Following his Facebook Live chat with Bernie Sanders yesterday, during which he made some pretty depressing predictions regarding the continued effects of climate change, Bill Nye was invited onto Fox News to discuss the subject with Tucker Carlson. Unfortunately, this conversation was not nearly as productive — or civil, for that matter — as his one with the Senator was.
Carlson came right out of the gate swinging, condescendingly panning the Science Guy’s claims that climate change skeptics suffer from the psychological delusion of cognitive dissonance. When Nye was given a chance to speak, he calmly explained that cognitive dissidence isn’t a delusion, but simple human nature in that humans have a tendency to eschew scientific evidence that disagrees with their worldview.
Firing back, Carlson claimed that we all should be skeptical and “asking ourselves questions” when it comes to uh, scientific evidence, but Nye was not having this argument. “Climate change denial is denial,” he explained. “The evidence is overwhelming.” Carlson followed up and asked point blank why there’s a change in the climate, and if it’s part of an endless cycle or if human activity is the cause of it.
“It’s not a subtle question, human activity is causing climate change, to a degree that it’s a very serious problem in the next few decades,” Nye responded. After some back and forth in which Nye was constantly interrupted and given rephrased questions in an attempt to throw him off, Tucker demanded to know why we shouldn’t be “encouraging people to ask honest questions.” To that, Nye shot back, “Let me ask you this, why aren’t you concerned about it, don’t you have four children?”
It was more than apparent that Carlson did not invite his guest on to participate in a productive conversation, but attempt to discredit him — a point Nye later made by using his phone to time how long it would take Carlson to interrupt him. Although he probably fully anticipated it, as this sort of discourse is par for the course when it comes to the Fox News host.