More Fallout from Bill Maher’s interview with Rick Santorum , where Climate change came up, and Santorum, predictably, couldn’t even quote a non-scientist buffoon blogger correctly.
I quickly interviewed Bart Verheggen, above, – the actual scientist whose work was distorted by the quack blogger that Santorum misquoted….
I like to think that interview might have had some influence on Politifact’s subsequent investigation.…
Bill Maher wouldn’t let Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum get away with bad science and phony numbers, even if it took two weeks to get it right. On HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher Friday, the host made a pointed – and unusual – follow-up to an assertion made by Santorum on an episode two weeks prior.
“I don’t usually talk about people after they’re gone,” Maher said in a prepared statement near the end of Friday’s episode before disputing a statistic cited by Santorum on the August 28 show that 57 percent of climate scientists “don’t agree that 95 percent of climate change is caused by CO2.”
Maher called Santorum’s claim “complete bullshit,” then cited an article posted on Politifact.com that investigated Santorum’s claim. In that article, Yale University climate science researcher Anthony Leiserowitz said that Santorum’s claim commits “two orders of mischaracterization” by relying on flawed statistics, apparently from a climate denier blogger, and further misstating “what it’s allegedly disapproving.”
Said Maher, “You could get your information from over 200 worldwide scientific bodies, but he gets it from a blogger and then misquotes them. Sorry, Rick, but you can’t come on my show and misrepresent the most important issue of our time.”
Anyone that’s bored can follow the link and wade into the discussion thread. Good luck, let us know how that goes..
Initial Maher interview below.
Good to see that Maher has followed up on Santomoron’s BS and said more. I had commented on another thread about what he should have done at the time—-throw the lying POS off the stage and spend the time explaining why it was lying BS. Better late than never, I guess.
Rightwingers have tried, sometimes successfully, to spout BS on Real Time before because of the live format. I’ve complained about this on their Facebook channel before.
Glad to see that Bill is not letting them get away with it even if it’s after their appearance on the show. Now if only he’d get over his crush on Ann Coulter and react the same to her Category 5 gishgalloping.
Right; better late than never. I’d sure like to see Maher be as uncompromising face-to-face with these guys as he is when doing his prepared schtick. Santorum’s nonsense was pretty easy to jump all over right on the spot, after all.
When he’s sure he can refute them he’s been pretty good lately at calling out their “rectally-derived facts”. Given his strong support for climate change, perhaps he needs to have someone knowledgeable on standby for each show or for when the deniers show up.
He’s on good term with both Nye and Degrasse-Tyson and he once had Mike Mann as a guest. Can’t be too hard to have one of them present by satellite or Internet video every Friday night.
I sensed that Maher was caught astonished by the overt blatant-ness of Santorum’s BS. It’s like getting hit by a baseball bat, for a moment all you can think to do is look stupidly around, saying “did he just DO that?”
Global Warming Consensus Exceeds 99.9%
24,210 peer-reviewed articles by 69,406 authors.
Only 4 authors reject human-caused global warming,
1 author in 17,352 or 0.006%,
2013-2014
http://www.jamespowell.org/files/stacks_image_1888.jpg
It’s still amazing how cheeky these politicians are lying on TV in the US. What would you say if a German politician would claim on German TV that the Holocaust had never happened? But fortunately this will not happen. The Europeans have not such a lying culture, and their public TV are way more accurate.