Bill Nye is getting good at this.
Fresh off a mega-debate that embarrassed Young Earth creationists and led to none other than Pat Robertson denouncing their views, Nye appeared on Meet the Press today to debate Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a global warming "skeptic."
On the air, Blackburn, who is vice-chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, denied that there is a scientific consensus on climate change and argued that "you don't make good laws, sustainable laws, when you're making them on hypotheses, or theories, or unproven sciences." (There is indeed such a scientific consensus; at one moment, host David Gregory had to correct Blackburn on this point.)
But Nye rebutted her with some simple science lessons that made a lot of sense—noting that going from 320 to 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, something Blackburn called "very slight," is actually a very big change in percentage terms (Nye said 30 percent; it is actually a 25 percent increase). At the same time, Nye also hammered home a compelling message centered on patriotism. "As a guy who grew up in the US," he said, "I want the US to lead the world in this....The more we mess around with this denial, the less we're going to get done."
The key gotcha moment in the debate came when Nye called out Blackburn for failing to lead on the climate issue. "You are our leader," he said to Blackburn. "We need you to change things, not deny what's happening."
"Neither he nor I are a climate scientist," Blackburn noted during the debate. But as Nye observed, only one of them is a politician, whose job is to use the best information that we have at our disposal to make the world work better.
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