Search
Close this search box.

‘Bill Nye Isn’t a Scientist — He Just Plays One on TV’

by IAN TUTTLE August 25, 2016 4:00 AM

For Nye, science is a weapon wielded to advance a certain type of politics. Bill Nye — “the Science Guy” — thinks that the recent deadly flooding in Louisiana is a result of climate change. That’s not surprising. Bill Nye thinks everything is the result of climate change. Flooding in Missouri is climate change. Tornadoes in Kentucky is climate change. Fire in Alaska is climate change. A morning thunderstorm in Houston is climate change. One time, there was a blizzard in New York in January. That was climate change, too. The event doesn’t even have to be weather-related. The Islamic State’s massacre of 130 people in Paris last year? You guessed it. When it comes to Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” it’s almost like “science” has nothing to do with it. That would not be particularly surprising, either. After all, William Sanford Nye’s scientific bona fides consists of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and a stint at Boeing. But you can be anything you want on television, and in the late 1980s, hard at work pursuing a career in comedy, Nye landed a recurring bit as Bill Nye “the Science Guy” on Almost Live!, a Seattle-area sketch-comedy television show, and a role as Christopher Lloyd’s laboratory sidekick on Back to the Future: The Animated Series. Nye then leveraged that success into his namesake PBS Kids show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which from 1993 to 1998 filmed 100 half-hour episodes, each focused on a particular topic (dinosaurs, buoyancy, germs, &c.) and accompanied by a parody soundtrack (e.g., Episode 75, on invertebrates: “Crawl Away,” by “S. Khar Go” — a parody of “Runaway” by Janet Jackson). Somehow, because of this, Nye is now the go-to authority on exoplanets and dark matter and whether we are living in a computer simulation — and, of course, environmental policy.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439330/bill-nye-science-guy-climate-change-its-politics-not-science

Share: