When hearing “Follow the science,” many once-bitten-twice-shy skeptics have learned, you should perhaps follow the money. Or maybe the power.
Or both.
This perhaps could come to mind with news that TV “scientist” Bill Nye is following Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. In fact, says Nye, you should vote for her because “science isn’t partisan. It’s patriotic.”
Rolling Stone reports on the story:
With the race to the White House poised to come down to the wire in key battleground states, America’s favorite science guy Bill Nye [you mean, it’s not Neil deGrasse Tyson?] took to social media to urge Americans to vote for climate and clean energy champions.
Wearing a powdered wig and evoking the U.S. Constitution, Nye underlined that Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, states Congress shall “promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
He elaborated that the country’s founders “saw the future and knew that science would be essential to it,” but that this election season, “One side is living in an imagined past world in which we can drill, scrape, and burn the coal and oil of ancient swamps without consequence.”
“They’re bent on ignoring science, blinded to the overwhelming evidence of climate change, fires, floods, disappearing ice, hottest summers on record,” he continued, before urging: “Let’s do something. Let’s vote. Science isn’t partisan. It’s patriotic.”
Whom Are You Voting for, Science?
Of course, literally speaking, science isn’t patriotic or not so. Oh, people can argue over whether patriotism is or isn’t a moral imperative. What’s for certain, however, is that you can’t see a principle in a Petri dish or a moral under a microscope. Science is just a method for achieving ends. This may seem an obvious and picayune point. But it bears mentioning because, ironically, Nye is invoking “science” in the partisan endeavor of aiding a political party and presidential candidate.
More significantly, with deep government involvement, “science” has become very partisan in recent decades. The Covid response is a perfect example, as official medical pronouncements were shaped by politics more than science. They were, not surprisingly, often wrong and sometimes deadly. And, interestingly, they always seemed to facilitate just one major party’s agenda.
Whatever, though, Nye’s conception of science, he’s certainly not “Bill Nye the Civics Guy.” After all, as is common today, he cited a constitutional provision but truncated it to misrepresent (i.e., widen) its scope. That is, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 actually reads (part Nye cited in italics; part omitted in bold):
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
This is, in fact, literally known as the “Intellectual Property Clause” or the “Patent and Copyright Clause” because that’s all it relates to. It does not grant the feds open-ended permission to pursue any and every (pseudo)scientific fancy. An MSN commenter, responding to the Rolling Stone piece, alluded to this reality, too.
“The Founders would be appalled at the size, scope and unfettered power of the federal government,” he wrote.
“It is precisely the sort of thing they fought against.”
What Is Nye Fighting: Rising Temperatures — or Reality?
Nye might have “graduated” from being the “Science Guy” (is Fauci that now?) to, as his Netflix show’s deific-sounding title reads, “Bill Nye Saves the World.” But critics might say he should save his own sanity.
He could start by first pondering that Earth’s temperature was considerably higher in prehistoric times. It also has been somewhat higher in more recent, pre-industrial history. Note, too, the predictions that the climate will actually cool in coming decades.
Then there’s the point made by, among others, geologist Professor Ian Plimer. “No one has ever shown that human emissions of CO2 drive global warming,” he said in 2022 (video below). In fact, according to Plimer and others, CO2 increases don’t precipitate higher temperatures, but follow them.
More recently, scientist Bjorn Lomborg silenced commentator Bill Maher on climate change (video below). Debunking the notion that global warming was “killing” the Great Barrier Reef, he pointed out that the coral reef has grown notably the last three years.
Perhaps, however, the most compelling argument against climate alarmism lies in reason’s realm. Just ask believers this:
What is the ideal temperature for the Earth?
They invariably won’t have an answer. Without knowing this, though, how can we know if the climate change, whether naturally induced or man-caused, is good or bad?
After all, we can’t then know if it’s bringing us closer to or taking us farther from that ideal temperature.
Nye’s Lowlights
Returning to Nye, his history reveals that he may not exactly be the guy whose counsel we should follow. Just consider some of his past statements, courtesy of the Daily Caller (quotations are the Caller’s):
- Nye once asked a bioethicist, “‘Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?’”
- Nye’s TV show “featured a cartoon sequence that depicted different sexual identities as different flavors of ice cream.”
- Nye once featured on his program a bizarre rap song titled “My Sex Junk.”
- “Last year, he suggested during a video interview that throwing ‘deniers’ of global warming in prison was an understandable and perhaps sensible idea.”
- Nye once asserted that pro-life proponents “are mostly scientifically ignorant white men,” as the Caller relates it.
- Nye has also flip-flopped on opposition to genetically modified organisms in agriculture and the matter of chromosomes determining a person’s sex.
But, hey, the past is past. Bill Nye is the Science Guy — and he’s got a world to save.
