Know-nothing or just ultra-rightist hack?
Last week, while mentioning all the snow and ice he had just encountered in a visit to New Hampshire, Sen. Ted Cruz, who brags about how smart he is,
demonstrated his scientific illiteracy in an exchange on
Late Night With Seth Meyers:
Debates should follow science and should follow data. Many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem because the science doesn’t back them up and, in particular, satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years, there’s been zero warming. None whatsoever. It's why ... remember how it used to be global warming, and then magically the theory changed to climate change? The reason was it wasn't warming. But the computer models still say it is except the satellites show it's not.
Delivered with a straight face.
On Meet the Press, Sunday, California Gov. Jerry Brown took that statement to the woodshed: "What he said is absolutely false [...] And that man betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of scientific data. It’s shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office."
Cruz was, indeed, utterly wrong on all counts in his remarks to Meyers. The implication that "climate change" had been substituted for "global warming" as some leftist political ploy is an outright fabrication. The folks at Skeptical Science have explained:
For example, a seminal climate science work is Gilbert Plass' 1956 study 'The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change' (which coincidentally estimated the climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide at 3.6°C, not far off from today's widely accepted most likely value of 3°C). Barrett and Gast published a letter in Science in 1971 entitled simply 'Climate Change'. The journal 'Climatic Change' was created in 1977 (and is still published today). The IPCC was formed in 1988, and of course the 'CC' is 'climate change', not 'global warming'. There are many, many other examples of the use of the term 'climate change' many decades ago. There is nothing new whatsoever about the usage of the term.
There's more to how wrong Cruz is below the tangled orange web we weave.
Cruz also repeated his bogus claim that global warming isn't happening and satellite observations prove it. Tim McDonnell at Grist shreds this concoction:
So what’s wrong with what Cruz said? For starters, the satellite record does, in fact, show warming. Here’s a view of temperature anomalies (that is, the deviation from the long-term average) reported by Remote Sensing Systems, a NASA-backed private satellite lab. It shows warming of about 0.2 degrees F per decade since 1980, the beginning of the satellite record:
More importantly, satellites measure temperatures in the atmosphere, high above the surface. The chart above shows the lower troposphere, about six miles above the surface. This data is an important piece of the climate and weather system, but it’s only one piece. There are plenty of other signs that are far less equivocal, and perhaps even more relevant to those of us who live on the Earth’s surface: Land and ocean surface temperatures are increasing, sea ice is declining, glaciers are shrinking, oceans are rising, the list goes on. In other words, the satellites-vs-computers dichotomy described by Cruz ignores most of the full picture.
Cruz surely does ignore the big picture. And we can no doubt count on his doing that on a whole range of issues as his campaign gets fired up. If he somehow beats the conventional wisdom and gets the Republican nomination, expect him to bring snowballs to the presidential debates.