You know, I like Bill Nye normally. I mean I had enjoyed his odd sense of humor since all the way back in his days on Almost Live. He was just starting this “science guy” shtick with crazy experiments which weren’t very scientific, but were pretty funny. I particularly loved a bit where he answered science questions. In one a viewer asked that if you were in a falling elevator, if you could save your life by jumping just before you hit the ground. He demonstrated that you would be screwed in that situation, by rigging a model elevator with an automatic “pop-up” near the bottom. Then he puts an egg in, sets the thing off and, well, yolk happens. It’s probably funnier to see it than I described, but I couldn’t find a youtube clip.
So its more than a little disappointing to see him say it is almost unpatriotic to doubt humans cause climate change.
But he does hit on an interesting point. I suspect he is right to say that belief in human-caused global warming is a generational thing. I mean my attitude is this. All my life they have been telling me that I am about to die. First it was global cooling, then it was acid rain, then it was holes in the ozone layer, then it was global warming and the lame attempt to cover up the failings of that by repackaging it as “climate change.” The fact that so many people who came before Nye and his crew were clearly crying wolf is not proof that this time it was a lie. But this time we have actual smoking guns showing how data has been faked.
And more damning is that the “respectable” scientific community was silent. East Anglia and the IPCC lied to us again and again, and no one spoke up and said, “this is wrong.” Oh, except for the same people who say that all of this fear of man-caused global warming is fake.
It became clear to me several years ago, that this theory had taken on the qualities of a religion. Think of it this way. I have pointed out to people again and again that there is no way to disprove creationism. The belief that an all-powerful God created the earth is unfalsifiable. You can point at dinosaur bones, but then I can just say God put it there to throw us off, or Satan did it for the same reason, or who knows? After all, if you believe in God it is tautologically true that literally anything is possible. But in that sense, creationism is unscientific; it is faith.
Belief in man-caused global warming is the same way. If the winter is uniquely cold, it is because of global warming. If it is hot, it is because of global warming. There was a blizzard in Dallas, Texas of around eleven inches last Thursday, which is claimed to be more evidence of global warming. The weatherman can’t predict the weather next Tuesday, but I am supposed to believe that the computer models they use will predict the climate 50 years from now. And most damningly how many times have things happened that weren’t in the model, but the man-cause global warming types proclaimed that the model was still correct? Normally in science, if you make a prediction based on a hypothesis, and it turns out to be wrong, you reexamine your hypothesis. But not here. It is abundantly clear that there can be no event that causes any of the believers in man-caused global warming that would convince them it is not happening.
You know a few days ago, I talked about a story printed in the National Inquirer saying that John Edwards had beaten Elizabeth. I wrote: “Yeah, I know it’s the Inquirer, but, um, haven’t they been the most accurate on this guy?”
I tend to believe the people who tell the truth when everyone else is either lying to me, or failing to speak up when others are lying to me. That’s just how I roll.
I guess that makes me unpatriotic.
