“Bill Nye ‘the Science Guy’ is here, ready to fight the haters,” the host said in her introduction of him.
He brought along a very specific analogy.
After tweeting that recent floods in Texas and Oklahoma were related to climate change, TV icon Nye caught a lot of flack, and he appeared on CNN Saturday to address the nation.
“You tweet about climate change after extreme weather events all the time, and each time it makes climate change deniers freak out,” noted CNN’s Carol Costello. “Is this your strategy?”
Here’s Nye’s response:
I just want to remind voters that suppose you had somebody running for congressional office in your district who insisted there was no connection between cigarette smoking and cancer. Would you vote for that person? You might, but if this person were adamant — ‘No, the scientists who studied cigarette smoking, they don’t know what…’ — if they were adamant, would you vote for them? And so, in the same way the connection between climate change and human activity is at least as strong as cigarettes and cancer. And so, I just want everybody to keep this in mind: that it’s very reasonable that the floods in Texas, the strengthening storms, especially — the president was in Florida — these things are a result of human activity making things worse.
Watch the segment below:

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/weather/2015/05/29/bill-nye-climate-change-and-texas-floods-intv-costello-nr.cnn.html

It’s not the first time Nye has said something bound to ruffle feathers.
He drew fire when he said that questioning science is “unpatriotic” and critics skewered him for tweeting about flying on Air Force One on Earth Day.