Bill Nye Thinks People Breathing Contributes to Climate Change

Bill Nye, formerly known as “The Science Guy,” has made some jaw dropping gaffes over the years when he’s talked publicly about climate change. The most notable occurred on Meet the Press last year:

Bill Nye, the actor/comedian/educator who gained fame in the 1990s for his Bill Nye the Science Guy program on PBS, apparently doesn’t know the difference between the Arctic and Antarctic regions of the globe. At least that’s the way it looks from his recent “debate” appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he urgently lectured Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and viewers on the supposed need to “do everything” and do it now to stop catastrophic climate change. At the 8:26 minute mark in the program, Nye rhetorically asked Blackburn if they could at least agree on the “facts.” He then held up a graphic purporting to be a satellite image of Antarctica and asked: “Would you say the Antarctic has less ice than it used to?”

This was a big flub for Nye on several counts. First of all, the image he held up was of the Arctic, not Antarctica. Not exactly an inconsequential detail, especially for an alleged “expert.” But maybe he simply grabbed the wrong graphic in the heat of argument and didn’t notice, so maybe we shouldn’t make too much of that, right? OK, let’s magnanimously grant that point and let the mistake slide, though it is difficult to imagine that if the tables were turned and a climate skeptic had made such an embarrassing faux pas on national television that it wouldn’t have been turned into a definitive “gotcha” moment to forever disqualify him or her as a credible witness on climate issues.

Oops.

In a recent video released on the YouTube channel The Watercooler, Nye made the claim that climate change was caused by overpopulation and “billions of people breathing.”

In a video released by The Watercooler, Bill Nye states that the over population of the planet is causing Climate Change:

“Hey, Hey! Bill Nye here for the Emoji Science Lab. This episode: Climate Change.

Climate Change is a real deal everybody and here’s why. If we had some extraordinary car on some extraordinary highway and we could drive, somehow, straight up. For an hour. At highway speed we would be in outer space. It’s right there. The atmosphere is really thin.

Now back in 1750 there were about one-and-a-half billion people in the world. Well today there is 7.2 going on 7.3 billion people.

Well that’s the problem. There’s billions of people breathing and burning the same thin atmosphere…”

So which is it? Are we going to die from global warming or when the atmosphere is all burned up? I don’t know about you but there’s nothing I like better than burning the atmosphere to grill some T-bones. But I’d gladly stop using the atmosphere to cook my steaks if it will save lives.

As for all those billions of people exhaling CO2, perhaps if we asked everybody to hold their breath for a while, we could save ourselves.

I’m sure Bill Nye would approve.