Tucker Carlson of Fox News recently had Bill Nye on as a guest to discuss climate change. The entire interview is worth a listen because it nicely illustrates the strategies employed by denialists.

Here are some highlights:

Carlson pushes what is a very common denialist narrative, that they are skeptics who are just asking honest questions. Meanwhile the proponents of global warming are trying to shout them down, call them names, and are doing a disservice to science by trying to shut down debate.

The problem with this narrative (other than not being true) is that you can apply it to any position that denies established science. Flat-Earthers are just skeptics, stop shouting them down. Answer their honest questions.

The devil, of course, is in the details. Are climate change denier just asking honest questions? Ironically, Carlson himself demonstrates in the interview that he isn’t. He is playing rhetorical games to cast doubt on climate science.

First Carlson plays the silly hand that the “climate is always changing.” Of course it is. Saying this as if it counters the claims of anthropogenic global warming is so profoundly intellectually dishonest that Carlson has already abandoned any scientific high ground and proven Nye’s point before he even makes it.

Nye tries to explain that while the climate is always changing, it is the rate of change that is extraordinary. While this is correct, Nye did not really have the time to explain what he meant sufficiently to address Carlson’s persistent attempts to distort the scientific position.

The climate changes in various cycles. There are short term trends, which cause the meandering of average temperatures from year to year oscillating around the average over decades. There are also medium-term trends, with increases and decreases in the average over hundreds or thousands of years. There are also long term trends, with changes happening over millions of years.

Nye was essentially saying that we are currently seeing changes in climate over decades that normally take tens of thousands or millions of years to occur. It could also have added that the meandering background trend has been forced in the last 50 years or so in a relentlessly upward trend. Climate scientists call this, in fact, “forcing.” They have looked for all possible causes of this climate forcing in the warming direction and the only explanation they can find is human-caused release of greenhouse gases.

Nye never had the chance to give even this minimalist explanation, because Carlson kept interrupting him with nonsensical questions.

First, Carlson misinterpreted Nye’s point about the rate of change. He interpreted it to mean that the same directional forcing would be occurring naturally, just over a longer period of time. I don’t believe for a second that Carlson actually believes this is the scientific position, he was just trying to use every trick he could to trip up Nye.

Carlson therefore asked Nye, what would the rate of change be without human activity? That’s a silly question, again misinterpreting the scientific position. Not only would the rate of change be slower but the direction of change would not be persistently in the warming direction, absent human forcing.

Carlson got into a game with Nye where he was asking him what percentage of the change in climate is due to human activity. Is it 70% or 80%? He actually said, that if the science is settled, than you should be able to answer this simple honest question.

Again, the question is neither simple nor honest. It misunderstands that actual scientific position. Further, Carlson knows that scientists cannot give precise answers to the behavior of a chaotic system like climate. He even admits this is “unknowable.”

What Carlson is doing is also a classic denialist strategy – confuse uncertainty over the details with uncertainty over the more basic concept. Scientists don’t know exactly what species evolved into which other species and exactly when and where? Well, how do they know evolution happened at all?

This is not valid scientific reasoning. We can be certain (as much as science can be certain about anything) the DNA is the molecule of inheritance without fleshing out all of the mechanisms by which DNA works and is regulated. We can be conclude beyond reasonable scientific doubt (i.e., settled science) that plate tectonics is real, before we can measure the precise rate at which the continents are shifting.

Carlson’s example is even worse, because you cannot predict what the precise behavior of a complex system would have been without this one factor, you cannot conclude what effect that one factor is having. That is an absurd position – it is not just asking honest questions like a good skeptic.

Nye countered that the climate would look like it did in 1750, which is a reasonable assumption. In general terms, without the industrial revolution, the climate would most likely look similar to what it did before the industrial revolution started pouring CO2 into the atmosphere. We can’t say exactly what it would have looked like, but we can estimate by subtracting human forcing from what did happen.

Carlson simultaneously attacks Nye for criticizing climate deniers, trying to make it seem like Nye is the one who is being unreasonable, while he is nicely demonstrating the exact behavior of deniers that Nye and others criticize.