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If you are not the sort of person who watches Meet the Press (because you are not an old person), you may have missed Sunday's "debate" between Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Mr. William Nye, Science Guy. Allow me to summarize: There is no actual debate over climate change. Allow me to summarize at greater length: Blackburn was full of misinformation and Nye seemed sleepy.
I pulled out the assertions presented by the participants in the discussion and evaluated them for truth. That's the point of a debate, right? To use facts to make a point? The Meet the Press conversation mirrored the climate change "debate" at large, which is far less a debate than a siege between people who will and people who will not accept the presented scientific facts.
Here's an example of how this will work. The segment, which you can watch here, begins inauspiciously, with a quote from NBC weatherguy Al Roker.
Al Roker:
Is it a natural cycle? Is it — is it due to human interference or human conditions that we have created? That remains open to debate. But there is no doubt the climate is changing.
Rating: False
What Roker's doing here is what you might call skepticism-once-removed. He's too smart and too prominent to deny that climate change exists, but he also doesn't want to get nasty emails from people who hate the idea that anyone would say climate change exists. (I, however, welcome such emails!) So he walks a wishy-washy and incorrect middle road: climate change is real, but is it humanity's fault?