Ted Cruz says satellite data show the globe isn’t warming. This satellite scientist feels otherwise


The Washington Post has the article Ted Cruz says satellite data show the globe isn’t warming. This satellite scientist feels otherwise by Chris Mooney.

Mooney discusses the data that Cruz uses to come to the conclusions that he does.

To explore Mears’s views further, I did one thing journalists can do when covering the climate views of presidential candidates — I contacted the researcher. And his response was quite critical of Cruz’s approach to the evidence on this issue:

Mr. Cruz (and others who seek to minimize the threat posed by climate change) likes to cite statistics about the last 17 years because 17 years ago, the Earth was experiencing a large ENSO [El Nino-Southern Oscillation] event and the observed temperatures were substantially above normal, and above any long-term trend line a reasonable person would draw. When one starts their analysis on an extraordinarily warm year, the resulting trend is below the true long term trend. It’s like a pro baseball player deciding he’s having a batting slump three weeks after a game when he hit three homers because he’s only considering those three weeks instead of the whole season.

So if you have been tempted to fall for this meme that there hasn’t been global warning recently, remember this is the trick that has been played to come to this conclusion.

They could have mentioned the President Reagan fans measuring the performance of the economy from the depths of the Reagan induced depression to the end of his term to convince you that Reagan was wonderful on the economy.

I have categorized this post as an example of Greenberg’s Law of The Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading”. Actually it is probably a counter example. In this case the news article debunks one of the common techniques of misleading.

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