So I remember Bill Nye the Science Guy from his show ten years ago that my kids used to love to watch.  He did cool experiments and helped kids learn to like science.

I heard a rumor that he died and I hadn’t heard anything else about him in a while, so I figured it was true.

So I was shocked to see him on the TV when I was helping at my Mom’s the other day on a Fox news morning show.  Note:  I don’t want to get political or anything, but this is a channel that is not watched often at my house and I only see it when my stepdad has been watching it at their house.  I always check it out it for a bit before I start flipping channels.

As I watched, the show cut away to Bill Nye and I could tell he was getting a little hot and bothered about something.   As I listened I could tell he was going on in a bit of rant … about global warming…. on a Fox channel news showl.  These things don’t go together well.

The co-hosts looked very nervous and they were trying to get him to stop talking without making a scene.  This didn’t go with the channel’s overall point of view.  The fact that any channel has a point of view so strong that it is undeniable makes me crazy in the first place (for either political side).  I went to journalism school where we learned that news is objective.  But that’s beside the point, sort of.

So the co-hosts kept nervously trying to get him to talk about a web resource for kids that he was supposed to be promoting — instead of global warming.  They said “thanks Bill for sharing your ‘theory’.”   But Bill wouldn’t stop.  He was telling them that it wasn’t a theory.  That it was a fact, and he didn’t understand why so many thought it was merely a theory.  Now it was getting just plain fun to watch and they kept calling it his ‘theory’.

Finally they got him to change gears when one of the co-hosts said, “Well, Bill, we want our children to believe what we believe, so let’s move on.”

Seriously, that was said.  I kid you not.  My jaw dropped.  And Bill Nye begrudgingly went into his spiel about whatever he was supposed to be promoting.  And probably poked himself in the eye when he got home.

As I grabbed the remote to change the channel I thought about the whole exchange. Again, I don’t want to get political here folks, but saying that global warming is a theory and doesn’t exist baffles me.  Why believe scientists for some things that they prove and not for others? Especially if it has to do with the quality of life for all of us and our health.

Bill Nye and I suspect that it’s because if we accept it as truth, that would really hurt a lot of oil and gas companies, and other companies who don’t put the environment at the top of their list.  And those companies pay lobbyists a lot of money to get the our congressmen and women to believe that global warming is just a theory.  Or to go along with it.  And the Fox news channel is known to cater to that group of constituents.

It is a fact that Fox News pays contributing guests who actually work for one political party’s campaign to “analyze” top issues. How anyone could not see bias at work is beyond me.  Most news channels I watch bring in guests from both sides.  Fox News also regularly has to list multiple corrections and apologies at the end of shows for incorrect facts and misrepresenting data.  Again, this goes against everything I learned in Journalism school.

At any rate, the funny thing is that according to “Bill Nye’s Climate Lab at Chabot Space & Science Center”.Video on YouTube, Bill Nye is the face of a new permanent exhibition at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.  According to Wikipedia, the lab features Nye as commander of the Clean Energy Space Station, and invites visitors on an urgent mission to thwart climate change. Beginning with a view of Planet Earth from space, visitors explore air, water, and land galleries to discover how climate change affects Earth’s connected systems, and how to use the Sun, wind, land, and water to generate clean energy.

This, my friends, is what the programming manager at the Fox morning news show forgot to check out.  And my guess is that someone is in hot water if they still work there.

But it all made for absolutely terrific entertainment.  And for that, I am grateful.