Overcoming climate change is a challenge for those “coming of age,” much like World War II was for the Greatest Generation, Bill Nye “The Science Guy” asserted.
Nye claimed that climate change was “certainly the most serious problem facing humankind right now” while on HuffPost Live [1] May 7 with host Josh Zepps.
“So what I want to do is create the next Great Generation,” Nye said. He said the members of the Greatest Generation “pitched in” to win World War II. “And so I want the people coming of age now, the president’s kids and stuff, to work together to address climate change. I think they can, I’m sure they can do it.”
Zepps asked if climate change was a “sufficiently galvanizing purpose” and motivator as World War II and the Cold War. Nye admitted that “getting people on board with this” had proved challenging.
“Now when people have to really kind of leave Miami, then it will be serious and people will take it seriously,” Nye contended. “But then there will be so much carbon in the atmosphere, it’s a really hard thing.”
Since the public hasn’t stepped up, Nye demanded the government step in.
“We’re gonna need some regulation to get people on board, and just like they had in World War II,” Nye said, citing examples of “rationing tires,” “collecting bones to get the calcium” and “victory gardens.”
Nye also insisted that opponents be called deniers, which conjures up the offensive idea of Holocaust denial. He called out Zepps for referring to them as “people who are skeptical of climate science.”
“We just don’t like to use that word [skepticism],” Nye said. “These people are deniers.” He was one of the people to sign an open letter in December 2014 trying to bully the media [2] into using the “denier” term. He and other left-wingers demanded the media use the term “climate denier” instead of “climate skeptic.”
He had previously attacked “climate deniers” before, calling [3] politicians skeptical of catastrophic global warming “unpatriotic” and “inappropriate” on the Rachel Maddow Show Feb. 10, 2010.
Nye also lectured climate skeptics [4] on Meet the Press Feb. 27, 2014, saying “the more we mess around with this denial, the less we're going to get done.”