Today, Senator Ted Cruz announced he is running for President, the first, no doubt of a string of avowed climate science deniers that will be vying for the Chief Executive job.
Above, on his NBC “Late Night” show, Seth Meyer interviewed Senator Cruz a few weeks ago, and questioned the Senator’s stance on climate change. I think Seth let the Senator get away with a few whoppers.
I’ve offered to run a seminar for talk show hosts in this political season, to prep them for situations just such as this, which are bound to come up again.
If anyone knows Seth, pass this along. My hourly rates are reasonable.
Dear Mr Meyers
A few weeks ago Senator Ted Cruz appeared on your program – significant because the Honorable Senator is now running for President of the United States.
I greatly appreciate that you challenged Mr Cruz on his denial of climate science, and I hope you’ll continue to challenge future political guests on this critical issue.
That said, I think you let Mr Cruz get away too lightly with three talking points that are often heard, and can be effectively knocked down.Let’s take the first one – “I just came back from New Hampshire, where there’s snow and ice everywhere.” We are supposed to infer, apparently, that because there is snow, in winter, in New Hampshire, that there is no global warming.
I suggest you have your graphics guys blow up a few key graphs. Here’s one. (click it for a larger version)
Ask your guest if they have looked at a temperature map of the globe, where they would see that New Hampshire, (or wherever the cold spot of the moment is) is an anomaly in a sea of warmth, as this February 26th, 2015, map from the University of Maine shows. Ask them if a President should have a global view, or one that ends at our shores, or the state line of New Hampshire.
Let’s take the next one: “Satellite data demonstrate that for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever.”
Have your guys put this one up, Global Temperatures over the last century and a half from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
When we look at global temperatures as we should, decade by decade, the warming trend is clear. Can you point to where this graph shows a flat temperature, Senator?
You can then show the audience how climate deniers, like Senator Cruz, like to cherry pick beginning and end dates for their talking points – which one could use to arguably, show that temperature has not risen at all at any given point in the last century, even as clear data shows it has.
Senator Cruz then followed up with “Remember how it used to be called global warming, but then it magically changed to climate change?”
You can simply ask, “When was that change made?” – because when Physicist Gilbert Plass nailed the physics on this back in 1955, he was calling it “Climatic Change”.
And the global scientific body monitoring this issue was founded in 1988, and named “The Intergovernmental panel on”, say it with me Senator,…. “Climate Change”.
Again, Seth, thanks for your attention.
I’m available if you schedule me soon, my summer calendar is filling up.best
Peter Sinclair
Media DirectorDark Snow Project
Typo?
“Remember how it used to be called global warming, but then it magically changed to global warming?”
Refuting global warming remains so easy it is elementary
http://liberalsbackwardsthink.com/2014/07/09/refuting-global-warming-science-is-elementary/
http://liberalsbackwardsthink.com/2015/03/23/refuting-global-warming-science-is-elementary-part-ii/
I love it when deniers write in and raise the bar of cluelessness. Just makes my job is easier.
Dusty is not clueless. A visit to his site will prove that. For instance, he says:
“The lies that people say FOX is guilty of always results (sic), not from deception, but a difference of opinion with leftists whose lack of a moral compass causes them to fail to understand the difference between right and wrong”.
That’s not cluelessness, that’s WIFI, (Willfully Ignorant Functional Illiteracy), and yes, it does make your job easier.
And has everyone noticed that Cruz will be making the announcement today at Liberty University, that hotbed of intellectualism and tolerance founded by Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg VA in 1971? (Almost as old as Harvard and William and Mary).
Cruz joins a long line of Repugnants who have made that journey so that they could pander to “the base”, although he may be the first to announce his candidacy there. A good start, actually—-if he begins so far to the right, he will have a hard time getting back anywhere near the electable middle, and will drag others over there with him as they jump on the “panderwagon”. 2012 and Romney all over again—will the Repugnants ever learn? (Hope not).
Great letter and logic, this article in current Christian Science Monitor on Mr Cruz..
Ted Cruz: Can a climate change skeptic win in 2016?
“I think there will be a political problem for the Republican Party going into 2016 if we don’t define what we are for on the environment,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina, who has worked on climate legislation with Democrats, told Roll Call in November. “I don’t know what the environmental policy of the Republican Party is.”
Maybe it is time for the party to change and issue a clear unified policy so voters know where they stand …
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy/2015/0323/Ted-Cruz-Can-a-climate-change-skeptic-win-in-2016
Cruz: “for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever” I like to point out to people like Cruz that the best ‘proxy’ for whether Earth is warming or not is sea level rise (SLR). SLR encompasses about 99% (by heat capacitance) of all warming that could be occurring on Earth: specifically ocean warming and expansion (93%), warming of land and the melting of land-based glaciers (3%), and warming of the ice sheets which are melting as well (3%). The remaining 1% of Earth-based warming is the graph Cruz is referring to, the atmospheric warming record. But 99% of the Earth subject to ‘warming’ will lead directly to rising sea levels. Hence, if sea levels are rising, ‘Global Warming’ is still on. So: Are sea levels rising?
http://www.realclimate.org/images/haysl13.jpg
We report, you decide.
10 inches of sea level rise in 120 years…how terrifying
Peter, the colored anomaly map from the UoMaine originally displayed with the anomaly in ºC (1979-2000 baseline) written beneath the map for the World and for the NH, SH, Tropics, Arctic and Antarctic.
I think that’s always useful information to include with that map, and I send out the current daily map often to my own skeptical/denier family.
(Also, did you just happen to have that particular day and map already saved? Or were you able to retroactively pull it up on the Maine site for that date? – I am unable to get it to display for dates prior to about Aug, 2014.)
You should also write to Sen. Whitehouse with the same info, who might then pre-emptively have a large color poster prepared every day and on the chamber floor –– whether or not Inhofe says or does something snowball stupid.
I saved it on that day since the cold was remarkable.
Hey Peter, did you get banned from reddit for spamming? I hope so. Nobody really cares about your silly blog, you should find a better line of work.
Bart’s back! And no more relevant or intelligent than he was at his last appearance, at which time I said to him:
“Yeah, Bart, you are a real genius. I for one am trembling at the awesomeness of your comment here and “how much more you know than ‘warmists’. Please don’t come back here and beat up on us any more”.
Ditto and DUH!!!!.
http://climatecrocks.com/2015/02/23/how-to-combat-climate-denial-the-online-course/
Maybe Ted Cruz is running to become president of the ‘Nonsenseist Society of America’.
And Bart should really concentrate on writing his lines out on the chalkboard with the words:
‘I must stop exposing myself to ridicule.’
Bart may need a dictionary to find out what that last word means.
Good article and generally very high quality comment so far.
I really hope US will not get a denier president. In that case its goodbye for the world as we know it (as it might be anyway). And then I might as well exit my membership in green party.