Bill Nye Tells Tucker Carlson Human Activity ‘Almost Certainly’ Prevented a New Ice Age

Yesterday, Bill Nye the Not a Scientist Guy did a global warming dog and pony show with Bernie Sanders via Facebook Live. It went as you would expect any meeting between an anti-capitalist and a proponent of an idea that is a convenient weapon to wield against capitalism. Nye didn’t fare as well matched up against Tucker Carlson on Fox News last night.

Left wing media outlets today are bashing Carlson for making “absurd” statements like telling Nye that he’s only a popularizer of science, not a scientist—which is 100 percent true. Leftists don’t really care for truth if it makes them question their dogma. One point Carlson made is one that seldom gets raised in any of these climate kerfuffles. It has to do with the difference between believing something and actually knowing it.

Tucker said that he – like most people – is open to the idea that the climate is indeed changing.

He said it’s up to climate change advocates, however, to prove to what degree human activity is causing it.

Nye explained that human activity is making climate change occur at a “catastrophically fast” rate.

“So much of this you don’t know!” Tucker countered. “You pretend that you know, but you don’t know. And you bully people who ask you questions.”

Carlson’s point is that when someone asserts that they know humans have drastically accelerated climate change, they are also asserting that they know how the climate would have behaved in the absence of human activity. That’s impossible. There’s no experimental way to determine that. There is not control planet we can use to compare to the one receiving stimulus from humans.

Nye either is dodging that concept or he’s failing to understand it. It could be either. Science-ists like Nye tend not to be big thinkers. They usually make lousy philosophers—and absolutely terrible epistemologists.

Nye begins the segment addressing the “cognitive dissonance” in which “climate change deniers” find themselves, because in his mind there is no room for skepticism when the evidence is so overwhelming.

However, Nye is comfortable in his own cognitive dissonance. He simultaneously believes he knows how the climate would have behaved without mankind’s influence despite the impossibility of his knowing anything of the kind. He doesn’t perceive this as cognitive dissonance because he has made the a priori assumption that he is right and skeptics are wrong.

He can form an opinion on what he thinks might have happened, but as Carlson says, he’s only pretending to know it. Nye treats climate change skepticism as something wrong with the skeptic, while claiming to know things that cannot even be known. Focusing on his opponents’ alleged cognitive dissonance while denying that he experiences any of his own is the sort of  flagrant arrogance that characterizes so much debate.

Carlson asked Nye to what degree human activity has accelerated climate change. Nye at first appears not to understand the question and tries to deflect it. Then when pressed he says that human activity is 100% responsible for the alleged catastrophic acceleration of climate change.  Nye makes the claim that human activity has changed things so much that we “almost certainly” avoided another ice age. When asked when that ice age would otherwise have occurred, he says that that isn’t relevant.

Of course it’s relevant. Its relevance is that it differentiates actual science from claims he’s pulling out of his own arse.

Watch the whole “absurd” segment here:

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