Students, faculty and fans flooded into The University of Alabama’s Moody Music Concert Hall Monday, Sept. 28 at 7 p.m. Heads turned, eyes searched. An excited murmur travelled through the hall.

The crowd roared as Bill Nye entered the room.

“Roll tide,” he called out, and another wave of screaming began.

The Blount Undergraduate Initiative and the Allele Lecture Series partnered to host a lecture by Nye.

Nye began his speech with an overview of his family history.

“I would like to just tell you a couple of stories, and of course it all centers around me, me, me, me,” he said.

The crowd erupted with laughter.

Nye said his father, Ned Nye, went to school for political science with the intent of pursuing a law degree. He wanted to marry his future wife, but her father wouldn’t let him until she graduated college.

His father took a job on Wake Island as a quartermaster for the U.S. military

“He said it was the greatest job,” Nye said. “You would just work all day in the tropical weather you would go swimming whenever you wanted to at break time and then at night they would watch movies, but if it started raining, which is quite common in the tropics, they wouldn’t go inside. It was just raining. They’d just sit outside and watch movies.”

His father was a prisoner of war in World War II. When he returned home, he married his wife and had Nye.

Nye transitioned to talking about the number of people in the world during his grandfather’s and parents’ lifetimes.

“In my grandfather’s time, there were about one and a half billion,” Nye said. “During his lifetime it doubled. During my lifetime and as of about lunch time today, we have almost 7.3 billion people.”

He said climate change is caused by this increase in people.

“The atmosphere is thin and there’s 7 billion humans driving around breathing and burning it, I mean that’s the problem,” Nye said. “This part of it is not rocket surgery.”

This drew another laugh from the crowd.

July 2015, Nye said, was the warmest month on record, and 2015 is well on its way to being the warmest year in human history.

Nye said ice melting in Antarctica could cause flooding very quickly.

“Most of southern Florida will be under water and New Orleans,” he said.

Underwater, Nye said, means water would be ankle deep. Everywhere. This would cause serious problems for residents.

“It’s done,” he said. “You’re over. You can’t live there anymore.”

Some, he said, would be in more trouble than others.

“In a place, for example, like Miami, we have 2 million lower class people, people who don’t make very much money,” Nye said. “They can’t just drive, they can’t just go somewhere else and get a job. They don’t have the resources.”

Nye said that in Miami today, you can’t get liability insurance on your car because of the number of parking lots and garages that flood with salt water.

“The trouble is the speed,” he said. “It’s the rate at which the world is getting warmer. It’s not that the world didn’t used to be warmer, it’s the speed that all this is happening.”

College students need to get together and find solutions to society’s climate problems, Nye said.

“If you think the Earth is six thousand years old, knock yourself out, but don’t make your children believe it, because we need you all who are in college to design new cool stuff and deal with climate change and establish new policies and change the world,” he said.

Nye said he wondered if there were really that many people who believed the Earth is 6,000 years old.

“And then I went to Kentucky,” he said.

The crowd laughed and cheered.

The Creation Museum in Kentucky, according to its website, brings the Bible to life. This, Nye said, isn’t a real museum. A museum has artifacts, photos, and paintings. The Creation Museum, he said, has dioramas and mannequins and robots.

His comments on the museum were, he said, troubling to many people. Nye showed a picture of a car with “Bill Nye the Science Lie” written on the rear window.

“If Bill Nye hadn’t shown up, everything would be fine,” he said. “The Earth would be six thousand years old.”

The crowd laughed again.

“You laugh, but these guys are serious,” he said. “There is a huge effort to get elementary kids to somehow buy into ignoring everything they’ve ever observed in nature.”

Nye said the Bible was not built to be a science text. He said he would believe in creation if someone could prove to him that events that happened in the Bible were possible.

“If you found a way for trees to live underwater for a year, under salt water for a year; if you had a way for the kangaroos from the snow capped peak of Mount Ararat to get to Australia, without anybody noticing it; if you could make a boat that could hold 17,000 animals and a human for a year without food,” Nye said. “This way of thinking is very troubling. These followers are able to ignore everything they see.”

This, Nye said, is holding society back and leaving the world in a worse place than when people found it. He said it’s very troubling that government leaders, people in positions of power, can blatantly ignore science.

“You have to vote,” he said. “If you don’t vote, if you don’t believe in voting, will you just shut up and let the rest of us run things?”

The crowd roared in agreement.

Nye said that what society needs to do is develop wind and solar energy.

“We believe that we can power the U.S. entirely with wind and solar by 2050 and cut the emissions 80 percent by 2030, just 15 years from now, if you wanted to do it,” he said. “If it were important to you, you could do it.”

The reason for this is always blowing somewhere, Nye said. This, he said, has huge untapped potential.

“If we could build wind turbines off shore of the U.S. it would, dare I say it, change the world,” Nye said.

Nye said that, if the U.S. had solar panels everywhere, they would generate enough energy to give power all day.

He spoke about how this week, scientists discovered there is almost definitely water that flows on Mars every year.

“It is very reasonable that in your lifetime we will discover life on Mars,” Nye said.

Nye said there are approximately 100 times more starts that we can observe in the sky than there are grains of sand on the beach. He compared himself to a speck in space.

“With your brains you can know all of this,” Nye said. “With your brain you can understand what our ancestors understood, you can build on it with the process of science, you can know nature, you can know the cosmos and our place in it, you can know your place in space. With your brain you can see what’s happening to the world’s atmosphere. And with your brain you can, dare I say it, change the world.”