Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality. Apologies for that slightly unusual injection of Bohemian Rhapsody there, but there is really no other way at this point to sum up the behavior of the incoming Trump administration or his transition team.

Right now, the transition team is doing all it can to intimidate scientists and researchers, from nominating climate denialists for powerful positions to rooting out workers that attend climate change conferences and meetings. Now, executive committee member Anthony Scaramucci has compared climate change research to the flat-earth theory.

“I know that the current president believes that human beings are affecting the climate,” Scaramucci told CNN’s “New Day” program. “There are scientists that believe that that’s not happening.”

He’s correct on the first part. The second part is demonstrably untrue. In fact, 99.9 percent of scientists now accept that climate change is happening and humans are causing it, but anyway.

Then, Scaramucci delivers his bombshell.

“There was an overwhelming science that the earth was flat and there was an overwhelming science that we were the center of the world,” he said. “We get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community.”

It’s tempting to go into a rant here about how science is self-correcting, always skeptical and always learning over time. It might be worth pointing out that everything is based on the best evidence available at the time, and as more evidence comes to light, we can refine our current theories.

However, we’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt, dear reader, because you are on a science site, so you probably already know all this. So let’s look at what that statement by Scaramucci implies instead.

This thoroughly unusual fellow suggests that the scientific community gets things wrong all the time. Seeing as we can cure diseases, fly through the air, talk to people thousands of miles away, and land spacecraft on other worlds, we don’t know about you, but from where we’re standing, it looks like science is doing a pretty good job at getting things right.

Fortunately, science itself is invulnerable to such bare-faced idiocy like this. Let’s take a moment, though, to mourn the true victim of this type of commentary: satire. It’s essentially impossible to use hyperbolic humor these days to point out how ridiculous this all is as it’s already so self-evidently ludicrous.

^{Well, you sure sound like one.}

Trump’s already claimed that vaccines cause autism, that solar power actually drains the Sun’s power and that wind is “very deceiving.” One of those three things isn’t true, and if you can’t tell which, that’s kind of the point.

 [H/T: Washington Post]