By Scott Whitlock
Climate change enthusiast Bill Nye appeared on MSNBC, Monday, to lobby the network for more global warming cheerleading and the importance of linking all weather events to the phenomena. Talking to Joy Reid about the cold and snow hitting much of the country, he implored, “...Just say the word climate change. Just, like, ‘It could be climate change. It’s a possible connection to climate change. Is this evidence of climate change?’”
Nye demanded, “Could you just toss that in now and then?” A compliant Reid agreed: “Absolutely. I would like to toss that in every single time.” Nye then stated the obvious: “MSNBC is, in many ways, regarded as a progressive station.” He spoke to the few conservatives watching MSNBC: “We need you.”
Nye quickly turned insulting, “But if the conservative side are going to continue to deny what 97 percent of the scientists in the world are saying, we’re not going to reach a consensus. We are not going to make progress.”
Before fist bumping Reid goodbye, Nye reiterated the need to make every other word “climate change”:
BILL NYE: Just talk about it....If we were talking about it, we’d raise awareness and get to work and I, as a guy born in the U.S, would like the U.S. to be leading this effort. It’s President’s Day.
The genesis of the segment on Monday was a Time magazine article slamming Pat Sajak for dismissing the winter storms as “weather.” The Time headline dismissed, “Wheel of Fortune Host Tweets About Climate Change Again.” (Of course, climate change activists are not often derided as mere celebrities. James Cameron has been a frequent guest on the network. He’s not derided as the “Titanic director.")
On January 26, Nye connected the storms in Boston on climate change and sneered, “I know there will be certain viewers who will become unglued.”
A transcript of the February 16 Reid Report segment is below:
JOY REID: Why should we care that it is cold in the winter? Well, for one thing the unusual nature of some of these temperatures does raise, or should raise, questions about climate change. And joining me here on set is Bill Nye the Science Guy, one of my favorite people, period. But favorite people to talk about this. So, Bill, there’s a helpful description from someone named Eliana Dockterman in Time magazine that sort of teases the difference between climate change and weather. She says, “Cold snaps do not change the overall trajectory of our warming planet. While weather is what changes in the atmosphere day to day, climate is how the atmosphere behaves over a long period of time.” So, when it’s cold, should we then say, “Oh, no problem. Don’t worry about climate change.”
BILL NYE: No, no. Let’s not confuse or interchange climate change with global warming. Global warming - The world is getting warmer. There is more carbon monoxide holding in more heat. So when the climate changes, some places get colder. And the thing that’s really consistent with climate change models is this variance where it’s cold, it’s warm, it’s cold, it’s warm. And so I was in Wyoming last week and it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s very unusual. So what I would hope for, my dream, Joy, is that you all, you and the news business would just say the word climate change. Just, like, “It could be climate change. It’s a possible connection to climate change. Is this evidence of climate change?” Could you just toss that in now and then?
JOY REID: Absolutely. I would like to toss that in every single time. Because I’m of the mind, Bill Nye the Science Guy, that, you know, I grew up in Denver, Colorado. I went to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have lived in New York. I’ve lived in places where it’s cold all the time.
NYE: Yes, yes.
REID: But when you see extremes of cold, when you’re breaking, I’m counting one, two, three, four, five records from Little Rock to Flint, Michigan, to Redding, Pennsylvania, New Jersey.
NYE: Louisville, Kentucky.
REID: We’re breaking 100-year-old records in cold. Is there not enough attention that people are paying to what we are doing to the planet and how it’s impacting our daily lives?
NYE: No, there isn’t enough attention being paid. But I’ll go on to say if the ocean, this mythic thing, the noreaster, if the oceans just ever so slightly warmer, it snows more. There’s more moisture in the atmosphere, just for example. Yesterday, everyone was so excited about thunder snow, this is where you had atmospheric conditions. So, the gradient, the difference between the bottom of the top of the atmosphere was so strong that it was lightning and thunder during a snowstorm. Oooh. It’s cool. It’s cold. The other thing I would say, MSNBC is, in many ways, regarded as a progressive station, as opposed to a conservative - I say station—news organization. I will say to the conservatives, we need you. This is to say, we can’t have everybody be a progressive, liberal bleeding heart and so on and so on. We need people on both sides. But if the conservative side are going to continue to deny what 97 percent of the scientists in the world are saying, we’re not going to reach a consensus. We are not going to make progress.
REID: Yeah.
NYE: And I get a sense that if I can use the term “they” know this because they say repeatedly “Well, I’m not a scientist so therefor I can’t have an opinion on this.” But you’re a human running around in Boston or Louisville and you can look at the graphs as much as anybody. The world’s climate is changing.
REID: Yeah.
NYE: And along with that, apparently, is this extraordinary winter event. See, I have got to tell you the hot weather events like we had in Texas in 2012, those are now statistically connected to climate change. You know, any one event is hard to do when you’re talking about—
REID: It’s the cumulative effect.
NYE: Yeah, yeah. I bet you in coming years, people will be able to tie events like this mathematically to the bigger picture. So, we need you, you guys Just say it could be climate change, possible connection. Just once in awhile.
REID: Yeah. And I think the bigger picture meaning we’re not pursuing aggressively the policies that could do something about it.
NYE: Can I throw in one more thing?
REID: Quickly. One more thing. Yes.
NYE: People always say to me, “What can I do about climate? What can I do about climate change?” Just talk about it.
REID: Yeah.
NYE: If we were talking about it, we’d raise awareness and get to work and I, as a guy born in the U.S, would like the U.S. to be leading this effort. It’s President’s day. Let’s go. Let’s lead.
REID: Amen. Fist bump. [The two fist bump.] Bill Nye the Science Guy.
- See more here.
Good thing nobody watches MSNBC. Be sure to read the comments. I like the one suggesting Bill Nye is really a conservative trying to make the progressives or liberals look stupid.
U.N. Climate Chief: We’re ‘Intentionally’ Transforming The World Economy
Truth Revolt
The United Nation’s top climate change official Christiana Figueres announced this week that the group is actively working to “intentionally transform” the world’s economic development model, a task she called the “most difficult” one the group has ever undertaken.
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” UNFCCC Executive Secretary Figueres stated at a press conference in Brussels Tuesday.
Also reported by IBD:
U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
The cat’s out of the bag. There is no approaching ecological calamity. The aim is to destroy capitalism.
As Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace wrote:
The collapse of World Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the environmental movement being hijacked by the political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalization than with science or ecology.
Read more from Dr. Larry Bell on the real agenda here.
A few weeks ago, in mid-January, you would have had a hard time missing the big shouting and celebration in the global warming alarmist camp of 2014 being the “hottest year ever.” As just a few examples, there was Scientific American on January 5 ("2014 Officially Hottest Year On Record"); the BBC on January 16 ("2014 warmest year on record, say US researchers"”; or the New York Times on January 16 ("2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics"). There were plenty of others like those.
If you read all of those articles, without doubt you will come away asking yourself one glaring question, namely: So what did the satellites show? Not one of these articles, or for that matter any of many others from the alarmist camp that I have looked at, so much as mentions the satellite data. But anybody who follows this issue even a little knows that beginning in 1979 the U.S. government at great taxpayer expense has put up satellites with sophisticated instruments to get much more accurate measurements of world temperatures than previously available. The alternative networks of ground based thermometers still exist, but have widely scattered coverage and are subject to large inaccuracies (like from having cities grow up around them, or having their sites moved over the years). So SA, BBC, NYT: How could you insult our intelligence with articles trumpeting “hottest year ever” without telling us what the satellites say?
Luckily it’s not too hard to figure out what the satellites say—their data is published monthly by two sources, UAH and RSS. Here’s an article summarizing the results from both. Of course it’s exactly what you knew it would be as soon as you saw that the likes of the liars at SA, BBC and NYT wouldn’t tell you what the satellites say: 2014 was not the hottest year, nor close, but rather tied for 6th/7th place in the 36 year record from RSS, 0.3 degrees C cooler than the warmest year, which was 1998—16 years ago. Now 0.3 degrees C may not be a lot, but it’s also not a little in a record that only varies by about 1.2 degrees C from coolest to warmest year.
But it gets worse. Regular readers of this blog know that there is a gigantic issue out there of the extent to which the ground thermometer records can be trusted because the guardians of the data (who are the same people putting out the press releases about 2014 being the “hottest year ever") have been systematically tampering with the data to make the earlier years cooler and therefore make the present appear warmer by comparison. I previously wrote about this issue on July 3, 2014 (”What Is The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time—Part II”
and on July 19, 2013 (”What Is The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time?” Those articles name names, both of the crooked U.S. government paid fake scientists who “adjust” the raw thermometer data without explanation to fit the desired narrative of “hottest year ever,” and also of the independent researchers who laboriously track down old archived temperature records to uncover the tampering.
Just today this issue is starting to explode. It was at the top of Drudge earlier today, although now gradually falling back. Drudge linked to an article by Christopher Booker in the UK Telegraph from Saturday titled “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever.” (Wait, are they stealing their headlines from me? OK, not quite.) Booker discusses the work of Paul Homewood, reported on his blog notalotofpeopleknowthat. Sample (from Booker):
Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy. See Iceland changes here.
Homewood has also uncovered massive tampering from Paraguay. John Hinderaker of Power Line includes numerous animated GIFs from Homewood demonstrating the data tampering from Paraguay. Homewood adds his work to the extensive output of Tony Heller (who blogs under the name Steven Goddard) of realscience. Heller has uncovered and reported on data tampering at dozens of sites. Just today he reports on Addison, New York. In every instance, whether Siberia, Paraguay, or upstate New York, it’s always the same thing—the past has been cooled to make the present look warmer by comparison. But how could the past somehow have suddenly gotten cooler, 50 or 80 or 100 years after the fact?
Lots and lots of people have demanded an explanation from the guys at NCDC/GISS who put out the adjusted/tampered data and then claim “hottest year ever.” They won’t give any.
So, Scientific American, BBC, New York Times, and all the rest of you who uncritically report the greatest scientific fraud of all time as if it was the truth: When are you going to tell us the real story?
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Mercury News editorial: Scientists must solve growing trust problem
Scientists are facing a crisis of trust.
A Pew Research Center poll released Jan. 29 shows a huge gap between the views of scientists and the general public on a range of issues—not just climate change but also genetically modified foods, vaccinations, the use of animals in research and the threat of overpopulation. Furthermore, as scientific theories evolve, today’s instant mass communication of each step forward and back undermines belief in facts that are proven, like the ability of vaccines to all but eliminate a disease.
Lecturing people isn’t the answer. Alan Leshner, the outgoing CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, made that clear Wednesday when he met with this newspaper’s Editorial Board. Scientists instead need to engage the public in a forthright conversation about the importance of science to society, he said.
Thousands of scientists are gathered in San Jose this weekend for the AAAS annual meeting. We hope they’re grappling with how to begin that public conversation. Silicon Valley’s science-based economy should be an inspiration.
Federal funding for R&D in areas such as energy and medicine has dropped 10 percent in the past six years—and these are areas people consider important. Overall, R&D as a percentage of total federal spending is at its lowest level since 1956.
America’s changing attitudes toward science and diminishing funding for research are not entirely a cause-and-effect phenomenon. Americans believe in roads and bridges but don’t want to pay to maintain them, either. And like declining infrastructure, the decline of scientific research and the consequences for Americans’ lives and economic advancement are worrisome.
Increasingly, Americans believe that what’s called science is actually political posturing. For example, only half of the adults surveyed by Pew said climate change is mostly due to human activity, while 87 percent of scientists believe it is; 37 percent of Americans think genetically modified foods are safe, compared to 88 percent of scientists; 68 percent of adults say childhood vaccines should be required, while 86 percent of scientists think so.
And 82 percent of scientists believe world population will be a major problem, while only 59 percent of Americans agree.
In a January editorial in Science magazine, Lesher wrote that only 52 percent of scientists say this “ is a good time for science,” down from 76 percent as recently as 2009. The disparity not only puts future funding for science in danger, Leshner said, but also carries the risk that America’s best young minds will no longer want to pursue research as a career. That would be disastrous for Silicon Valley.
Community and political leaders have a role in restoring respect for the pursuit of scientific truth. But Lesher is right that scientists themselves need to be more engaged in fostering understanding of their independence, motivation and actual work.