‘Climate Hustle’ storm brews as Weather Channel founder calls Bill Nye ‘pretend scientist’

The skeptical documentary “Climate Hustle” doesn’t hit U.S. theaters until Monday, but it’s already unsettling the climate-change debate. 

Weather Channel founder John Coleman rushed to the defense of the film, which challenges the catastrophic climate-change narrative, after “science guy” Bill Nye slammed it in a clip released over the weekend as “not in our national interest and the world’s interest.”

“I have always been amazed that anyone would pay attention to Bill Nye, a pretend scientist in a bow tie,” Mr. Coleman said Saturday on the website Climate Depot.

“As a man who has studied the science of meteorology for over 60 years and received the AMS [American Meteorological Society] ‘Meteorologist of the Year’ award, I am totally offended that Nye gets the press and media attention he does,” Mr. Coleman said. “And I am rooting for the ‘Climate Hustle’ film to become a huge hit — bigger than ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore.”

Indeed, the documentary by Climate Depot’s Marc Morano bills itself as a response to former Vice President Gore’s Academy Award-winning 2006 documentary, which sparked international alarm with its warnings of imminent environmental disaster fueled by rising greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere.

“Climate Hustle,” which has a one-day screening at theaters nationwide Monday, argues that the climate-change catastrophe scenarios are part of an “overheated environmental con job” aimed at creating hysteria in order to drive public support for bigger government and ever-increasing regulation...