Stephen Hawking: Trump is going to make Earth like Venus, with temperatures of nearly 500 degrees Fahrenheit

Everybody thinks Stephen Hawking is some sort of genius. I think it's more like this: Hawking is capable of digesting a lot of information and engaging in some intelligent analysis of what it all means. That involves topics that most people are not able to understand. Bully for him. But Hawking is as capable as anyone else of reaching a wrongheaded conclusion about the information he's dealing with. He's also very capable of letting biases crowd out his judgment. And when you combine ordinary bias with the strange derangement that sets in whenever Donald Trump becomes a factor, you get completely bizarre statements like this one:

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I did the translation for you. Actually, 250 degrees Celsius is only 482 degrees Fahrenheit, so I did round up a little. If you want to use that fact as a defense of Hawking, go right ahead. But it won't get you far. Roy Spencer is an actual climate scientist and a skeptic of all this business, and he takes no prisoners in his assessment of Hawking's latest nonsense:

The trouble with this statement is that no reputable climate scientist would claim such a thing. The reason is that Venus has about 220,000 times as much carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as does Earth. Meanwhile, human civilization will have trouble simply doubling (2x) our atmospheric CO2 concentration (it’s taken about 100 years to increase it by 50%, which is half way to doubling). Since we don’t know what our future energy mix will be in 50-100 years, it’s not obvious we will even reach “2XCO2”. So, how could we possibly get from 2x to 220,000x? We can’t.

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Impossible. Not even if we wanted to. Venus is a very different planet. Venus has 93x as much atmosphere as Earth, and it is almost 100% CO2. The CO2 concentration in our comparatively thin atmosphere is only 0.04%. I have no idea where Hawking ever got such a wild idea. Apparently, he had his audience in tears with his dire predictions. This is partly why the public makes fun of scientists. Sad.

Is it really possible that the supposed super-genius Stephen Hawking didn't know all this? It's hard to imagine, but who knows? Maybe Hawking was so worked up about Trump's involvement in the issue that he lost all sense of rationality and offered a prediction so absurd that anyone with a basic working knowledge of the subject could pick out how far off he was.

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Hawking is the same guy who attempts to dispute the notion of an intelligent creator

But none of this is surprising to me. Hawking is the same guy who attempts to dispute the notion of an intelligent creator by insisting that matter - which can neither be created or destroyed within the natural world - came from nothing. That's right, according to Hawking, the events that triggered the creation of the universe unleashed such powerful energy that they created something from nothing. That's impossible. Unless, of course, an eternal and supernatural creator wills the matter into existence. Hawking denies that this happened, but can't explain where matter came from apart from a slipshod theory that it somehow showed up of its own volition. In other words, matter created itself.

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Stephen Hawking. A guy who thinks that pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord is going to jack the Earth's temperature up to 500 degrees

Spencer says he's come to expect nonsense from pseudoscientist types like Bill Nye, but is surprised to hear such rot coming from Hawking. I guess Spencer holds Hawking in higher regard than I do. He is not a dumb man, the conclusions he comes to about things are not as unassailable as people portray them to be. And he clearly is more driven by his personal and political agendas than he is by a dispassionate pursuit of the truth. And this is one of the main people that global warmists cite as a source authority who should bring about the end of all skepticism about man-made global warming, along with all the horrifying consequences they think are coming as a result. Stephen Hawking. A guy who thinks that pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord is going to jack the Earth's temperature up to 500 degrees. That's who these people are listening to.

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