Evidently, the only certain aspect of so-called “Global Warming” – renamed “Anthropogenic Climate Change” because its promoters couldn’t point to any real, significant warming without displaying what looks like a disdain for real data – is how hot under the collar Bill Nye “The Science Guy” becomes when anyone shows him any degree of skepticism. In fact, he just confirmed how angry he gets about people who still retain the temerity of independent thinking and a desire for more convincing evidence of the politically charged climate change theory than he has been willing to offer.
Appearing on a religiously-themed, three-minute NBC video torture piece entitled “Bill Nye Takes On Climate Deniers”, Mr. Nye was quite candid about his disdain for those who aren’t willing to bow in supplication to the great Climate Change sky god or pay tax indulgences to the Climate Change cult.
His response to the question of “Do people ever treat you with hostility?” displays not only a lack of interest in discussing science with people who want more evidence, but an almost Delphic or Platonic arrogance that he, among a select few, bothers to look at or understand data.
Yes! It’s nothing but hostility. The big one’s ‘Bill’s not a scientist.’ Okay! I can read a graph! So can YOU!
Which, in addition to his clear stress on the last word, reveals two important things. First, Bill assumes that anyone who does not agree with him is either not bothering to look at data or is not reading the data properly, the way he appears to think he does. The second is his underlying implication that one does not have to be a lettered scientist to read data, which actually undercuts his earlier implication that those who might be reading charts aren’t reading them correctly. If he, as a non-scientist, can claim to read charts properly, who is he to say that we skeptical non-scientists cannot do the same? What gives him the wisdom of all non-scientists to claim that those who of his ilk disagree with him either aren’t reading charts, or aren’t reading them properly?
Bill might want to consider that our skepticism is derived in part from recognition of the empirical hurdles inherent in aligning 17th Century temperature data with temps taken via contemporary instruments. Where hundredths of a degree (Fahrenheit or Celcius) differences in temp make a profound difference in estimating change in temp, it’s pretty easy to note that any empirically-minded person would never mix data from before the mid-20th Century with modern readings.
But there’s more than that. Nye’s focus on charts is a profound mistake, because many skeptics initially became skeptical, and have grown more skeptical, of the force-fed “Climate Change” narrative precisely because of charts.
One of the earliest visuals to set off bells, Bill, was Al Gore’s sad excuse for a “chart” in his sad excuse for a so-called “documentary,” the 2006 hammer to the head “An Inconvenient Truth”. It was already known by some skeptics as the “hockey stick graph” because anyone with knowledge of history could see that the graph conveniently began after the Medieval Warming Period had cooled off, and that, if Gore and his team had been interested in openness and discourse, rather than leading the witnesses, they would have shown that the low temperatures Gore claims are destroyed by the invention and use of the internal combustion engine were actually much higher a few years, decades, centuries earlier. This visual manipulation to drive a causal link between use of carbon fuels and higher temps is so obvious that even kids get it in milliseconds once they see a larger timeframe – something I’ve done with students, and which Gore and Nye do not.
And that Gore chart – the one based on Michael Mann’s hard-to-believe work? It not only deceived by omission, if one looks closely, it belies its own claim that carbon emissions are driving temperature changes. Anyone who pauses the video or looks at a screencap from it can see that on the graph there are two lines, one being C02 emissions and the other temperature. Given the Gore/Nye/Climate Cult claim, one would expect to see rises in C02 preceding temperature increases. But as a general rule, one can see on the graph the exact opposite. The temperature changes precede the C02 increases in the atmosphere.
As Shaviv notes for ScienceBits.com (along with providing a screencap of the graph to follow):
In all cases where there is a good enough resolution, one finds that the CO2 lags behind the temperature by typically several hundred to a thousand years. Namely, the basic climate driver which controls the temperature cannot be that of CO2.
Given the fact that Nye’s righteous argument is based in no small part on this incorrect assumption, and the fact that neither he nor Gore have never addressed the reversal in possible drives, perhaps we who have bothered to look at charts can read them more precisely or more honestly than they?
And perhaps he might want to listen and discuss…
He might even want to chat with Lord Christopher Monckton, a mathematician who noticed statistical anomalies in the data being pushed by the Climate Cult and who became interested in investigating their claims. Monckton’s work has exposed many questionable “charts” released by people like Mann, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Gore, NASA, NOAA, and others. He’s even revealed the questionable way in which many politically connected scientists appear to be changing temp readings from the early 20th Century to make it appear cooler, thus allowing them to claim that as the world has industrialized, even though there is no appreciable and historically unprecedented warming to note, the relative temp changes will appear to be increasing throughout the 1900s.
In fact, Monckton became such a thorn in the side of the Climate Cult that he was disinvited from an international gathering that was going to push for more carbon taxes and government controls on people.
Monckton’s ribald and gutsy response…?
He parachuted into the event to get past the perimeter guards.
All of this seems to have blown past Bill Nye in his rapid race to get onto NBC and let off some steam. But implying ignorance on the part of skeptics was not enough for Bill. He had to compare them to Flat-Earthers.
It’s almost like they’re on the ‘world is flat’ camp. The world’s not flat. Humans are causing climate change.
Which is not only insulting, it is, as I recently reported for MRCTV, precisely what two major new studies show is wrong. As many of Nye’s supposedly “ignorant” skeptics like I have been saying for nearly two decades, solar activity seems to be the main driver of overall long-term temperature changes.
And yet he continues on this path and gets easy air time from NBC, even going so far as to claim that:
Other countries are going to develop technologies for producing electricity, especially, that are going to out-compete you, if you pretend it’s not happening.
And here we see one of the key problems with Bill’s approach.
Notice how he frames the idea of “competition” within the sphere of nationalism. How he places it squarely under the control of national industrial policy, something he might not like to recall or be informed is precisely what Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler did in their collectivist states under the names “fascism” and “communism”, and something many top-down economies have done to their eventual downfall.
From Japan’s government pushing computer chip manufacturing in the 1980s, only to discover that, thanks to competition, profits in chips became marginally lower and lower while profits in the software (ideas) going on the chips grew and grew, to Stalin’s infamous “five-year plans”, politicians dictating to people how economies should be run, and promising to them great benefits through the political force of taking tax money to subsidize a certain kind of industry -- or energy creation – always prove themselves to be huge failures. They simply cannot test products and services and prices and resources in the daily, hourly, minute-to-minute way market participants can.
And when governments make their failing decisions, they harm everyone. When market participants make errors, they harm only those participants and small numbers of others, allowing still more people to learn, withdraw their money, and decide what is more valuable and efficient for them.
In fact, as I’ve mentioned to students in my economics classes when we discuss environmentalism, one cannot really define a “problem” unless one allows individuals to define it themselves. This requires people to have private property retention and to be able to decide where their money will go.
The environment is best husbanded when people are allowed to control their own property and to demand damages from those who harm them.
But the centralization of government decisions, and even the centralizing tendencies of the dinosaur network media focus attention on government answers and pop media darlings like Mr. Nye, instead of allowing us the freedom we need to decide what is good or bad for our wellbeing.
These are things one won’t hear from NBC’s chat with Bill. But through decentralization and free markets testing what works best, we can share that info with each other.
Insult-free.