Refusing to acknowledge any benefit of fossil fuels, Bill Nye instead compares their use to the “limitless energy in the form of human slaves” that built ancient Pompeii.
MARC MORANO: “Do you acknowledge fossil fuels have been one of the greatest liberators of man kind?”
BILL NYE: “Have you been to Pompeii? And, this is not changing the subject? Pompeii is extraordinary. The ancient Romans built this amazing place that’s still amazing because they had limitless energy in the form of human slaves. So [laughs], it’s– having limitless energy for your populous is great, but you don’t want to have it to the detriment of the future. It’s fundamental, Mr. Morano…
Morano wrote in an emailed statement about his interview with Nye for the upcoming documentary Climate Hustle. Morano had debated Nye twice before, but this time he was there “to interview him and get his thoughts on issues.” He said that during the interview, he “challenged Nye on certain assertions but generally let Nye do all the talking.”
Morano said the interview with Nye ran about one hour and 20 minutes, and he was hoping to get Nye’s reactions to film clips from Climate Hustle and for his next film ‘Climate Monarchy.’ “I was very low key and just trying to get reactions,” Morano writes. Nye also had a film crew at the interview, and subsequently published an edited video that was released at DeSmog.
DeSmog writes that within that nearly hour-and-a-half interview, Nye offered Morano two $10,000 bets. The first bet was that 2016 would be one of the ten hottest years on record (conventional weather records kept since the middle of 19th century). The second bet was that the decade of 2010-2020 would prove to be the hottest decade on record. DeSmog asked Morano why he turned those bets down with Nye.
Morano says he turned down Nye’s two bets but not for the reasons they insinuated. “Nye’s temperature bet is pointless on many levels. First off, given the geologic history of the Earth, how does one year here or there or even a decade prove anything? Second, Nye is implying that ‘record’ temperatures that are not outside the margin of error of the dataset are somehow meaningful. Even former NASA climatologist James Hansen admitted “hottest year” declarations are “not particularly important.”
Morano notes that despite “Nye’s claims of hottest year or decade compared to the past 150 years or so of recordkeeping, it is clear that the 1930s were a very warm decade before NOAA ‘adjustments’ cooled the past. But the EPA still shows the 1930s reign supreme in the US.” He told Desmog that “2015, fueled by the record or near record El Nino, was barely a tenth of a degree warmer than previous ‘hottest’ year claims.”
As reported previously, except for a few months of anomalous warming attributed to a strong, naturally occurring El Niño, there has been a global warming hiatus that began after the last strong El Niño in 1998. This runs contrary to DeSmog’s claim that “14 of the 16 hottest years on record have all happened since the year 2000.” The evidence presented in this latest study supports the claim there has been a “reduced rate of global surface warming.” DeSmog is still relying on jiggered data by NOAA and NASA that tries to hide the hiatus.
And still another study shows that there hasn’t been an increase in droughts or rainfall despite the Obama administration’s best efforts to attribute any and all weather events to climate change. They even held a press event at the White House last week and conflated smog/pollution with global warming and said it could make billions of people more sick. Increased carbon dioxide emissions, which is the basic premise behind increased global warming, is an odorless, colorless trace gas.
To back up his claims, Morano points to what Dr. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, said: “The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree. When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period. And they are arguing over hundredths of a degree when it is uncertain in tenths of a degree.”
Dr. Lindzen also says, “And the proof that the uncertainty is tenths of a degree are the adjustments that are being made. If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree.” Even Kevin Trenberth, a NOAA scientist and former IPCC author, says he’s not so sure 2016 will be considered ‘hottest.’ With over eight months to go, no one could possibly say this year will be a record breaker.
Morano also wrote that he explained to Nye that these ‘hottest’ year claims “were just a fancy way of saying that the ‘global warming pause’ was continuing. (Also, satellites were considered the ‘gold standard’ and more accurate than surface data.)” He says he explained to Nye about how “past temperatures have been adjusted after the fact to cool the past and now show enhanced warming.” Morano adds this was done to both the surface datasets and the satellite record.
“The past temperatures have been ‘readjusted‘ to eliminate the ‘pause’ in both the surface datasets and RSS satellite dataset,” Morano writes. There will be a pre-screening of Climate Hustle on April 14 in D.C., with a follow-up panel that includes Bill Nye via videotape. Climate Hustle premiers on May 2 in theaters nationwide for one night only.
