Bill Nye — yes, the science guy — has lent his voice to a song on The Rap Guide to Climate Chaos, the latest album from Canada’s Baba Brinkman.
The 60-year-old educator and TV personality appears on “What’s Beef,” a song that takes aim at those who deny global warming (and a riff on the Notorious B.I.G. track of the same name).
“What’s beef? / beef is when the contrarian view / with no data supporting it / still gets through,” Nye says.
He agreed to contribute to Brinkman’s project after the two met last May at the Northeastern Conference on Science and Skepticism in New York City.
Brinkman, 38, was born in the small town of Riondel, B.C. (about 55 km from Nelson) but studied at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University and at the University of Victoria. His parents are both environmentalists -- his mother is Liberal MP Joyce Murray and his father Dirk Brinkman founded a reforestation company.
The rapper-playwright debuted The Rap Guide to Climate Chaos at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe festival. Brinkman boasts that he is the world’s only “peer-reviewed rapper” because his lyrics are vetted by scientists like Nye.
You can listen to “What’s Beef” and other raps about climate change at Brinkman’s website.