Ted Cruz, official 2016 presidential contender, spoke with the Texas Tribune's political reporter Jay Root about why the country should vote for him to be Rat Overlord. In the interview, Cruz echoed some of his more extreme views on climate policy.
"I'm a big believer that we should follow the science and follow the evidence," he said. "If you look at global warming alarmists, they don't like to look at the actual facts and the data. The satellite data demonstrate that there has been no significant warming whatsoever for 17 years. Now that's a real problem for the global warming alarmists because all of the computer models on which this issue is based predicted significant warming and yet the satellite data show it ain't happening."
"Today, the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers," he continued. "You know, it used to be accepted scientific wisdom, the Earth is flat and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier! And you know what, there are an awful lot of people making a whole lot of money-- Al Gore's made millions of dollars off of global warming and a lot of these scientists who are most vocal about it are receiving massive grants on this theory that the data are not backing up."
As the Washington Post's Chris Mooney points out, Cruz doesn't even mention that ground-based weather station data and sea-based buoy data are telling a very different story (that the Earth is getting hotter), nor does he argue why satellite data is more reliable than those two other data sets.
Mooney goes on to explain that Cruz's "17 years" claim is backed up by a blog post from physicist Carl Mears, who feels that his points have been misrepresented. When Mooney spoke with Mears, the scientist condemned Cruz's flawed reasoning:
Mr. Cruz (and others who seek to minimize the threat posed by climate change) likes to cite statistics about the last 17 years because 17 years ago, the Earth was experiencing a large ENSO [El Nino-Southern Oscillation] event and the observed temperatures were substantially above normal, and above any long-term trend line a reasonable person would draw. When one starts their analysis on an extraordinarily warm year, the resulting trend is below the true long term trend. It’s like a pro baseball player deciding he’s having a batting slump three weeks after a game when he hit three homers because he’s only considering those three weeks instead of the whole season.
The point is that Cruz is full of rapidly warming shit.
Watch the interview below:
Shares