Ted Cruz misinforms on global warming on Seth Meyers’ show
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) visited New Hampshire recently to attend a Strafford County Republican Committee event. He gave one of his standard fear mongering speeches that scared a little girl in attendance. In that speech he excoriated President Obama’s domestic policies (e.g., Obamacare) and his foreign policy. “And the Obama – Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind,” Ted Cruz said. “The whole world is on fire.”
The statement got to a little girl in the audience and she worriedly asked, “The world is on fire?” Seth Meyers asked Ted Cruz about it and he kind of made light of it. He claimed he spoke to the child’s mother. He said the mother said the child is not upset and now thinks Cruz is a fireman.
While Ted Cruz’s ‘the world is on fire’ rhetoric was a metaphor for his distorted view of the effect of President Obama’s policies, Seth Meyers attempted to bring some truth to his statement by superimposing it on the global warming / climate change debate.
“My question is more about the rhetoric of ‘the world is on fire’,” Seth Meyer said. “First I got excited because I thought maybe you were coming around on global warming. That’s not the case right? Because I think the world is on fire. Literally! Hottest year on record.But you’re not there right?”
“You know it is interesting you say that as I just came back from New Hampshire where there is snow and ice everywhere,” Ted Cruz responded. “And my view actually is simple. Debate on this should follow science and should follow data. And many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem cause the science data does not 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 called global warming? And then magically the theory changed to climate change? The reason is, it wasn’t warming, but the computer models still say it is, except the satellites show it’s not.”
Ted Cruz is using the ‘research‘ from Dr. John Christy, director of the University of Alabama/Huntsville’s Earth System Science Center who testified in front of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works’ hearing on global warming in August, 2012. This has been summarily debunked when all the data is provide. The oceans are serving as a huge heat sink. Anyone who understands thermodynamics knows that water has a high specific heat.
In researching this piece it is amazing to see the amount of blogs and websites devoted to promoting any outlier that attempts to disprove climate change. These blog and websites are very well SEOed in order to occupy top positions in the search engines. Maybe that is why so many on the right hyperventilated when Google hinted it may be ranking based on the truthfulness of a site. Many of these purveyors of misinformation will fall off.
It is incumbent on those who want to get the truth out to share fact based information when they find it through all their social media, emails, and just while talking to others. That is the only way to disarm politicians like Ted Cruz and Benjamin Netanyahu who are clear and present danger to a civil society where all can prosper.