Ted Cruz - A Pseudoscience Unto Himself

[hatrack]

The planet has just endured its hottest year since we've been recording temperatures, and this news will undoubtedly be met with another succession of strategic yawns and sneering derision from the climate deniers in Congress. But analyses by scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tell us that 2015 was a scorcher, and that we've had 14 of our 15 hottest years in the 21st century.

Which means it's time to cue the wingnuts: "The science can't back up that it's warming," Sen. Ted Cruz said Wednesday. "If you are a big-government politician, if you want more power, climate change is the perfect pseudo-scientific theory. . . because it can never, ever, ever be disproven."

None of the GOP presidential candidates believe climate change is an urgent matter, but Cruz is the most expert purveyor of these lies, which benefit the billionaire class that bankrolls his campaign with fossil fuel money. He used those same phrases at a Senate hearing last month after the Paris climate summit, and it was an exquisite manipulation of facts. He added that "satellites show no rise in temperature whatsoever" and that there "hasn't been scientific warming for 18 years."

Two problems with that: Weather satellites measure microwaves, not temperatures; and he chose 1998 because that was the year of a very powerful El Nino, which is second only to greenhouse gas as the cause of rising temperatures. And his data included the part of the atmosphere that actually is cooling – the top of the stratosphere – but has less to do with violent weather extremes that hammer every part of the globe.

EDIT

http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/01/ted_cruz_is_a_pseudo_science_onto_himself_editoria.html

[Gman]

1. Clearly the highest levels of the atmosphere cool

Because heat is trapped at lower levels.