistribute his money, or yours, to advance climate policies that won’t meaningfully alter the temperature of the Earth.
In December, at the time of the UN climate talks in Paris (CFACT was there!), Stein appeared on the Neil Cavuto show and asked, “What if man-made climate change is a fraud?” After presenting the Green credentials he earned for having written the first speech on The “Clean Air Act” for the Nixon administration, Stein stated that, “Climate change is very much in question. The Earth stopped heating up about 25 years ago. The data that shows that the Earth is the hottest it’s been in 200 years or whatever, is very much in question because the data from 200 years ago is extremely specious. Yes, the polar ice cap in the North Pole is melting, but the polar ice cap in the South Pole is getting very very much bigger very rapidly… I can remember very well in the sixties and early seventies when we were fearing a new ice age. What if by any chance all this climate change: a – is not happening, or b – if it is happening is not man-made, or c- if it is man-made if it’s not coming from the U.S. but coming from China and India… and we’re going to crucify the American worker and the American businessman in the name of a false goal? … It’s not irrefutable.”
The Chinese “are the one’s ginning out all these pollutants that are supposedly causing global warming and they haven’t even promised to stop,” Stein continued, “they’ve just promised they’ll consider it at some point down the road.”
In April of 2016, Stein appeared again on Fox and asked, “why this hatred of the fossil fuel companies?” He answered his own question, “there is something deeply sick and psychologically awful about it. I think it has to do with the envy of the intellectual chattering class.”
Jimmy Kimmel should heed Ben Stein’s real concern. “I am more worried about saving political freedom,” Stein told Cavuto, “that appears to me to be the real thing we ar
e in danger of losing.”
While he’s at it Kimmel might want to check in with another close friend and his former co-host at The Man Show, Adam Carolla, who described the idea that mankind is the primary driver of any climate change as a “bizarre form of narcissism.”
So how’s that for a show? Kimmel, Stein and Carolla discuss the climate and we’ll learn who’s politically correct and who’s factually correct. If you really want to open some minds and learn something invite Marc Morano, the host of Climate Hustle, on the show.
Follow that up with scientists. Match up Kimmel’s group with Doctors Roy Spencer, Dick Lindzen, Judith Curry, Fred Singer, Nils Axel Morner, Freeman Dyson, John Christy, Will Happer and David Legates for a start.
If anyone mouths off about flat Earth or denying the moon landing, throw in Apollo astronauts Walt Cunningham and Jack Schmitt for some real perspective. While you’ve got them in the studio, ask them how the Obama administration turned NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies into a propaganda organ for the climate campaign. Are America’s pioneers in space “insane” too?
Sorry you’ve been hustled about the climate, Jimmy. If you’re as smart as Ben Stein says you are, and willing to open your mind and host a fair discussion, you’ll learn. Once you learn the facts hopefully you won’t be so easily hustled again.
If you learn anything, Jimmy, how about this: If you insist on insulting the intelligence of one entire side of a public policy debate in order to silence them, be prepared to hurt some very fine and credible people; including people you know, respect, and care about. That’s “insane.”
This is all so simple if you know the facts:
CO2 is a “trace gas” in air and is insignificant by definition. It absorbs 1/7th as much IR, heat energy, from sunlight per molecule as water vapor which has 188 times as many molecules capturing 1200 times as much heat producing 99.8% of all “global warming.” CO2 does only 0.2% of it. For this we should destroy our economy, starve the world, cause hunger, riots and wars?
There is no “greenhouse effect” in an atmosphere. A greenhouse has a solid, clear cover trapping heat. The atmosphere does not trap heat as gas molecules cannot form surfaces to work as greenhouses that admit and reflect energy depending on sun angle. Gases do not form surfaces as their molecules are not in contact.
The Medieval Warming from 800 AD to 1300 AD Micheal Mann erased for his “hockey stick” was several Fahrenheit degrees warmer than anything “global warmers” fear. It was 500 years of world peace and abundance, longest ever.
Vostock Ice Core data analysis show CO2 rises followed temperature by 800 years 19 times in 450,000 years. Therefore temperature change is cause and CO2 change is effect. This alone refutes the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.
Methane is called “a greenhouse gas 20 to 500 times more potent than CO2,” by Heidi Cullen and Jim Hansen, but it is not per the energy absorption chart at the American Meteorological Society. It has an absorption profile very similar to nitrogen which is classified “transparent” to IR, heat waves and is only present to 18 ppm. “Vegans” blame methane in cow flatulence for global warming in their war against meat consumption.
Carbon combustion generates 80% of our energy. Control and taxing of carbon would give the elected ruling class more power and money than anything since the Magna Carta of 1215 AD.
Most scientists and science educators work for tax supported institutions. They are eager to help government raise more money for them and they love being seen as “saving the planet.”
Read the whole story in “Vapor Tiger” at Amazon.com, Kindle $2.99 including a free Kindle reading program for your computer.
Google “Two Minute Conservative” for clarity.
Regarding the fact that the Medieval Warming Period was a global phenomenon and likely warmer than now….
If the 1,000+ peer-reviewed temperature studies, which represent the work of investigators and organizations from 40+ countries is not sufficient (links to all via co2science.org) for Kimmel, perhaps the 6,000 boreholes around the globe will help. (Boreholes perhaps not as accurate at temperature measurements, but very good at demonstrating that the MWP trend was global.)
Then there is the recent exposure by two receding glaciers (Mendenhall in Alaska, and another in the Alps) of splintered tree trunks still upright in their original position, the former dated about 1,000 years ago, the latter, about 4,000 years ago. Both demonstrate that trees have not been growing at that latitude for a very long time. Furthermore, trees are not known to grow anywhere near glaciers. Then there are the antique vineyards, also discovered at latitudes where grapes can no longer be grown. This evidence (which CANNOT be brushed aside as “anecdotal”) is DENIED by the alarmists because they cannot answer why it is cooler now than back then.
There is no empirical evidence showing that co2 has EVER (even over geologic periods) had any impact on our climate’s temprature, and co2 has been considerably higher than now during most of this planet’s existence.
The alarmist base their entire claim on two recent decades of warming, a miniscule (so insignificant) duration. Our current warming (such as it is) began NOT in the mid 1800s, but, by definition, at the bottom of the little ice age which took place in the mid 1600s. That’s 200 years of warming BEFORE co2 level began is rise (and also 200 years BEFORE our industrial revolution). … But it gets worse for the alarmists because co2 annual rate of increase (about 2ppmv) would have had to continue for about another century before it could possibly have impacted temperature measurements. That pushes natural warming from 1650 to about 1950. But… there was a mild cooling from the 40s to the mid 70s. The WARMING has taken place completely between about 1975 and 1998. Both our weather satellites show no further temperature increase right up to now, and that’s inspite of an El Nino which cranked up before midyear 2015 and is likely still underway.
The likely upcoming La Nina (a cooling) should cause even more consternation among those claiming their “science” is “settled”. That’s why they’re in such a hurry. They want to be able to claim that their actions have reversed the warming trend.
Kimmel: why do you suppose that neither NOAA nor NASA (both of whom using terrestrial data) NEVER even mention the two federally funded weather satellite data (which agrees quite well with balloon data)? Why did these government agencies last year quietly attempt to over-ride ocean data from 3,000 ARGO buoys (designed specifically for that job) by re-introducing older and dubious sea surface temperature data with known biases?
You are correct and all the temperature estimations for the Medieval warming, as there were no thermometers from 800 AD to 1300 AD, are from plant records of where they grew. Every plant has a specific number of “degree-days” needed to complete its season, make fruit or grain and knowing where they grew tells you what the daily temperatures had to be.
During that time they were growing wine grapes in northern England and that cannot be done now, for example.
What’s annoying about this is that alarmists want to know which of those studies, specifically, refute their claim. The real point is where are their studies backing their claim? After all, it only takes a half dozen studies remote from each other, so covering much of the globe, to show that the MWP was global. Not only are there many more than that, but confirming studies continue to come in almost weekly to co2science.org.
Rather ironic that these studies (not based on casual opinion or a poll) are by investigators, so would appear to provide an actual (and useful) “consensus”. The folks who pretend to understand scientific method but refuse to accept this evidence have to be considered LIARs.
Even Phil Jones, one of the IPCC players (at least during the ClimateGate scenario) has been quoted as saying “If the MWP was global that’s a whole different ballgame”. Strange, that a lay person (such as me) has no difficulty understanding the implications this evidence, when supposed experts continue to doubt……
It has been shown by the Vostok Ice Core Studies and plant growth/crop records in the far east (China) that the Medieval Warming period was indeed world wide. And, that was well known at the time Phil Jones made that comment so he was either exposing his own ignorance or arrogance, or both.