Bernie Sanders and Bill Nye have given a joint presentation on climate. In my opinion their presentation more than anything demonstrates how out of touch they are with ordinary people.
Some Highlights:
- Bill Nye wants to convince President Trump renewables make economic sense.
- Bill Nye thinks Fox News Anchors “know better” about climate change – he thinks prominent skeptics are lying about their true position on climate change.
- Some nonsense about Tobacco
- “If we can get these people to look at it more closely, they’ll be on the side of renewables.”
- If we ignore climate, we’ll build seawalls – the developing world doesn’t have the resources to build seawalls.
- “When the ocean comes in, they’re just going to leave. They’re going to default on their mortgages, and there’s going to be all this copper and infrastructure just sitting there”.
- Climate change is causing terrorism – “a lot of the problems in the middle east are displaced young men who don’t want to work the family farm anymore, because the family farm isn’t doing so well anymore, so they go to the cities, can’t find jobs, and get involved in terrorism”.
- Wants “deniers” to think about “cognitive dissonance”.
- “Instead of accepting the client is changing, you’re denying the evidence, and denying the authorities”
- “Deniers” are suffering from the “backfire effect” – apparently when we hear a nasty rattle from the car engine we ignore it, because we think everything will be fine.
- “Its not just that the world has too many people, we’re not using our resources as well as we could.”
- Sanders: “Give me some examples of the fossil fuel industry, in maintaining this thing is not real”.
- Bill Nye doesn’t answer the question, talks about how big the Canadian Tar Sands mining industry is.
- Bill Nye thinks oil majors will get even richer if they invest in renewables.
- “If you put in double or triple glazing, you will save a lot of money, for free”
- Nye talking about how he drives a Chevy Bolt – wants to electrify all ground transportation. Chevy Bolt is affordable, because it only costs $40,000
- Nye talking about how every roof should be covered in solar panels – “its not that hard to create a grid which can accept that energy”.
- Nye thinks some engineer should just create a better battery. “Its not that hard”.
- Once the [wind] turbine is up, its free, in a sense.
- Thinks exhaust from coal plants kills more birds than wind turbines. “We can solve this problem”.
- “Distributing electricity is like a mobile phone – as you drive, your call is handed from tower to tower.”
- Sanders: What are the technologies of the future? “I don’t know what the next innovation is going to be”.
- “Solar panels will become cheaper by not wasting as much silicon”
- “In 30 years we could be 100% renewable. The thing about nuclear plants … people don’t want it around”
- Nye is hoping the discovery of life on another world will unite humanity – hopes space exploration will restore faith in scientists
- Some stuff about the danger of an impact from an Asteroid, and a need to find a way to protect the world from such threats, that I actually agree with.
- Nye thinks renewables will improve quality of life worldwide, and help to prevent terrorism.
Why do I think Nye and Sanders (who as far as I can recall didn’t challenge Nye on anything) are out of touch? The answer is the ridiculous comments they made that all people need to do is come up with $40,000 to buy an electric car, and whatever it costs (likely 10s of thousands) to double glaze their homes, to make the world a better place.
Everyone can afford that, right?
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Working in the window industry, I know that the payback for Triple glazing is often 2 decades or more depending on what the base case is (double glazing in this case). Technically it has a positive return if your windows last that long, but relative to what else you could invest your money in it is a negative return, so it is very misleading to point people to high efficiency windows. Using opportunity cost it never pays back on a pure cost savings basis. Greens want people to reduce their carbon footprint by reducing their net worth, which is commendable as long as you are truthful about the cost/benefit…….which they aren’t.
Good comment.
Cognitive dissonance is when you believe one thing but say another. Skeptics don’t believe and say they don’t (CD is actually most likely seen on the side of proclaimed believers, not skeptics. People who don’t believe are going along because of “consensus” and bullying. Skeptics are the pariahs, not the believers.). There is NO cognitive dissonance in most skepticism. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological defense mechanism. If these two know as much about climate as psychology, that’s a big zero between them. (Their comment on double or triple glazing windows saving money for free indicates neither can do math, either. Or they know the window fairy.)
The utter lack of science—comparing wireless to wired as if it were the same. Wind turbines are free once up—guess paying people to fix them and take care of the wind plant is paid for by the wind fairy. Hoping aliens save us.
Wikipedia gives my understanding of the term — “In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress (discomfort) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, when performing an action that contradicts those beliefs, ideas, and values; or when confronted with new information that contradicts existing beliefs, ideas, and values.”
That said, I think Sheri makes a valid point that, when it comes to global warming, there’s more cognitive dissonance (by her definition and by Wikipedia’s) on the global warmist side. Some people are just going with the crowd on the global warming thing and can easily ignore that cognitive dissonance because it isn’t something they feel passionate about one way or the other (Sheri’s definition). But there also seems to be a lot of people who desperately want to believe, to the point where they can’t stand allowing disagreement.
True Believers, unlike the go-with-the-flow crowd, suffer considerable from their cognitive dissonance, and can get very angry when that cognitive dissonance is brought to the surface. Anytime you see one side of an argument doing a “the science is settled/debate should not be allowed” kind of routine, that is the side suffering cognitive dissonance. The side saying, “Science is never really settled; problems should be recognized and grappled with, so skeptics can be a good thing and must be allowed to speak” is the scientific side. That doesn’t mean the scientific side is necessarily correct — what the True Believers embrace may be true for reasons science hasn’t figured out yet — it just means that the bullying side has a lot more people whose belief is unscientific, and who don’t want to admit that fact.
What I would like to know is what drives the True Believers here, because it is clearly *not* the science. Paul Ehrlich (“The Population Bomb” may claim he’s doing science and disdain the Biblical prophecies of Hal Lindsey (“The Late Great Planet Earth”), but they’re both coming from the same place, and it’s not science (which is neutral on the subject of the future) or the Bible, either (Lindsey’s form of interpreting those passages was unknown to Christians for nearly 2000 years). Why some people so gleefully embrace Doomsday scenarios is beyond me.
““If you put in double or triple glazing, you will save a lot of money, for free”
Well, here in Canada we elected a drama teacher who told us that “the deficit will take care of itself”.
So, knowing an engineer believes that you can “put in” windows for “free” doesn’t surprise me.
Those two bozos are so reality-challenged I’m surprised they can tie their own shoes.
I really like it when they say, “Look at all the new jobs the renewables are creating,” as if that is a good thing. Wait a minute, isn’t it better to have the least number of jobs to produce a product than more jobs? Hmmmm…..
Some people work for a living and then there are those who mine student activity fees at universities for a living or a campaign coffer.
Just watched a outrageous ad for Radon test kits.
Sitting here with our new granddaughter watching morning news (caveat, where our son works). She really likes the traffic reports. Apparently she is contributing methane to CAGW. OMG.
This ad showed a woman dressed to the nines without a hair out of place, sitting on the floor reading to her attentive well dress children in the living room of their lavish not a thing out of castle. “Radon is the second leading lung cancer killer of non-smokers.”
I bring this up because Bennie Sanders came close to being our fear monger in chief. The target audience for fear mongers is rich white women with advance degrees in art history.
These people do not have a clue why we elected Trump and not Clinton or Sanders. Our son gets home at 1 am and mom leaves for work at 2 am. They are happy to have jobs. Gone are the jobs where one parent could stay home. Apparently mining coal and making steel are bad things and being a political activists is good.
Reading to children is commendable. It is done by sleep deprived, ragged parent, sitting on the floor cluttered with toys.
Boy does that bring back memories! Many nights I would fall asleep while reading to my younger son. I wouldn’t realize it but he would say “Daddy, you’re talking funny again”. Apparently I babble when I fall asleep while reading …
We would also play board games. In a children’s version we would make the youngest the banker. At a teachers conference in kindergarten, I asked why they were teaching kids to count by fifteens. The teacher replied she was going to ask me that.
It is funny how kids learn. The best way to teach about the environment is to take kids out into the environment. Glaciers and volcanoes are wondrous things. It is okay to say we do not know, it just a theory.
“Solar panels will become cheaper by not wasting as much silicon”
Now that is the stupidest claim of them all and self promotion at the same time. A lot of solar startup fraud money was siphoned from taxpayers based on this scam, including the one Nye is invested in. It is not silicon material savings that matters in the aftermath of global over supply of silicon ingot and plunging solar panel prices. It is oversupply of all types starting with Chinese oversupply, and plunging ROI and margins currently. Bill Nye is attempting to sidestep the business facts in solar that have been in play for at least four years now and use the same old silicon savings ploy that was used at other failed DOE-funded scam startups years back. Frankly, Nye is using his promotional talking skills to step around the industry facts here and preach to the less educated who don’t know these industry facts. Shame!
Bernie and Nye have great acting skills in their own market niche and facts and fact checking are not part of the act.
I see the PV=nRT cult is back.
The ideal gas equation has four variables in it. One cannot state that temperature is proportional to temperature unless one can specify in some way all other factors. The best counter example is that a pressurized cylinder of industrial gas does not remain hot once the gas is put in–it loses heat, its spefic volume decreases and so does its temperature despite it high pressure. In the Venusian atmosphere, which has a very great optical depth, an equilibrium temperature (from equating solar in vs. IR out) is achieved high above the solid surface. The stirring of the atmosphere all the way to the surface as an adiabatic process (
) will maintain a very high surface temperature.
One cannot use the ideal gas law to explain what temperature a gas will achieve as a function of pressure without another relationship that ties down the specific volume.
Let’s try that bit of LaTeX again
…
Oh…should be temperature proportional to pressure….stepped all over my own feet.
BZ – well done. I did not know there was a cult. That is funny.
Also funny is the suggestion about thermodynamics. Often made by those who did not take the class. Part of being an engineer is know how to apply simple concepts.
I made some comments to a test a during startup at a nuke plant. Later I was reviewing the same test on the other division of equipment. I had the same comments (except the results I could not explain were in the opposite direction) so I wanted to find out how my comments were addressed.
Found my operations superintend (an electrical engineer) playing cards at lunch. He I said I was wrong and the test passed acceptance criteria. I told him his lead mechanical said there was a problem. He should listen to me because I knew where the BRS (big red switch) was in the control room. Yes, I would get fired for scramming the reactor.
Turns out there was a problem. PV=nRT does not directly apply because air is a compressible gas but it is a good approximation. We had to shut down the plant and fix it. The second problem was not fixing the first when first identified.
Just for the record, before the plant exceeded 5% the NRC issued a show cause letter and requiring management to listen to people and fix problem.
Bernie and Buffaloing Bill are poster children for why those among the political left ought not be given jobs of very great importance. This also includes the demographic group “Retired Kit P” was speaking of.
Hay, Mr. Nye if it’s not that hard why haven’t you done it already and make a mint doing it.
Well, he has made a mint just by talking about it…
What was the average outside air temperature in the 1750’s Bill? And how precise do you think it is?
P.S. Anders Celsius (27 November 1701 – 25 April 1744) was the first to perform and publish careful experiments aiming at the definition of an international temperature scale on scientific grounds.
Honestly, the support for Bernie Sanders scared me almost as much as people that supported Hillary – because Sander’s a TOTAL idiot – and he was supposed to be – all he was intended as was a foil for Hillary… and she STILL had to cheat to win her own party’s nomination.
And the hell of it is, if Sanders had gotten the nomination, he probably could have won.
Renweables can and do work…
…in a world where there is no other option
…when ALL other options have been exhausted
…when doing without isn’t preferable
…where Gird is not an option
…in a world of fewer than 100,000,000 people
…where population density is less than 1 family of 4 per acre (and grid electricity isn’t available)
…where you don’t need to drive anywhere greater than 15 miles distant (and return on the same charge)
…where you have $60K to spend on a vehicle just to travel 50 miles distant (and return on the same charge)
…when the federal government spends your tax dollars to offset the costliness
Bill Nye knows nothing of Climate Change Science. A Limerick.
The Roman Northamptonshire wine
was good, not excessively fine.
So it just goes to show
that Bill Nye does not know
of Climate Change past, that’s my line.
During the Roman warm period wine grapes were grown almost up to the
Hadrian Wall, The the dark ages came and grapes no longer ripened in
England. During the Medieval Warm Period there was at least one cheese
farm on Greenland “Gaarden under sanden”, abandoned as the glaciers
regrew until the “Little Ice Age”. We are still recovering from the
little ice age. 2016 may have been a warm year, but most years since the
ice age were warmer. See Chart. https://lenbilen.com/2017/02/28/bill-nye-knows-nothing-of-climate-change-science-a-limerick/
You mean, like every coastal civilization that’s ever existed has had to do at one time or another? Meaning we’re just as short-sighted as they were.