Bill Nye to Climate Change Deniers: You Can’t Ignore Facts Forever | Big Think

You’ve heard the President in drought-stricken California saying that these weather emergencies in effect, are creating the conditions that the government has to act.

David, I think that what it brings to mind is how we utilize the information that we have, and we all know. And I think that Bill would probably agree with this; neither he nor I are a climate scientist. He is an engineer and an actor, I am a member of Congress, and what we have to do is look at the information that we get from climate scientists.

As you said... So she did something, which is very common in the climate denier community or whatever you would call it, is to talk about credentials. So, Marsha Blackburn, Representative in the US Congress from Tennessee said, "Well, I am a congresswoman and Bill, you're just a mechanical engineer so you're not really a climate scientist."

And what I would say is what we're talking about in this level of climate science is you don't need to be a full-time climate scientist to understand it. Furthermore, as far as my credentials, everybody, I'm a mechanical engineer. I took a lot of physics. All I did was take physics, physics, physics, physics.

And when you're done with formal physics, then you take mechanical engineering, which is just applied physics. I get it. I can understand what's going on. We're putting carbon dioxide in the air at a prodigious rate and the world is getting warmer, and you can know this by looking at the neutrons in the ice. You can know this by looking at the pollen grains per cubic centimeter in the sediment of ponds.

You can know this by looking carefully at the rings on trees during warm seasons, wet seasons, cold seasons, dry seasons, and you can work your way back and figure out that the earth is getting warmer faster than it has ever gotten before. And that's the problem. It's not that the world hasn't had more carbon dioxide, it's not that the world hasn't been warmer. The problem is the speed at which things are changing.

We are inducing a sixth mass extinction event kind of by accident and we don't want to be the extinctee, if I may coin this noun. So, I mean as far as Miss Blackburn, sounded like she had been coached on denial bullet points or talking points. And I very much enjoy taking those people on, but meanwhile it breaks my heart because we got work to do.

And the fossil fuel industry has really gotten in their ears and it's really troublesome. We're the world's most technically advanced country, or if the U.S. isn't the most technically advanced it's certainly in the top ten. I mean you could say Japan, New Zealand are very sophisticated societies. But the U.S. is where iPhones are invented, what have you, the Internet; it's still a significant place.

And so to have a generation of science students being brought up without awareness of climate change is just a formula for disaster. I mean this is, everybody kinda knows this. So, I think, as an observer, and I may be wrong as I like to say, you may be right, as an observer it looks like the U.S.'s strength is its weakness.

So people came here from all over the world for freedom to think and act the way they wanted, especially freedom of religion. So, we ended up with both the people who framed the Constitution, which is a fabulous thing, and people who asserted that the garden of Eden was in Missouri.

And there's no police for that sort of thing. You're allowed to believe whatever you want. It's great. But with that was this, for them, and I emphasize them, the other side, consequence of that was you could also ignore facts of science for a while and now it’s coming to a head.

But man, it's really divisive, isn't it? It's really something. That living things change from generation to generation through a process that Darwin and Wallace, Alfred Wallace called natural selection or descent with modification. Those are true things. Those are facts. Tectonic plates move and that's a fact and the world is getting warmer because of human activity. That's a fact.

If you had somebody who really strongly believed the earth was flat, you wouldn't have to have that person on a television show with the people who believe the earth is round. So, the BBC, as I understand, just got enough. We got work to do. It's not one person versus the other person, it's 97 people versus three people.

After a while, let's move on. There may have been such debates at some time in early human history, but you wouldn't have such a debate now.