Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Bill Nye the not-really-Science Guy was on Tucker Carlson tonight. Tucker tried time after time to get Nye to say how much of the change was due to humans … and time after time, Nye refused to say what his opinion was.
So Tucker got him to agree that the climate has always been changing.
Then, in response to the question as to “what the climate would be like if humans weren’t involved right now”, Bill Nye said (according to my own transcription):
NYE: “The climate would be like it was in 1750. And the economics would be that you could not grow wine-worthy grapes in Britain as you can today because the climate is changing. The use of pesticides in the Midwest would not be increasing because the pests are showing up sooner and staying around longer. The forests in Wyoming would not be overwhelmed by pine bark beetles as it is because of climate change. That’s how the world would be different if it were not for humans”.
Oh, my goodness. Isn’t that touching? Nye refuses to say how much of the change in temperature is due to humans … but at the same time he claims that if there weren’t humans, that the climate would have stopped changing in 1750. Without humans, he says, we would have a climate which was forever the same …
… and people actually believe this guy? Tucker Carlson was scathing:
CARLSON: You’re not even a scientist, you’re an engineer … So much of this you don’t know, you pretend that you know, and you gotta believe people who ask you questions.
Another escapade in the world of pseudo-science. Anyhow, after writing this I found a YouTube video of the interview—check it out, it’s good for a laugh.
Regards to all,
w.
PS—When you comment PLEASE QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING, so we can all be clear about your subject.
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Science Fraud Guy
It struck me that Nye’s last rant (after being dismissed by the commentator) against the current paradigm in this country says volumes about his agenda-driven “scientific” motivations.
Yes, his rants were telling. I don’t judge people by the positions they take, just how they support them. Ad hominem attacks, failing to answer difficult questions, appealing to authority and endlessly spewing talking points are not legitimate ways to support any position.
How did Bill Nye find out Wyoming exists, let alone has a pine beetle problem?
He’s probably been to Jackson….
“we got caught in global warming. Hotter than a pepper sprout. We’ve been talking about Jackson ever since the fire went out. (with apologies to Johnny Cash and June Carter).
You may be right. Harrison Ford and many other celebrities have lived or wed or vacationed there. I guess I didn’t think of the pine beetles being so bad there—the Medicine Bow forest is the one I think of for massive damage. Yeah, Jackson. 🙂
“Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer, so he has a firm background in science.”
Engineers are ethically required to not represent an expertise they do not have. My BSME 1975 science background did not prepare me to understand more than the basics science of climate change.
Based my extensive experience, we can not measure temperature over time with enough accuracy to identify human effects. The confidence interval is greater than the contribution of humans. In scientific terms, we do not know.
As a Level III, ASME test engineer, I have had to explain to mangers that I can not run a test to show that heat heat exchangers to remove decay heat have not become degraded because of instrument accuracy. Furthermore the NRC does not require it.
Why? Because we routinely demonstrate performance when shutting down from 100% power and cooling down to start refueling in 24 hours. It is not a problem.
Alarmists worry that a slow, small change in climate will keep us from producing power. Done it at nuke plants from -40 F to 117 F.
Been there, done that but I did not get a T-shirt for just doing my job.
Engineers are applied scientists.
They are held to much higher standards of understanding hypotheses than a lot of scientists – given the number of papers which can not be replicated.
Engineers cannot just homogenise out uncooperative data. They sometimes go to jail for getting it wrong.
65 million people, primarily in urban areas with failing schools
….are OK with people going back on their word, deleting 33,000 public records,
….lying that “the video” caused the death of several people the person was responsible for.
“The buck doesn’t stop here! (but in my pocket)” is their chant.
so, what did you expect?
So Nye believes the end of the little ice age was brought about by the industrial revolution?
Alastair wrote
>> Whenever you ask them just what is this lost Nirvana we’re supposed to pine for…what is their ideal temperature, CO2 level, etc. They can never answer that one properly.
It’s the same when you ask a big-government leftie what the tax rate should be for the wealthy – how much is enough? They cannot answer.
Whoa “your not even a scientist, you are an engineer”. Engineers are scientists. I am in particular an R&D mechanical engineer. You know postulating theories, setting up and running experiments to test those theories, analysing the results and repeat until we come up with something to design like this little device I am writing on know. You know “scientific method”. So fu Carlson
>>you are an engineer
I’m an EE and didn’t like that comment either – in fact, I’d say engineers are at least as (if not more) likely to be skeptical as any scientist.
Bill Nye is an outsourced, former court jester making his way from one student activity fee to another at universities. At least he is not in competition with Hillary for those funds at present.
http://i.imgur.com/J0X9zWG.gif
Well, somewhere up-thread someone noted he was a lot like Pee Wee Herman.
Looking up Bill’s wiki is hilarious. He is actually a member of the “Committee for Skeptical Inquiry” and has honorary doctor of science degrees from just about everywhere. I think those degrees have been doctored 🙂 I really wonder about the engineer part. He is in over his head I feel.
He is a paid actor by the establishment that is designed to make us feel guilty not to solve anything.
Interesting that climate science has now come down to: Do you have children?. Why do we have to feel bad that we are humans that don’t want to buy solar panels and have electric cars. Is that all there is to climate science is guilt?
I watched it what joke. Billy went all lewandowski. Too bad Tucker didn’t know that 1750 was deep in the Little Ice Age with the Thames freezing every year for the Frost festival. Or the Potomac freezing solid. He also seems to have taken on the latest leftist arguing style which is to never stop talking and talk over the host spewing gibberish
For those who slightly disparage Carlson for missing opportunities to crush Nye, it helps to understand his modus operandi;
1) find a single fatal flaw in the liberal’s argument;
2) hammer the liberal with a logical question(s) about the flaw;
3) do not get distracted by other arguments, keep coming back to the fatal flaw.
I did not expect Carlson to have, or try to present, all of the fatal flaws of CAGW – there are too many. He stuck to one fatal flaw which reduced Nye to a babbler. I was classic Carlson and delicious to watch.
Carlson wins every time. Because the flaw is fatal, the interviewee can never answer it and ends up babbling or attacking the opponent or interviewer personally. In the public’s eyes, this is unacceptable and the interviewee loses. The object of the interviewer is not to convince his/her supporters, but to demonstrate to the 80% of the audience who are neutral on the subject that the interviewee is an idiot . On a Sunday talk show, I debated an anti-nuclear idiot and I did exactly what Carlson does: used one fatal flaw and hammered the point throughout the debate. As we left the studio, the idiot was literally yelling at the person who arranged to have him on the show. I just smiled knowing that he knew I had won the debate.
They should televise a duel between Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson spouting “facts” and the winner being the one with the least amount of errors. Both these nitwits are routinely caught talking out their backsides.
The all-time best televised duel was between Nye and Lindzen on Larry King in 2007, in my view. It’s a hoot.
I thought Nye only attended university (mech. eng.) for two years. Also my understanding is that he got into this science gig career through a children’s science show as an entertainer.
For those slightly disparaging Tucker Carlson for missing opportunities to crush Nye, it helps to understand Carlson’s modus operandi:
1) Pick a single fatal flaw in the liberal’s arguments;
2) Ask logical questions about the flaw;
3) Do not get distracted by other arguments and always bring the discussion back to the single flaw.
I do not expect Carlson to have, or present, all of the fatal flaws of CAGW – there are too many. The liberal will dance, duck, or babble on about a non-sequitur to avoid answering the fatal flaw questions. Carlson followed the above modus operandi with Nye and it left Nye dancing, ducking and babbling. Nye lost the debate and it was delicious. It takes discipline to stay on point when the opponent will try to find the hot button that will take you off of point. Tucker is good at staying on point.
Most of us here already think Nye is an idiot. However, put yourself in the shoes of others who have no investment in the CAGW religion – probably 80% of the population. Who do you think they saw as the winner in the Carlson/Nye debate? If I was a neutral observer, I could not have made heads nor tails of Nye’s arguments and would have deemed him the loser. Carlson did not have to prove the anti-CAGW views, but the CAGW side won because Nye looked like such an idiot. Basic Debate Club stuff.
You lack something Bill.
nye is NOT a scientist in any way and honestly he isnt very bright…..less than average IQ likely.
Daniel Payne calls Nye, “a professional lab-coat wearer.”
Any thoughts on this?
https://youtu.be/ox5hbkg34Ow
It is alarming that a PhD professor in physics apparently does not understand that power and energy are different things and that energy is the time-integral of power. No wonder so many got it wrong.
Paraphrasing Richard Feynman: Regardless of how many experts believe a theory or how many organizations concur, if it doesn’t agree with observation, it’s wrong.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), some politicians and many others mislead the gullible public by stubbornly continuing to proclaim that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is a substantial cause of global warming.
Measurements demonstrate that they are wrong.
CO2 increase from 1800 to 2001 was 89.5 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The atmospheric carbon dioxide level has now (through Dec, 2016) increased since 2001 by 34.1 ppmv (an amount equal to 38.1% of the increase that took place from 1800 to 2001) (1800, 281.6 ppmv; 2001, 371.13 ppmv; Dec, 2016, 405.25 ppmv).
The average global temperature trend since 2001 is essentially flat (the recent El Niño has been in steep downtrend since Feb. 2016).
That is the observation. No amount of spin can rationalize that the temperature increase 1800-2001 was caused by a CO2 increase of 89.5 ppmv but that 34.1 ppmv additional CO2 increase did not cause a significant uptrend in the average global temperatures after 2001.
Where is WUWT’s troll squad on this thread??
Even they won’t abide this buffoon.
The paychecks come out today. Probably at a bar somewhere.
Griff is still in hiding from his hits on Dr Curry & Dr Crockford.
Probably won’t make another substantive visit until there’s another woman to attack…
“…The forests in Wyoming would not be overwhelmed by pine bark beetles as it is because of climate change…”
Bill, Bill Bill. The beetle is largely gone around here. Came through in a dry period a decade ago, when trees allowed to grow to unsustainable density became drought stressed. The forests still have a lot of visible dead trees, but the remaining trees look pretty healthy, and new ones are sprouted and growing. This completes a cycle begun in the 1970s after the last big beetle kill in our area, and will complete once again in perhaps year 2060 unless we alter forest management practices.
I see. Nye prefers drought &. famine in Spain. Just don’t tell the Spanish, please.
Assessing extreme droughts in Spain during 1750–1850 from rogation ceremonies
The period analysed in this paper (1750–1850) is quite interesting not only because it is a pre-industrial period, without anthropogenic forcing, but […]
So Bill Nye, How much of the change in global warming since the ice age is due to human activity?
Tucker asked you ONE question. One. You had no answer. Ohhh you said quite a bit. But you didn’t answer that central, unanswerable question. You said 100%. You said something about sea level rise, leaks in the administration, something about Tucker Carlson’s 4 kids but you didn’t actually say what the accepted fraction of global warming is attributed to human activity.
You dry gulped several times, and tried to answer the question you wanted to answer rather that the question Carlson asked.
So there is no agreement is there. There is no conclusion to the debate.
The obvious implication of his verbiage is that 100% of climate change since 1750 is man-made.
This is obviously false on its face. As is his suggestion that natural climate change occurs only on the scale of tens of thousands or millions of years.
The definition of climate is the average of weather over 30 years. Climate change for the past 30 years and the 30 before that and the 30 before that and the 30 before that and the 30 before that, etc, is not in the least bit unprecedented. Climate change in the interval of rapid CO2 growth is no different from during the cooling and warming phases of the Holocene before that interval.
Whatever evidence Nye imagines for a human fingerprint since 1750 doesn’t exist.
Nye has lost the pilot?
Does that mean he won’t be able to fly anywhere anymore?
Hmm, vanishing post…
And the award for hypocrisy goes to…
DiCaprio flew eyebrow artist 7,500 miles to do his brows for the Oscars
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/