There is such a superabundance of right-wing commentators and bloggers that it is useful to categorize them by their intellectual ability. There are perhaps one or two that merit membership in the “A” level. Those would be David Brooks and George Will but in recent years their output has become more slanted and more vacuous. At the opposite end, one can identify such writers as Brandon Morse as a definite D-lister, or perhaps even lower. He is a young libertarian who has written for the Blaze and gained some publicity during the GamerGate affair.
A recent piece of his about Bill Nye, the Science Guy shows his abysmal abilities as a thinker (See the Blaze, April 24, 2017). Morse complains about three things, Nye’s stance on transgenderism, his views on climate, and his status as a scientist.
Morse uses Nye’s view of transgenderism and climate change to assert that he is a “psuedo-scientist” [sic]. Because one of Nye’s presentations showed that he clearly accepts transgenderism as a valid condition or identity for some people, Morse thinks that Nye’s is being unscientific, that he is ignoring sound science. As proof, Morse finds one psychiatrist from Canada who believes that such people are mentally ill. However, if you go to the APA web site, you will find a view much more sympathetic to transgender people.
Morse’s view of sexuality is extremely simplistic. If you have two X chromosomes, ovaries, and other female characteristics, then you are a woman; it doesn’t matter how you feel or what you think. If you are a man physically, and thus can’t menstruate and can’t give birth, then there is no way that you can consider yourself a woman stuck in a man’s body. However, Morse’s view is at odds with reality, and thus is the unscientific view. Transgender people don’t claim that they can function in all ways like someone of the sex that is opposite of what they were born with physically. And note too that sexuality and gender identity, though not fully understood, are clearly much more than obvious physical characteristics. One’s endocrine makeup and environmental factors play roles as well.
Just because most people seem to fit into one of two types, heterosexual male or heterosexual female, Morse wants to view all who are different from those types as mentally ill, deviant, or abnormal. If he did his research, he would learn that human sexuality is far more diverse than two simple types, and even within those types there is a great range of behavior and traits.
And then Morse tries further demean Nye as a scientist by bringing up a debate Nye had with William Happer. In that debate Nye had pointed out that the oceans were warming, a claim Morse says has been disproven. Morse is wrong. If one follows the links to the article about an ocean warming study, the article actually says that it is only the deep abysses that have not shown warming. The ocean water in the top mile or so has warmed (and that’s a lot of water, by the way, and thus a lot of heat). Obviously, Morse did not read the article.
Morse then attacks Nye with the claim that because Happer is a “real scientist”, we must listen to him and not to Nye. Happer says that people are overly alarmed about climate change and we shouldn’t change policy over what are flawed models of climate behavior. Unfortunately for Morse, he has not done his homework. Happer does qualify as a scientist, but he does not qualify as a climate scientist. He is a retired physicist, and he is notorious for his unconventional and easily disproven views on climate science. For example, he once tried to persuade against any regulation of CO2 as a pollutant, saying, “Carbon dioxide is a perfectly natural gas, it’s just like water vapor, it’s something that plants love.” In spite of being a physicist and supposedly intelligent person, he seems to have missed the point that it doesn’t matter whether we call CO2 a pollutant or not. The issue is that increased levels of it in the atmosphere hold in more heat. That’s a simple fact of physics. I like P. Z. Myers response to this statement by Happer: “[W]ell, we make about a pound of poop every day, it’s perfectly natural, plants love it, but do we really believe more sewage would make the world a better place for humans?”
What’s important is not if someone is a scientist and someone else isn’t. What is important is whether a person understands the science. Nye clearly does and Happer clearly doesn’t. What Morse is trying to do by bringing Happer in on his side is an argument from authority. The problem here is that one could bring in far more and vastly better qualified authorities (that is, actual climate scientists, not retired physicists) who accept the idea of anthropogenic global warming, and thus would win the “authority” game hands down. Happer may fit the definition of a scientist in the sense of someone who does (or once did) scientific research, but if he refuses to accept obvious facts about CO2, he could be a professor emeritus of a dozen scientific fields, and he would deserve to be ignored.
An informed public would see through people like Brandon Morse and William Happer quickly, but this is America, where the rightwing works tirelessly to con and confuse.
