On Monday, Bill Nye, sitting alongside fellow climate alarmist Bernie Sanders, chided “extreme skeptics,” lecturing them “to think about what is called cognitive dissonance.” He asserted, “Instead of accepting that the climate is changing, deniers are denying the evidence and dismissing the authorities.”

The problem, as elucidated in an Investor’s Business Daily editorial, is “we’re often told by advocates of climate change that the ‘science is settled.’ But in fact, ‘science’ itself is in a deep crisis over making claims it can’t back up, especially about climate.” For example, the article continues, an analysis by University of Virginia’s Center for Open Science “estimates that roughly 70% of all studies can’t be reproduced. And this includes the field of climate change.” The fact that “99% of scientists” — a bogus but nevertheless often repeated statistic — blame man-made emissions for global warming despite often being unable to replicate studies is highly alarming.

Meanwhile, a new study of planetary orbits flies in the face of the conventional climate change theory. As reported in a news release, the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports newfound “evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.” The report explains how “small but regular ticks in a planet’s orbit can exert big changes on the location and orientation of a planet on its axis relative to the sun and, accordingly, change the amount of solar radiation a planet receives over a given area. Where and how much solar radiation a planet gets is a key driver of climate.”

Now consider this: The globe soaks up roughly 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) of solar energy annually. To better comprehend this number, De Anza College’s Ridha Hamidi, Ph.D., says, “More energy from sunlight strikes the earth in one hour than all of the energy currently consumed on the planet in one year. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth’s non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined.” Read the last sentence twice if you have to.

In an email to The Patriot Post, meteorologist Joe Bastardi responds: “I have not read enough of the study to comment on aspects I have not researched. But given my stated position that the sun is the conductor of the climatic orchestra of the oceans, stochastic events and the very design of the system, it would make sense that the sun should be considered as the source of climatic variations rather than the increase of one molecule of CO₂ out of every 10 thousand molecules of air over a 100-year period.” The lesson here is that man’s footprint isn’t just relatively small, it’s minuscule. Perhaps it’s not the skeptics who are, as Nye says, “denying the evidence,” but rather those who want to silence the discussion.