Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Ignorance of Climate Deniers About Hurricane Harvey Boggles the Mind
Neil DeGrasse Tyson took a swing at climate change deniers during his Daily Show interview Monday night.
The topic came up when host Trevor Noah asked the astrophysicist about his recent tweet, "Odd. No one is in denial of America's Aug 21 total solar eclipse. Like Climate Change, methods & tools of science predict it."
Odd. No one is in denial of America’s Aug 21 total solar eclipse. Like Climate Change, methods & tools of science predict it.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) August 10, 2017
"Well, I just thought, there's everyone organizing their lives around attending and viewing one of nature's great spectacles, and I don't see people protesting it," the Astrophysics for People in a Hurry author explained during the Daily Show sit-down.
"I don't see people objecting to it. I don't see people in denial of it. Yet methods and tools of science predict it. So when methods and tools of science predict other things, to have people turn around and say 'I deny what you say,' there's something wrong in our world when that happens."
DeGrasse Tyson took a similar dig at science deniers with a tweet last week about Hurricane Harvey:
Hmm. Don’t see much denial of @NOAA climate scientists who have predicted Hurricane Harvey’s devastating path into Texas.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) August 25, 2017
Interestingly, DeGrasse Tyson later clarified with TMZ that he should have tweeted "NOAA scientists" rather than "NOAA climate scientists" after a mass of Twitter users accused him of confusing weather events with climate change.
While Harvey is not exactly caused by climate change, the hurricane, now a tropical storm, has been exacerbated and become more deadly because of the global phenomenon.
As DeGrasse Tyson told TMZ, "the point is that we have people in denial of the emergent scientific consensus, and that was the real point of the tweet ... people got all distracted by it."
The famed scientist has previously spoken against powerful U.S. politicians who reject the science of climate change.
"When you have an established scientific emergent truth it is true, whether or not you believe in it," he said in a April Facebook video. "And the sooner you understand that, the faster we can get on with the political conversations about how to solve the problems that face us."
He concluded that this shift in attitudes is a "recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy."
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