Marc Morano Exposes Bill Nye’s Astonishing Ignorance Of Climate Science In Debate On CNN

The following is video of a CNN debate between Marc Morano and Bill Nye. I thought Bill Nye was supposed to be well-informed about science. Boy, was I wrong.


Marc Morano Exposes Bill Nye’s astonishing ignorance of climate science.

It started as soon as Nye opened his mouth at the 1:39 mark, he claimed the Medieval Warm Period and Roman Period were isolated incidents occurring only in Europe. He repeated it again at 2:55.

That claim was already refuted 10 years ago. Since then there have been dozens of studies from every corner of the globe where proxy data clearly show that the aforementioned optimums occurred in cycles WORLDWIDE. Incredibly, Bill Nye thinks that the global temperature was more or less constant before human CO2 emissions. Even Michael Mann no longer believes that.

At the 2:20 mark, Nye then says that the rate of CO2 rise is of great concern. False. What is of concern is CO2’s impact on global warming. All scientists agree that a doubling of CO2 will lead only to about 1 – 1.5°C of warming by itself. CO2’s impact is turning out to be far less than originally feared. In fact “the rapidly rising CO2” has resulted in no global warming in over 15 years!

Then at about the 3:35 Morgan and Nye seem to claim that the climate is directly related to the human population, i.e. when population rises, then temperature rises. Now we are getting a good idea of just how bad Nye and Morgan’s science truly is.

Throughout the debate, Nye and Morgan’s arguments are carried by fear and horror visions. You can’t help but to think they are a bit on the hysterical side.

At the 4:30 mark, Morgan then totally confuses weather with climate. “How do you explain the warm weather today? Why is it we have all this freakish weather just when we have so many people? That’s evidence isn’t it?” The CNN host has now ventured into comedy science. It’s again that psychological affliction of insisting that the world is coming to an end, and not being able to live without that.

At the 6:30 mark it’s the old “precautionary principle” line. It’s a wonder these people ever hop onto a plane or drive a car.

The rest of the debate is pretty much Bill Nye and Piers Morgan neurotically worrying about the phony computer-generated horror scenarios 100 years down the road, and confirm they believe that global temperatures are rising (they aren’t, they’re flat) and that sea level rise is accelerating (it isn’t, in fact it is decelerating).

Finally, I couldn’t help noticing that their primary worry is population growth – for them there are just too many people on the planet. They need more “Lebensraum“.

 

62 responses to “Marc Morano Exposes Bill Nye’s Astonishing Ignorance Of Climate Science In Debate On CNN”

  1. Nonoy Oplas

    Some climate alarmists are using that “more population, more global warming” argument here in the Philippines. There is a very divisive, highly emotional congressional bill, known as “Reproductive Health” bill or simply population control bill. About 99 percent of its advocates are believers of AGW and man-made CC.

  2. Juergen Uhlemann

    Piers Morgan is such a bad host. He is not neutral as he (always) takes sides.
    He is one of these guys in the media that drive the AGW agenda.

    Piers and Bill just don’t understand that in our living memory many things took place but we easily forget as we go on with our life. What’s about the time before us? How far can we go back to be certain that we know what took place in the past? Bill should know it better as he is only a few years younger than I and I remember hot and cold summers, storms, floods, droughts, freezing and mild winters.

    Look at today’s media and the stories from all around the world. In the past a story from the other side of the globe was very rare and then most likely under miscellaneous reported.

    The one thing that was clear as Piers and Bill mentioned a lot of weather examples and if Marc would have done it they would said this is weather and not climate.

    Bill “Medieval Warm Period and Roman Period were isolated incidents occurring only in Europe” – Where was it found? In the ice core of Europe?
    Think again: The Artic ice was quite low this year and the claim was AGW. Vikings settled in Greenland and it was … what … not AGW.

    Btw.: Ice core, tree rings, weather stations and any non satellite data is local weather. The satellite data is not very old and is such a small snapshot that you could not predict anything for the future.

  3. John F. Hultquist

    If you look at the en.wiki site for P. T. Barnum you will find that Phineas Taylor Barnum “was an American showman, businessman, scam artist and entertainer, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and . . .”

    Many years ago I watched several of ‘the science guy’s’ shows and decided that Bill must have been a direct descendent of P.T. – and I haven’t heard him in a dozen years. Why waste my time – I’ve forgotten more about earth science than he has ever known.
    Whether it is Piers M., Rush L., A. Gore, Taylor Swift, or the science guy – they make their living based on their ability to entertain, not on their science credentials. Of these, only one is honest about that. While I’m not a big fan of Swift’s music, I respect her as an entertainer and if given the opportunity to have lunch with any of the four, she would be my choice. There is not a second place pick.

  4. richard

    Finally, I couldn’t help noticing that their primary worry is population growth

    a good indiction of strong agriculture.

  5. DirkH

    Another falsity by Piers Morgan: Calling Sandy a Hurricane. It wasn’t at landfall, it was an ex-tropical storm.

  6. MostlyHarmless

    I remember seeing Bill Nye the Nonsense Guy on CBS news last year. He was summarising his version of “Climate Change for Dummies”, explaining that “when water evaporates it gives out a lot of heat”. If we could only capture Bill’s heat we could supply the world’s energy needs – clean and carbon-free!

  7. norman harman

    Yes, when water evaporates it releases heat. That’s why, if you soak your clothes with water on a hot day you cool off. As the water evaporates from your clothes it takes much of your body heat with it. As a retired roofer I’m quite familiar with this process.

    In ancient Arabia this principle was so well known and so important the Arabs made special clay water jugs with tiny holes all through the sides and didn’t use a glaze finish so that the water would very, very slowly seep out to the surface and then evaporate – thus providing one of the few sources of cold water in the desert.

    I don’t think much of Piers Morgan, nor his grasp of scientific principles, but I do think highly of Bill Nye and his lifelong professional experience in the field of science.

    As to Marc Morano, well, his scientific credentials are simply non-existent. His grasp of science and scientific principles are even less credible than are Morgan’s. I’m afraid Mr. Morano’s opinions are thoroughly and completely without any basis in scientific fact.

    Mr. Morano’s view of the action of CO2 in the atmosphere is totally wrong, as any high school science text clearly shows (well, maybe not in Christian schools). CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere and keeps it from flowing back into space. Without CO2 occurring in the atmosphere at certain levels our oceans would freeze and there would exist little or no life on this planet. Too much CO2 and too much heat gets trapped and the planet warms up. It’s pretty simple, really.

    I would gladly debate Mr. Morano on the effects of CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” anytime – or virtually any other subject, for that matter.

    1. GoFigure

      Morano may not have educational or “hands-on” experience in climate, but he’s quoting from numerous climatologists, physicists, who do.

      The co2 experiement shows only that in a controlled experiment adding co2 to the mix will cause some increase in temperature. However, in the open atmosphere there are feedbacks. Obviously these feedbacks do not work the way the alarmists thought because in the past 16 years while co2 has continued to increase, the temperature has remained flat.

      Not only that, the models actually assume that water vapor is the real culprit (hardly ever, if ever, mentioned in the news media.) The modelers all assume that for the increase in temperature caused by co2, water vapor reacts by further increasing that temperature by a factor of2 to 3! Those models also cannot reconcile the fact most recently noticed by satellites – that when the earth is warmer, more heat escapes to space. This puts the greenhouse effect on shakey ground. The feedback claim never had even an ounce of credibility. As Svensmark pointed out years ago, it’s clear the cloud cover provides a negative feedback.

      The term “climate change” has been revised by the alarmists to mean “catastrophic anthropogenic-caused global warming” (CAGW). But most of the acolytes now understand, like any religion, it covers everything – global warming, cooling, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, etc, with no real evidence necessary (or available).

      The warming which supposedly began about the time co2 began rising is also bogus. Our current warming actyakkt began at the low point during the Little Ice Age. Using an arbitrary date, like the “end of the LIA” has no useful meaning. That low point, (low temperature) according to Dr. Evans, Aussie climatologist modeler, was around 1630, some two centuries BEFORE co2 began rising.

      And why would Morano have to have a PhD in climatology to point out that numerous peer-reviewed studies have shown that the Medieval Warming Period was a global event? (The only reason that the alarmists did not totally deny the existence of the MWP and the LIA is because there’s enough civilized history in Europe to rebut that, so they had to settle by claiming “just a regional phenomenon.”

    2. Duster

      In fact, it takes about high school level physics to describe the basic interactions, and you apparently flunked – English major perhaps? Water at a state change boundary requires or releases far more energy than is required to change the temperature of the material within the new state (see heat of fusion, heat of vaporziation. The transitions from ice to liquid and liquid to vapor demand extra energy to make the state change. The reverse transitions release that extra.

      The reason that an earthenware jug cools water so well is that it permits water to diffuse through the porous structure of the low-fired clay (there are no special “tiny holes”) to the outer surface where it evaporates, chilling the jar and indirectly, through conduction, the contents. The change from liquid to vapour takes about 540 times the energy required to heat the same mass of water one degree C as a lquid. If the cotents are somewhat saline, and in most desert regions they are, the process also causes salt to accumulate at and near the outer surface of the jug causing physical spalling of the jar.

      Hurricanes in contrast are driven by the reverse process. The volume of warm damp air pulled into the vortex is lifted and as it is, the vapour condenses forming the visible droplets that you see as clouds. Much of this tales place at high altitudes. The energy released may be re-absorbed by a GHG molecule or it may escape into space as longwave infrared radiation. Absorption means the recieving molecule is higher energy and thus potentially “hotter”, while if the LIR radiation escapes into space, that energy, which came from the ocean surface originally has left the planet, and thus cooling it. That means that both “warming” and “cooling” actions are taking place simulataneously with the very same GHG – water vapour.

      CO2, in much, much lower concetrations, has far lower thermal mass to begin with and also isn’t capable of absorbing as much radiant energy as water vapour. However, it follows much the same pattern with the exception that it undergoes no state changes within our atmosphere. In the lower atmosphere, it will absorb energy. Being “warmed” it will tend to “seek” a higher altitude like a hot air balloon. Where, when it re-emits the LIR, there is a slightly lower probability of that radiation being reabsorbed and a greater one of it radiating into space. This is because the mean free path a photon can take increases upward, remains essentially constant parallel to the earth’s surface at a given altitude (or atmospheric density) and increases downward. All other things being equal a photon will be more likely to leave than to hang around. Assuming that LIR scatters randomly from a CO2 molecule, the path of any particular photon would follow a fairly short Markov-like path before leaving the planet. It would not be a true radnom path because the biases in material density downward and increased optical path length outward mean that outward jumps are more likely to carry greater distances than inward ones. “Back radiation” is real enough, but by and large it originates within meters above your head and makes few downward visits before it says farewell to our planet for good.

    3. DirkH

      “I don’t think much of Piers Morgan, nor his grasp of scientific principles, but I do think highly of Bill Nye and his lifelong professional experience in the field of science.”

      You would surely also go to George Clooney to have your heart checked. (He used to play a doctor on TV; like Nye plays a “sciency” guy, not even a scientist, on TV)

      1. Guinness

        Um, Bill Nye is an actual scientist so your analogy of Clooney is moot.

        1. klem

          Bill Nye has a Bsc in Mechanical engineering.

        2. DirkH

          So if a BSc of mechanical engineering can pontificate about climate science, I’m qualified just the same (Computer science diploma).

  8. Sean Peake

    I don’t know why Piers would want fewer people. He needs as many viewers as possible.

    1. PsychoDad

      I guess it’s the competition he wants to die off.

  9. Christy

    The fact that global warming is actually still up for debate is what I take issue with. Poor Bill Nye having to actually listen to dangerously ignorant guys like Mark Morano who like the sound of their voices more than common
    ( Internationally) scientific facts on the subject.

    1. DirkH

      “Poor” Bill Nye probably gets pretty handsomely paid for playing a person who knows something about science on TV.

  10. schroedinger

    1. The earth is warming. Everything shows that; the BEST study concluded that.
    2. CO2 is the main cause. Almost every scientist agrees on that.
    3. Sea level rise is accelerating. I challenge you to find scientific sources that say it’s decelerating.

    1. Duster

      The earth has indeed been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age with no statistically significant changes in rate since that time. During the last 16 to 18 years there has been no warming at all, James Hanson to the contrary. His colleagues disagree with him you know.

      The one thing we do not know is the “main cause” for climate warming at any time. Not all climatologists agree, and in other science areas – e.g. geology only a minority agree (though with the availability of grant money for “research” into the topic, there are more “converts” every year), since the assertion is contrary to observation. Check Phanerozoic atmospheric CO2 levels. Almost “every scientist” does not agree on the cause. You would know that if you really researched such assertions. Similarly, sea level, while apparently still rising, in the last few years been decelerating, not accelerating. Some recent assertions, such as “the most siginificant sea level changes taking place in the open oceans” – where they can’t monitored by a tide gauge – need very serious work before they can be taken seriously. The idea contradicts hydrostatic equilibrium.

    2. Bruce of Newcastle

      BEST is a land only database (so far) which appears to be contaminated by UHI. If you look at sea surface datasets and combined datasets the warming is much less.

      CO2 is not the main cause. One half of warming last century was the result of solar magnetic influences on the atmosphere, plus TSI. Another one third was due to a cyclic ~60 year temperature fluctuation in the oceans, which is well known – even Michael Mann has a paper on it (see Knight et al 2005).

      That leaves about 1/6th of 20th Century warming due to CO2 and everything else. This is consistent with the empirically measured values for CO2 sensitivity by Linden & Choi 2011 and a number of other groups.

      I agree that CO2 probably causes some net warming, but at a 2XCO2 of about 0.5 C there is not possibility of human caused catastrophic warming.

    3. PsychoDad

      Stating allegations as facts and putting numbers before them does not make them so. In fact, your allegations are largely dead wrong. If YOU would open your neurotic little mind and read the contrary evidence with an unbigoted eye you would learn that there is at the very least room for some doubt about the tenets of the Church of Warmingology.

    4. DirkH

      “schroedinger
      5. Dezember 2012 at 22:31 | Permalink | Reply

      1. The earth is warming. Everything shows that; the BEST study concluded that.”

      The “warming” that BEST showed stopped in 2000 (The curve does not continue further. It is a 10 year running average. So when BEST came out (and it is still not published in a peer reviewed journal) in 2011, they very nicely captured the warming 80ies and 90ies but not the stop of global warming since then.

      A guy calling himself “Schrödinger” should know about these very simply mathematical tricks methinks…

      1. DirkH

        And lest we forget
        Dr. Muller And Associates’ BEST product: GreenGov ! Makes your governemnt green!
        (A “product” that Muller’s daughter tries to peddle to government agencies it seems – snout in the trough and all that)
        http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/13/the-waxman-markey-circus-is-coming-to-town-dr-richard-muller-to-showcase-best-under-the-bigtop/#comment-796111

        And let’s not forget that Muller himself is a geo engineering salesman for his own company and for NOVIM Group.
        http://www.mullerandassociates.com/index.php

      2. DirkH
  11. Marc Morano Exposes Bill Nye’s Astonishing Ignorance Of Climate Science In Debate On CNN | #Beet's B.O.O.T.

    […] Marc Morano Exposes Bill Nye’s Astonishing Ignorance Of Climate Science In Debate On CNN. Rate this:Share this:TwitterGoogle +1FacebookMoreDiggRedditLinkedInPrintTumblrEmailStumbleUponPinterestLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. This entry was posted in General and tagged Bill Nye, Marc Morano. Bookmark the permalink. ← Redneck tailpipe – cook your hamburgers while driving. 'Merica!! […]

  12. Bruce of Newcastle

    It is true that we are getting more extreme weather. But the climate scientists of the IPCC do not ever like to point out that when the sun is quiet we experience more common and more extreme instances of jet stream blocking. This caused the epic heat wave in Moscow and accompanying floods in Pakistan a couple of years ago, and also the US heatwave last summer.

    The CAGW people like to blame CO2 for this quite natural phenomenon. Read about Rossby waves for more on this area.

    1. klem

      “It is true that we are getting more extreme weather. ..”

      Compared to what? Compared to when?

      How does one define ‘more extreme’ anyway?

  13. PsychoDad

    The chief pitfall of the Warmingologists is that they are not peddling proper science at all. The core value, the sine qua non of the scientific method, is that a theory must be falsifiable; there must be a defined dispositive data set. However, like a TV psychic peddling his mummery, ANY scenario is interpreted as being evidence of “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” or “Climactic Chaos” or whatever the latest catchphrase is to replace the old one.

    Get a mild day in early December? Global warming did it. Get a foot of snow in early December? Well, global warming did that too. Remember when “Snow was going to be a thing of the past.”? Yeah, a long time back, like back when dissent was the highest form of patriotism.

    Official charts show absolutely zero warming trend over the last 15 years? Well, there’s a temporary cooling trend running too which is damping out warming.

    The ice caps are going to melt. Well, only the Arctic one. The same warming makes the North Pole melt and causes record-setting ice at the South Pole. Of course, all the ice melted where it was, that storm in August that broke up ice and blew it south doesn’t count. Or maybe it does, the storm was Global Warming too!

    Give us a well-defined dispositive data set first, and then we can talk about the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis as is if it was real science.

  14. kramer

    I noticed he said Sandy was not an especially big hurricane.

    1. DirkH

      Funny. Must be my ears. He called it the worst hurricane ever to hit NYC.

      1. DirkH

        (with “he” I meant Piers Morgan)

  15. Doug Proctor

    Nye’s position is based on a simple principle: there are too many people, doing too much, some of which is bound to be bad for the planetary biosphere, most of which is consumption based (physical resource as well as energy). If we go at “the problem”, whatever exactly it comes to be, from a decarbonization angle, we will reduce the human element wrt consumption of resources and probably reduce the human number as well, so it will be all to the good.

    Nye is a mechanic who changes your alternator, plugs, coils and leads because somewhere in there is probably the reason your car doesn’t run smoothly. It could be the fuel filter or the air filter, but a lot of mechanics will tell you that electrical problems are more likely to give you trouble than fuel-air blockages.

    And if the mechanic is wrong, you’ve got a “better” running car anyway. And you can afford it, you capitalist bastard.

  16. David Moore

    Mr. Harman, I think you should stick to roofing. Even in Christian schools I think they can do the simple arithmentic that 400 ppm of CO2 is 0.04%. CO2 is a trace gas, most of which is due to natural causes. The largest volume of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is by far water vapor. By the way, Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer, not an atmospheric physicist.

    1. Guinness

      And your credentials are?

      1. klem

        Who cares?

      2. DirkH

        Argumentum ad verecundiam. You did that before, you really like authority, don’t you?

    2. Bernd Felsche

      [shakes head. mutters]

      A Mechanical Engineer?

      Methinks the studio lights must’ve blinded him to what Engineers should be doing: Always asking “What’ve I done wrong? What can be done better?”

      1. DirkH

        Or: “Interesting. It failed in a different way this time.”

  17. Marc Morano Exposes Bill Nye’s Astonishing Ignorance Of Climate Science In Debate On CNN | THE MEGAPHONE | Scoop.it

    […] If you scare people long and hard enough, they’ll eventually discard their principles and agree to anything.  […]

  18. Bob Young

    Nye is an embarassment to himself. He has no clue what he is talking about

  19. John Riggs

    Quote [“Yes, when water evaporates it releases heat. That’s why, if you soak your clothes with water on a hot day you cool off. As the water evaporates from your clothes it takes much of your body heat with it. As a retired roofer I’m quite familiar with this process. …”]

    If I were you, I’d stick to roofing. Even your own analogy is nonsense: you say water releases heat when it evaporates – if that were so, the heat it released would be making your wet clothes warmer – hardly cooling you off.

    Try this scientific analogy: Empty vessels make most noise…

  20. Marc Morano Destroys Warmist Bill Nye » Pirate's Cove

    […] here’s NoTricksZone It started as soon as Nye opened his mouth at the 1:39 mark, he claimed the Medieval Warm Period […]

  21. PaulF

    What is amazing to someone like me (a person that doesn’t understand the science) is that there can be such disagreement on what is supposed to be science of climate change. One guy says the UN report shows no increase in temp. in the last 20 yrs, the other says the report shows an increase in the last 20 yrs. I don’t get it.

    1. DirkH
  22. klem

    I know you people like to bad mouth Bill Nye, but I like the guy, he’s a science guy through to the bone. I do not agree with him regarding climate change, I do not agree with him on population control and many other issues, but I still appreciate the guy. I’m one of those fools who beleives that if enough compelling evidence were presented to Bill Nye, he’d become a climate skeptic. Like James Lovelock, like many former climate alarmists out there who have reviewed the evidence for catastrophic climate change and ended up on the skeptic side.

    1. DirkH

      See Burt Rutan’s video on WUWT TV; he mentions that James Lovelock is a good friend of him and in private expressed his opinion that the Ozone scare as well as the climate scare were bogus science – long before he made his silent public U-turn about CO2AGW. Remember his “the only surviving humans will be a few breeding pairs in the arctis?”

      If Lovelock is an honest scientist, Harry Potter is Macbeth.

  23. Wil Burns

    Marc Morano opinions are bought and paid for!

  24. J L

    If you people would just stop and think for a few extra seconds, or spend one or two minutes looking into Marc Morano and his financial ties, you would realize that he is a charlatan and a shill.

    Just think about it for a second. Please. I’m begging you, please. Think.

    Which is more likely:

    1) Tens of thousands of career scientists somehow managed to stay organized across multiple decades as they orchestrated a massive conspiracy to destabilize the world economy – and they did it to swindle the world’s governments out of the grant money they’ll use to make their mortgage payments.

    2) A handful of ultra rich executives seeking to protect their energy empire have invested a tiny fraction of their multi-billion dollar fortunes into hiring public relations experts tasked with obscuring scientific findings from public view, just as tobacco executives did not so long ago.

    The average climatologist makes between $60,000 an $120,000 per year.

    High ranking oil executives make between $50,000 and $100,000 per DAY.

    Who has the motive? Who has the means?

    Think. Think. Think.

    1. DirkH

      J L
      22. August 2013 at 03:41 | Permalink | Reply
      “Which is more likely:
      1) Tens of thousands of career scientists somehow managed to stay organized
      […]
      2) A handful of ultra rich executives seeking to protect their energy empire ”

      J L, the CRU at UEA has been founded with money from BP. Big Oil has supported climatism from the start; Oil contains less carbon than coal per unit of energy; so oil wins against coal when climatism finishes off coal.

      I hope that was not too complicated for you.

  25. Ed Caryl

    First J. L., there are no PR agencies bankrolling skeptics. Contrary to all the myths about oil money bankrolling some devious plot, … It ain’t happening. Not a penny. Because the CAGW people get oil money, they think their opponents get even more money. I really wish it were true, but I have yet to see a check. And no one else I know has seen a check either.

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