Bill Nye’s Embarrassing Face-off with Tucker Carlson on Climate Change

Good for Tucker Carlson. Very seldom are Global Warming followers required to give evidence for their views. Very seldom are they asked the hard questions for Man-Made Global Warming.

PS – Happy Texas Independence Day! March 2, 1836.

David R. Brumbelow

Nye is sort of a lightweight, a celebrity rather than a scientist. Asking him to defend global warming is akin to asking Matt Damon to testify in congress on sex trafficking. In other words, how he performed in that interview is no reflection whatsoever on the veracity of global warming.

I confess to not at all understanding why conservative Christians have such angst with global warming.

….is probably not the issue at hand for the most part. My concern is that every proposed “solution” to a climatological crisis by groups like the IPCC involves giving more power to government—the guys that gave us Love Canal, Lake Baikal, and a host of environmental disasters around the Warsaw Pact nations and the world. It’s like solving problems with automotive design by firing guys at Toyota and hiring the old engineering staff from Yugo.

Also worth noting is that Nye is really probably a better spokesman for the science than we’d guess, though I’d grant that as a mechanical engineer, his “certificates” really don’t convey any more authority than my own EE degrees and ASQ certifications and the like. The reason he’s an excellent spokesman for the science is that over the years, the science has been politicized, and Nye is at his heart a politician, not a scientist.

To wit, when climatologists argue “consensus”, that’s politics, not science. When they refuse to share data, that’s politics, not science. When they have misplaced climate monitoring stations (70% of them by some estimates) to expose them to greater heat and replace known good data with known bad data (buoy ocean measurements with shipborne measurements), that’s politics, not science.

Nye is an especially good spokesman for the theory given that while he claims to believe emissions are going to irreparably harm the earth, he maintains two homes and spends a lot of time flying around on private jets. Again, politics, not science. Scientists often have heard about an application called “WebEx” that allows a person to share data with another without using a plane ticket.

Maybe we should call him “Bill Nye the political hack.” It would at least be more accurate. But again, he’s a great spokesman for the consensus view in climatology along with guys like Al Gore.

And for reference, I’m not totally opposed to the consensus view. I’ve looked at absorption spectra myself, and the greenhouse effect can be real. I’d actually support a tax on fossil fuels to encourage them to be used efficiently. But that said, there are simply too many games being played in climatology to take them seriously.

[GregH]

I confess to not at all understanding why conservative Christians have such angst with global warming.

My beef is that this has become a religion to most scientist and has stopped becoming science. It also points to the liberal progressive ideology that is increasingly becoming prevalent. That is that 1) science is dominate over everything, and 2) if you don’t believe what I believe is right, you will be attacked with extreme ferocity.

Case in point, is Judith Curry. She is regarded as a pre-eminent climatologist, and as soon as she began questioning the climate models she was branded a heretic and shunned by the scientific community. Even though she believes in climate change, has been on the international advisory committees around this, as soon as she begins to question that science is most likely over-emphasizing the human impact, she is booted off everything.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/i-was-tossed-out-of-the-tribe-climat…

It’s worth noting that whenever Nye is confronted by someone who knows how to debate and use evidence well, he gets thrashed. For example, after he debated Ken Ham, I read columns by secularists lamenting the fact that Nye clearly wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. My kids saw part of it and noted that Nye wasn’t even trying to present evidence or arguments.

Which is really weird—as an engineer, he ought to be able to use logic and evidence, and he’s even got a few patents. The heat flow and thermodynamics he learned in school ought to serve him well in understanding climatology in particular. But for whatever reason, when he gets on his soapbox, he seems to think that the rules of logic and evidence don’t apply to him, perhaps because he’s gotten away with grandstanding in most of the venues he visits for so long. And so whenever he “gets in the ring with a real boxer”, he ends up (metaphorically) looking at the lights and a jailbird counting to him.

For my undergrad degree in Political Science, I took 2 classes in communism. Classic communist tactics: Re-education camps (required “sensitivity” training), public shaming/shunning, marginalize/eliminate opponents, and “We’re doing this for the good of the people”.

I’m not a science guy. I’ve never liked it. I’m reading a lengthly, technical book about the Bible and geology right now, written by old-earth Christian scientists with earned PhD’s in geology. They wrote their book specifically to counter young-earth literature. There is a lot of technical stuff in there. I ordered Snelling’s massive two-volume geology text via inter-library loan, and plan to read that next, to compare arguments. The OEC guys have good arguments. I’m sure Snelling does, too. For me, this is a fun journey, because I’m convinced the Scripture is clear on a six-day creation.

Basically, I think AiG has it right to say that it really comes down to how you interpret the evidence. What are your presuppositions going in? This colors how you interpret things. Christians need to recognize that (and many do - thanks AiG). But, secularists (like Nye) need to be willing to admit their own bias at the beginning - and account for it when they make arguments.

I say that to say this - we can throw competing facts at each other all day long. I don’t have the time, training or desire to delve that far into the weeds on climate change or geology. I want to be reasonably informed, read a responsible book or two pro and con, and move on.

The best thing somebody can do going in is be honest about their presuppositions. We need more Christians, like Mark Smith, who have advanced training in the various sciences. We need people with God-centered worldviews to be out there, studying these issues and bringing a God-honoring mindset to the table to interpret this evidence for churches.

Global warming is a crock. there is much evidence that, in fact, the earth is cooling (e.g. Antarctica). There is some evidence that the earth is entering what is called a ‘solar minimum’ wherein overall the temperature is down but this causes unusual patterns in certain areas.

Sometimes I wonder if the heavy emphasis today on climate and warming is related to the climate changes and “warming” described in Revelation - If perhaps this is connected to the development of global political and economic structures which will be used by the antichrist during the tremendous climate judgments described in Revelation.

It’s probably a stretch to call the whole enterprise a “crock”. I’ve been watching it from a distance for a while, and here are a couple of basics.

The “greenhouse effect” is a misnamed description of the fact that certain gases absorb and reflect energy from solar and other radiation differently than others. It’s misnamed because a greenhouse actually works by preventing hot air from diffusing into cool air, and has little to do with whether the air or dirt inside absorbs sunlight differently from the dirt or air outside. It is very real—any chemistry professor will be able to show you graphs that show how, say, carbon dioxide or methane operates differently from nitrogen. For that matter, a bit of “google-fu” will get you graphs online.

The difference between “greenhouse effect” and “global warming” or “climate change” is that global warming requires that the net effect of extra gases of certain types is positive, and this is the trillion dollar question; is this true? Does the earth have negative feedback that puts carbon dioxide and water vapor into growing plants primarily, or does the increased atmospheric warmth release more carbon dioxide (etc..) into the atmosphere to cause positive feedback? At this point, most models overestimate warming significantly, so the “consensus” appears to be that it’s a lot worse than the data shows.

“Climate change” (vs. “global warming”) is an adaptation climatologists have made to this fact—the results are not monotonic as they used to predict, so they change the theory somewhat to allow for wider variance in climate. This is not illegitimate, but it can be a political dodge at times.

A point where I clearly agree with Paul is that if we don’t know how positive or negative the feedback is, we simultaneously do not know whether our emissions are going to be a smaller, or larger, driver of climate than what’s going on with our planet and that yellow ball in the sky. But that does leave us with a point for action; if we see tropical plants preserved in North Dakota coal, and if we see evidence of glaciers into northern Indiana, neither caused by my pickup truck’s emissions, we would infer that we might do well to be able to cope with a climate that is somewhat warmer or colder than the one we enjoy now.

And at that point, we would refer to Wally’s poly-sci education and ask ourselves which governmental policies allow this—and we would avoid those that allow mental patients to freeze to death at hospitals in the tropics. In other words, we’d avoid those that the IPCC endorses.

[WallyMorris]

For my undergrad degree in Political Science, I took 2 classes in communism. Classic communist tactics: Re-education camps (required “sensitivity” training), public shaming/shunning, marginalize/eliminate opponents, and “We’re doing this for the good of the people”.

And of course, this never happens in a church ;)

In a church? NEVER … !

I wonder if anyone else notices what is going on here. It is typical for sure, especially when you stick fundamentalists in a postmodern environment.

We have a guy claiming conspiracy theory and hinting that scientists are communists. We have a theologian who boldly and dogmatically calls global warming “crock” even while there are oh thousands of scientists that study global warming for a living that disagree with him.

With their bias against anything new, a fundamentalist armed with a few articles he reads on the internet is a dangerous thing.

As for me, I am going to side with the experts, not believing them unequivocally, but at least giving them the benefit of the doubt and certainly more credence than armchair scientists.

“Step on the grass and shoot a deer (during hunting season of course); it’s a disposable planet” John Piper in “Future Grace”.

[GregH]

I wonder if anyone else notices what is going on here. It is typical for sure, especially when you stick fundamentalists in a postmodern environment.

We have a guy claiming conspiracy theory and hinting that scientists are communists. We have a theologian who boldly and dogmatically calls global warming “crock” even while there are oh thousands of scientists that study global warming for a living that disagree with him.

With their bias against anything new, a fundamentalist armed with a few articles they read on the internet is a dangerous thing.

As for me, I am going to side with the experts, not believing them unequivocally, but at least giving them the benefit of the doubt and certainly more credence than armchair scientists.

Again, that’s the “appeal to authority” fallacy, and the most interesting thing about it is that the subject of this thread is not among the recognized authorities, but is rather a spokesman, so something of an irrelevant point to boot. Note also that you’re indulging appeal to popularity (“thousands of scientists…that disagree with him”) and indulging a couple of ad hominem attacks like “armchair scientists”, “conspiracy theory”, and “bias against anything new.”

With a record like that, Greg, I’d caution you against making the accusation that others are anti-intellectual, and I’d encourage you to take a good look at the data as well. I and others have provided some very testable references to the history of recent climatology which, if true, cast doubt on whether it’s being practiced as science or politics. Check us out on this—use your google-fu.