in effect, are creating the conditions that the government has to act.

David, I think that what it brings to mind is how we utilize the information that we

have, and we all know. And I think that Bill would probably agree with this; neither he

nor I are a climate scientist. He is an engineer and an actor, I am a member of Congress, and

what we have to do is look at the information that we get from climate scientists. As you

said...

So she did something, which is very common in the climate denier community or whatever

you would call it, is to talk about credentials. So, Marsha Blackburn, Representative in the

US Congress from Tennessee said well I am a congresswoman and Bill you're just a mechanical

engineer so you're not really a climate scientist. And what I would say is what we're talking

about in this level of climate science is you don't need to be a full-time climate scientists

to understand it. Furthermore, as far as my credentials everybody, I'm a mechanical engineer.

I took a lot of physics. All I did was take physics, physics, physics, physics. And when

you're done with formal physics then you take mechanical engineering, which is just applied

physics. I get it. I can understand what's going on. We're putting carbon dioxide in

the air at a prodigious rate and the world is getting warmer and you can know this by

looking at the neutrons in the ice. You can know this by looking at the pollen grains

per cubic centimeter in the sediment of ponds. You can know this by looking carefully at

the rings on trees during warm seasons, wet seasons, cold seasons, dry seasons, and you

can work your way back and figure out that the earth is getting warmer faster than has

ever gotten before.

And that's the problem. It's not that the world hasn't had more carbon dioxide, it's

not the world hasn't been warmer. The problem is the speed at which things are changing.

We are inducing a sixth mass extinction event kind of by accident and we don't want to be

the extinctee, if I may coin this noun. So, I mean as far as Miss Blackburn, sounded like

she had been coached on denial bullet points or talking points. And I very much enjoy taking

those people on, but meanwhile it breaks my heart because we got work to do. And the fossil

fuel industry has really gotten in their ears and it's really troublesome. We're the world's

most technically advanced country, or if the U.S. isn't the most technically advanced it's

certainly in the top ten. I mean you could say Japan, New Zealand are very sophisticated

societies. But the U.S. is where iPhone's are invented, what have you, the Internet;

it's still a significant place. And so to have a generation of science students being

brought up without awareness of climate change is just a formula for disaster. I mean this

is, everybody kinda knows this.

So, I think, as an observer, and I may be wrong as I like to say, you may be right,

as an observer it looks like the U.S.'s strength is its weakness. So people came here from

all over the world for freedom to think and act the way they wanted, especially freedom

of religion. So, we ended up with both the people who framed the Constitution, which

is a fabulous thing, and people who asserted that the garden of Eden was in Missouri. And

there's no police for that sort of thing. You're allowed to believe whatever you want.

It's great. But with that was this, for them, and I emphasize them, the other side, consequence

of that was you could also ignore facts of science for a while and now it’s coming

to a head. But man it's really divisive, isn't it? It's really something.

That living things change from generation to generation through a process that Darwin

and Wallace, Alfred Wallace called natural selection or descent with modification. Those

are true things. Those are facts. Tectonic plates move and that's a fact and the world

is getting warmer because of human activity. That's a fact. If you had somebody who really

strongly believed the earth was flat, you wouldn't have to have that person on a television

show with the people who believe the earth is round. So, the BBC as I understand just

got enough. We got work to do. It's not one person versus the other person, it's 97 people

versus three people. After a while let's move on. There may have been such debates at sometime

in early human history, but you wouldn't have such a debate now.