Fox News’ Tucker Carlson went head to head Monday night with bill nye the ‘Science’ guy and it was like watching the school nerd beating up on the bully. Except in this case the nerd was Tucker Carlson and the bully was Bill Nye. The subject was climate change, a subject Nye claims to be an expert on, and throughout the nearly 10-minute exchange, he couldn’t answer even the most basic questions posed by Carlson.

Carlson began by pointing out some recent statements Nye made regarding climate skeptics, saying they suffered from psychological delusions and should be jailed.

Carlson then went on to ask Nye a very simple question: To what degree is human activity causing climate change? Carlson wanted to know if it was 100 percent, or 74.3 percent, and since it was ‘settled science’ please tell our audience how much is based on human activity?”

Depends on what degree means

Nye first argued about what the word ‘degree’ meant and said we should be concerned about the speed at which climate change is occurring. “Instead of happening on time-scales of millions of years, or say 15,000 years, it’s now happening on a time scale of decades, even years.”

Carlson wanted to know how much of that speeding up was caused by human activity.

Nye blurted out “100 percent” followed by: “If that’s the number you want. Humans are causing it to happen catastrophically fast.” Again, Carlson asked at what rate would the Earth have changed if humans weren’t involved. After Nye refused to answer, Carlson noted that he was annoyed by these basic questions.

Nye not an expert

“They’re very basic questions. They’re not denial,” Carlson said. Nye’s response was a string of non-sequiturs about ice ages occurring thousands of years ago, and how dinosaurs roamed the Earth when there was much more carbon dioxide, and there was a sea in Wyoming where a certain member of Congress from Colorado would be underwater and how you can visit Dinosaur National Monument, but that was millions of years ago.

Carlson reminded him that he just said it was tens of thousands of years, to which Nye responded: “That was the ice age.” Nye said the rate was the problem and because half the population lives on the coasts, when the oceans get warmer they expand, and then people on the sea coast will get displaced. Nye, of course, was referring to thermal expansion.

Simple questions

"You’re not answering my questions," Carlson interjected. “I’m asking you a simple question about the rate of climate change that you said was happening at a rate that has been accelerating because of human activity. And I’m asking very simply-” Nye interrupted him and said the word accelerated was “an understatement” because it was occurring “extraordinarily fast.”

At one point, Carlson said: “So much of this you don’t know,” Carlson said.

You can watch the full debate here:

Nye has a new show debuting on Netflix targeting children. He is not a scientist and holds a degree in mechanical engineering.
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