It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Stupidity

I repeat: “I fuck Jesus hard through the hand holes and cream on his crown of thorns.” You say that in certain rooms and you’ll piss some people off. I said it to a socially conservative Christian woman during a commercial break on Politically Incorrect. When we came back on the air, she was in pro-wrestling mode. She was in full flipped-out Andy Kaufman mode, attacking me like a nut. I had made sure that no one but her, not even Bill Maher, heard me say it, so she seemed really to have lost it for no reason. I had said my crazy thing quietly, off air, and her reaction was loud, on air. She looked like a fucked-up crackhead and I looked measured, tolerant, and sane. It was just a cheesy TV trick that you can pull on amateurs. Hey, what can I say, I’m a professional.

Talking about raping the pain of the son of god can get you a strong reaction, but nowhere near as strong as you can get from environmentalists without even trying. James Randi is a skeptic and is Penn & Teller’s inspiration. Randi is our hero, our mentor, and our friend. The Amazing Randi taught us to use our fake magic powers for good. Psychics use tricks to lie to people; Randi uses tricks to tell the truth. About every year in Vegas, the James Randi Educational Foundation holds “The Amazing Meeting” and gathers as many like-thinking people as you can get from a group of people who want to question every time people think alike. They invite speakers as smart, famous, and groovy as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone. We all fill up a big Vegas ballroom. There’s lots of real science stuff with real scientists questioning things that a lot of people on TV take for granted, like ESP, UFOs, faith healing, and creationism. It’s a party.

Every year Penn & Teller are honored to be invited. We don’t wear our matching gray suits and Teller doesn’t stay in his silent character. Teller chats up a storm. It’s not a gig, it’s hanging out with a thousand friends. A couple years ago, during our loose Q & A, someone asked us about global warming. Teller and I were both silent onstage for a bit too long, and then I said I didn’t know. I elaborated on “I don’t know” quite a bit. I said that Al Gore was an asshole (that’s scientifically provable, right?), that I really wanted to doubt anything he was hyping, but when all was said and done, all I wanted to say was that I didn’t know. I also emphasized that really smart friends, who knew a lot more than me, were convinced of “climate change” (marketers have changed the brand name from “global warming” to “climate change,” having learned from Goldman Sachs that if you bet against yourself and have the government to bail you out with other people’s money, you’re golden). I ended my long-winded rambling (I most often have a silent partner) very clearly with “I don’t know.” I did that because . . . I don’t know. Teller chimed in with something about Al Gore’s selling of “indulgences” being bullshit and then said he didn’t know either. P & T don’t know jack shit about global warming; next question.

The next day I heard that one of the nonfamous, nongroovy nonscientists, Sharon Begley, had used me as an example of someone who lets his emotions make him believe things that are wrong. Okay. People who aren’t used to public speaking get excited and go off half-cocked. Hell, I’m used to public speaking and I go off half-cocked even when I’m not excited. I live half-cocked. Cut her some slack.

Later I was asked about some Newsweek blog she wrote. Reading it bugged me more than hearing about it. She ends with: “But here was Penn, a great friend to the skeptic community, basically saying, don’t bother me with scientific evidence, I’m going to make up my mind about global warming based on my disdain for Al Gore . . . Which just goes to show, not even the most hard-nosed empiricists and skeptics are immune from the power of emotion to make us believe stupid things.” Here is Penn, a great friend to your ass, basically saying, fuck you in the neck, Sharon.

Is there no ignorance allowed on this one subject? I took my children to see WALL-E. This wonderful family entertainment opens with the given that mankind destroyed Earth. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing us hating ourselves for what we’ve done to the planet and preaching the end of the world. Maybe they’re right, but is there no room for “maybe”? There’s a lot of evidence, but GW contains a lot of complicated points that are moral and practical and cannot be answered by evidence.

To be fair (and it’s always important to be fair when one is being mean-spirited, obscene, sanctimonious, and self-righteous), “I don’t know” can be a very bad answer when it is disingenuous. You can’t answer “I don’t know if that happened” to the attempted genocide of the Jews in World War II. But the climate of the whole world is much more complicated. I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t dedicated my life to studying weather. I’m trying to learn what I can, using the tools I have, and while I’m working on it, isn’t it okay to say “I don’t know”?

I mean, at least in front of a bunch of friendly skeptics?

I wrote a version of the above, in more L.A. Times language, for the L.A. Times right after it happened. The business with Sharon the cunt really bummed me. “Climate change” was a magic subject in Sharon’s world. Was it a taboo in the skeptics’ world, where I’d talked onstage about fucking Jesus, son of Mary, in all his holes and gotten a laugh, even from Christian skeptics? (Yup, there’s such a thing as a Christian skeptic—ESP is too weird for them, but they’re fine with zombie saviors.)

A year went by, and Penn & Teller were at the next TAM with The Amazing Randi, doing another Q & A, and we got asked the same fucking question. This is what I said this time:

“I tried saying before that I didn’t know. And when you say you don’t know, that’s a jive answer, because if someone says ‘Did the holocaust happen?’ and you answer ‘I don’t know,’ that’s absolutely a lie. And I tried to say it about global warming. I tried honestly to say that I don’t know without saying there isn’t evidence there. I really sincerely don’t know! It certainly seems like the evidence that—But you shouldn’t be listening to me, I’m the least-qualified person to talk about this. This is why we haven’t done a Bullshit! show about global warming—because we want to do stuff that we think there’s a very good chance that we’re correct about. And there is almost no chance we’d be correct about global warming.

“The only thing I’m trying to say is, if there is global warming, which there probably is, that doesn’t necessarily mean we caused it.

“And if we caused it, which we probably did, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we can stop it. Randi and I can take a tractor trailer to the top of a hill and put it in neutral, and we can start pushing it, but as it goes down the hill, we can’t necessarily stop it just because we started it.

“So if people can stop it, which they probably can, that doesn’t mean that the way to stop it is by stopping carbon emissions—which it probably is.

“And if it is happening, and we did start it, and we can stop it, and the way to do that is with carbon emissions, it does not necessarily mean that the answer is socialism.

“But it may very well be. I don’t know, and I mean I really, deeply don’t know. Not some skinhead Nazi ‘I don’t know about the holocaust’ thing, but just really, I don’t fuckin’ know!”

I should talk about global warming only during commercial breaks.

“(Tropical) Heat Wave”

—James White and the Blacks