Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has announced he's running for President in 2016. This means it's going to be a busy campaign season for fact checkers, who have already started the Sisyphean task of correcting Cruz.
Senator Cruz has clearly gotten some denier talking points, first repeating the "satellites show there's been no warming for 17 years" mantra during an interview with Seth Meyers and then deploying the Galileo comparison in an interview with The Texas Tribune. PolitiFact was the first out of the gate, rating Cruz's "satellites show no warming" claim as "Mostly False" and explaining how Cruz cherry-picked not just the time period, but also the data set, ignoring ocean temperatures, sea ice and other measurements that indicate warming.
Since then, the Washington Post has published four different Ted Cruz take downs. Chris Mooney demonstrated one way for journalists to deal with presidential climate claims by contacting a climate scientist, who made it clear that Cruz was cherry-picking. Michelle Ye Hee Lee examined the satellite comment for WaPo's Fact Checker column, giving Cruz "Three Pinnochios" for his misleading statements. Philip Bump took a critical look at Cruz's comparison of deniers to Galileo and other comments, stating, "There's not much Cruz got right."
Most amusing (and original) would be Mooney's column on Cruz's Galileo defense. Mooney points out that, first and foremost, Cruz botched the history, saying, "Galileo was branded a denier," for not accepting that the Earth was flat. This is just plain wrong, because Galileo's ordeal was about whether the Earth orbited the Sun. Going further, Mooney contacted some historians, who made it clear that when it comes to the Galileo comparison, deniers are off base. One science historian pointed out that Galileo wasn't attacked by scientists (as Cruz suggests) but by "the power structure of his day." And in modern times, "Climate contrarians are on the side of, and are supported by, the power structure of our day, which is the Republican Party and the carbon-combustion complex."
So apparently Cruz is not just a climate science denier, but a history denier as well!
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