Last week provided a beautiful series of examples of the increasingly amusing way that deniers are being handled.
It all began with a post on DeSmog that featured an exclusive clip of a discussion between beloved educational icon Bill Nye The Science Guy and his polar opposite, misinformation expert Marc Morano. In the clip, Nye offers Morano a pair of $10,000 bets: that 2016 will be among the hottest on record and that this decade will be record hot. Morano, of course, turned down the bets on the basis that it’s “obvious” that scientific data will show warming, implying that the data would be doctored.
In the video, which has over 100,000 views since April 12th, Nye takes a calm approach to Morano’s typical rapid-fire spewing of pseudoscience, leaving Morano flustered and dejected. By preventing Morano from dominating the conversation and framing his argument in terms of future generations, Nye showed how to set a professional denier on his heels.
Bill Nye shared the DeSmog post on his Facebook feed, which unsurprisingly triggered a flood of denier responses. In response to various conspiratorial accusations, none other than NASA stepped up to respond, with short but smart rebuttals amusing enough to warrant their own news coverage. Using simple language backed up by credible sources, NASA demonstrated how to deal with trolls - by showing others how plainly wrong they are.
But wait, there’s more! The Nye-Morano meet-up was made a central part of Morano’s attempt to publicize his movie Climate Hustle, which had its US premier on Thursday night. The movie is accurately described by IFLScience as “a propaganda movie for climate deniers.”
A clip of Nye and Morano's conversation was shown as part of a panel event promoting the movie that featured Sarah Palin, who took aim at Nye by claiming that she’s just as much of a scientist as Nye. As Suzanne Goldenberg noted in her must-read article about it, “that was not even the low point of the event.” Along with ample quoting of Palin’s rambling comments, Goldenberg adds appropriate facts to her reporting to make it clear that “there was a strong whiff of desperation to Palin’s efforts” as, while much of the GOP remains mired in denial, “the world is moving on.”
So while it is unfortunate that this episode has allowed Morano to use Nye to get more media for his movie than it deserves, it at least allowed Nye to teach us how to handle deniers in person, gave NASA a chance to show us how to handle deniers on the internet, and Goldenberg to demonstrate how reporters should handle them in the media.
In other words, even nearly twenty years after his show went off the air, Bill Nye is still a great educator and entertainer. Maybe a reboot is in order: Bill Nye, The Climate Science Guy!
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
The U.S. has been emitting a lot more methane than we thought, says EPA - “The oil and gas sector is the largest emitting-sector for methane and accounts for a third of total U.S. methane emissions.”
US and China lead push to bring Paris climate deal into force early | Early start date would add momentum for deeper emissions cuts and lock a future US president into the deal for four years
A tiny forest tribe built a DIY drone from YouTube to fight off illegal loggers — The Wapichan are assembling a “living map” to document their customary land use—and to demonstrate to the government how outside interests were impinging upon lands the Wapichan have safeguarded for centuries.
Scorching March temperatures set a global record — for the third straight month this year