Bill Nye says skeptics will die off. Instead young gullibles grow up to be old skeptics

Poor Bill Nye -he’s thinks somehow most people are as religious about climate change as he is, and will keep their naively unscientific beliefs about our ability to control the climate with power stations, wind mills and light bulbs, into their old age. Instead, the reality is Bill’s biggest nightmare, skeptics are not dying out at all — there is a never ending source of skeptics, as young gullible believers grow up to be old and wise.

Here’s his Christmas fantasy:

LA Times, Pat Morrison Bill Nye on the terrifying ascendancy of American ‘dingbatitude’

It just sounds like people are scared. It just sounds like people are afraid. And the people who are afraid in general — with due respect, and I am now one of them — are older. Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It’s generational. So we’re just going to have to wait for those people to “age out,” as they say. “Age out” is a euphemism for “die.” But it’ll happen, I guarantee you — that’ll happen. — Bill Nye

Here’s that data. For starters, we know that Republican voters are older than Democrat voters. So consider what […]

Bill Nye offers lame bets on pointless noise, talks of slavery, jail — other “sciencey” stuff

Bill Nye and co at DeSmog are congratulating themselves on his bold $10K offer to bet that 2016 will be one of the ten “hottest” ever years. But 2016 is already the hottest ever year — it’s been reported in The Guardian, and New Scientist. And even if it isn’t the hottest ever year yet, it will be one day after the results get post hoc adjusted.

Heck, It only has to be two hundreds of a degree hotter to get a NOAA and NASA special spin and press release. In 2014 the error bars were 500% bigger than the record but it’s the spirit that counts, not the signal-to-noise ratio.

Forget century-trends, in it’s dying days, the Trillion Dollar CO2 theory apparently boils down to 8 month bets on El Nino ephemera. Which coupled climate model predicted this El Nino from way back in 2010?

Marc Morano was totally right to call it “silly”. Nye’s other bet on offer was o’so bravely predicting that essentially the next three years won’t be super cool. O Bravo. Will the current decade be the “hottest on record”? The climate just has to stay the same as it has for […]

If only Bill Nye knew what science was, John Oliver could’ve been funny

Bill Nye thinks science is about opinion polls — not about reason and evidence, and John Oliver (who’s he? A British/US comedian) thought they should take that fallacy and run with it.

Oliver couldn’t quite sort out his opinion polls from his facts. He seemed to think that when believers do key-word surveys of abstracts it’s “a fact”, but when 75 million Americans are skeptical of a theory (which only has key-word surveys to back it up) “who gives a s***?”

He goes on to say: “You don’t need people’s opinions on a fact”. Except the “fact” in question is just some other people’s opinions. Obviously what matters to him is not the number of people who believe something, but whether they are card carrying members of the right club. After all only 62 climate scientists actually reviewed the chapter that mattered in the 2007 IPCC report, but some 31,000 scientists, including 9,000 PhD’s, 49 NASA scientists and 4 Apollo astronauts, and 2 Nobel Physics Prize winners disagree. Other surveys show that skeptics are older, better with numbers and smarter. Two thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics. The obvious conclusion (if you think surveys matter in science, which I […]