May 7, 2014

S.E. Cupp's trademark "fairness" schtick is on glorious display here, as she chides Bill Nye for the Sheer Audacity of shaming global warming deniers with unfair tactics like "facts" and "reason." And bringing on a media figure like Bill Nye instead one of the scientists who actually worked on the report guaranteed a clown act. There would be no discussion of the facts contained within the report, only a hollow slap fight between Cupp and Nye.

This might explain why no one watches CNN:

Popular science personality Bill Nye once again stepped up to the defense of science, appearing on CNN’s Crossfire Tuesday night to discuss the third National Climate Assessment, a landmark report documenting the ways in which climate change is impacting the United States.

Officially, this was “Bill Nye the Science Guy debates climate change with Nick Loris of the Heritage foundation,” a conservative think tank with climate skepticism tendencies and reported financial ties to the Koch brothers, so it was all but certain to be a disaster. But the real battle ended up going down between Nye and conservative host S.E. Cupp, who accused Nye, along with the Obama administration, of attempting to scare people about the scary reality of climate change.

What Nye called “informing” the public about the social and economic cost of things that are already happening, like extreme weather and sea level rise, Cupp termed “scare tactics.”

“Isn’t it a problem when ‘science guys’ attempt to bully other people?” Cupp asked. “Nick here had to say, ‘I’m not a denier.’ He had to get it out: ‘I’m not a denier.’ Because really, the science group has tried to shame anyone who dares question this, and the point I’m trying to make is, it’s not working with the public.” Lorimer, for his part, spent much of his air time calling aspects of the report into question.

[...] But scaring people, Nye pointed out, is kind of the whole point of a wake-up call: “This third [NCA] report came out, saying it’s very serious,” he told Cupp. “you say no. There’s the essence of the problem. The science, the researchers say yes.”

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