The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles made an appearance at Politicon over the weekend, where he was scheduled to debate Chris Hahn, the host of the Aggressive Progressive podcast.
“Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire and ‘The Aggressive Progressive’ Chris Hahn have decided to take their fiery debate about the state of the culture off air and settle things live on the Politicon Stage, led by moderator Clay Aiken,” according to the Politicon website.
The event was clearly billed as a debate between two people. But little did Knowles know that he would end up debating two people: his opponent Hahn, a professional leftist whom Knowles has debated before, and Clay Aiken, who quickly dismissed with his role as an impartial moderator and began attacking Knowles on the subject of climate change.
As Hahn and Knowles debated climate policy, Aiken jumped into the fray.
He quickly regretted it.
WATCH:
Knowles and Hahn were talking specifically about the exaggerated number of scientists who are typically cited as being sure about global warming — and specifically that man-made carbon emissions are responsible for such an increase in global temperature, that drastic, industry-destroying government-mandated measures are the only method of slowing the slow heat death of the planet when Aiken jumped in.
“You mentioned that 99 percent of scientists agree that man-made global warming is a very, very serious problem,” Knowles said. “The number that is usually cited, speaking of hyperbole, is 97 percent, and this was the line in the Al Gore movie. This is the line that people cite.”
“That number is completely bogus,” Knowles continued. “It is made up. Lock it away with the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. It is not true. That number is based on four studies. NASA cites four studies to back it up. One is by the historian Naomi Oreskes that has serious methodological problems because it only cites abstracts of papers. When you actually look into what she cites, she gets to 75 percent consensus. There was then a rebuttal of that. There was a refutation of it that showed that not only is it not 75 percent, in 2008 they showed it was actually 7 percent of those scientists explicitly endorsed the IPCC.”
“The second one came out at 97 percent from the scientist John Cook,” Knowles went on, destroying the statistic. “This was immediately debunked. Science and Education actually found that one percent of scientist surveyed explicitly supported the IPCC conclusion of catastrophic climate change. The third study was a two minute survey that was sent out to ten thousand people. Three thousand responded. They took out the scientists who would have been in fields that possibly could have attributed warming to the sun…”
At this point, Aiken jumps in, clearly agitated. Aiken starts before trying to talk over Knowles and get his point in — even as Hahn is waving him off.
“Since you’re trying to…Instead of going through all the specific links…since none of us have a library with us to go and look and check these studies,” Aiken stutters, “so let me ask you, instead of rebutting that,” referring to Hahn’s 97 percent statistic, “since you’re looking to…”
He’d barely gotten his words out when Knowles chimed in…”I knew I should have gotten Ruben Studdard to moderate this debate.”
Aiken was left speechless and could manage only that Knowles “rehearsed that line in the bathroom this morning.”