Bill Nye

Bill Nye, ook wel ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’ genoemd, is een bekende Amerikaanse wetenschapspopularisator, komiek, televisiepresentator, acteur, schrijver, wetenschapper en voormalig werktuigbouwkundige. Nye is vooral bekend als de presentator van ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’, een wetenschapsprogramma voor kinderen (1993–98) en vanwege zijn vele daaropvolgende optredens in populaire media. Hij is tevens een extreme klimaatalarmist, die in een interview heeft verklaard open te staan voor de gedachte van gevangenisstraf voor degenen die afwijken van de klimaat’consensus’.

Tucker Carlson is een bekende Amerikaanse TV-host van ‘Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight’. Onlangs was Bill Nye te gast bij Tucker Carlson. Gewoonlijk laten TV-interviewers zich afschepen met alarmistische prietpraatjes van klimaatbevlogen ‘deskundigen’, of degenen die daarvoor moeten doorgaan. Maar Tucker Carlson bleef dóórvragen, waardoor Bill Nye in grote verlegenheid werd gebracht en begon te fabuleren over allerlei virtuele verschrikkingen van de opwarming van de aarde (eigenlijk: atmosfeer), die maar niet wil komen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKMxmYcfw8Q

Onder de titel, ‘Bill Nye’s Embarrassing Face-off with Tucker Carlson on Climate Change’, deed Julie Kelly voor ‘The National Review’ daarover verslag.

It didn’t end well for the ‘Science Guy.’ Climate-change alarmists who have been largely unchallenged by the media over the past decade have finally met their match in Fox News host Tucker Carlson. And it ain’t pretty.

Since the premiere of his new nighttime show, Carlson has frequently confronted the dogma of man-made global warming, pushing “experts” to cite data and evidence to back up their claims rather than allowing them to repeat well-worn platitudes about a scientific consensus and the planet’s impending doom. …

But it was Carlson’s takedown of Bill Nye the Science Guy, a television personality and celebrity climate promoter, that exposes the intellectual chicanery behind this crusade. During an interview on Carlson’s show on February 27, Nye goofily claimed that people who question claims about global warming suffer from cognitive dissonance: “We in the science community are looking for information why climate change deniers, or extreme skeptics, do not accept the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.”

Nye went on to say that denial is denial, the evidence is overwhelming, and the question of whether humans are causing climate change is “not an open question, it’s a settled question.”

Now usually when these charges are made by someone who purports to possess expertise in climate science (Nye has a degree in mechanical engineering), the interviewer acquiesces, immediately surrendering the debate to the climate activist. But Carlson wouldn’t back down: “To what degree is climate change caused by human activity? … Is it 100 percent, is it 74.3 percent? If it’s settled science, please tell us to what degree human activity is responsible.”

Nye started to get uncomfortable, well aware he had no certain answer to this so-called settled question, since climate scientists cannot agree how much human activity contributes to climate change. … This is when Nye went off the rails, refusing to specify the degree to which people cause climate change and instead blaming us for the speed that climate change is happening: “Instead of happening at time scales of millions of years or let’s say 15,000 years, it’s happening on a time scale of decades and now years.” Or, you know, whatever.

He went on to tell Carlson humans are “100 percent” responsible for the rate of climate change and it’s happening catastrophically fast. This spun him into a really weird (and unscientific) spot where he started lamenting the fact that global warming has caused us to avoid another Ice Age — perhaps unaware that most people would consider freezing to death a horrible fate — and told Carlson another Ice Age “ain’t gonna happen because of you and me.” Yay CO2! …

Nye babbled about the weather back in 1750, grape growers in Europe, pesticides in the Midwest, and something about pine-bark beetles in Wyoming. (This is another common tactic of climate alarmists, they talk over you while throwing out unverifiable factoids that make them sound informed when they’re usually just making stuff up.)

While it’s easy to dismiss Nye’s interview as a kooky one-off appearance from an unprepared celebrity scientist, he sadly represents the lack of integrity by most climate-change pushers. They move goalposts, manufacture facts, resist honest debate, and resort to smear tactics when confronted with specific questions they cannot answer.

As Carlson said to Nye, “You really don’t know, and you bully people who ask questions.” Good thing Carlson is there to bully back for once.

Lees verder hier.

Voor mijn eerdere bijdragen over klimaat en aanverwante zaken zie hier, hier, hier, hier en hier.