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“Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

– Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ted Cruz (R-TX) attacks climate change as religion, which is kind of funny, because while attacking science as religion, he doesn’t attack religion for being religion. Cruz told Glenn Beck that “climate change is not science, it’s religion,” and then told a big, whopping lie, saying that people who “believe” in climate change do not cite any facts in support of their position.

Watch Ted Cruz spin his lies care of Right Wing Watch:

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Look at the language where they call you a ‘denier.'” “Denier is not the language of science. Look, I’m the child of two scientists … The essence of the scientific method is to start with a hypothesis, then look to the evidence to disprove the hypothesis; you’re not trying to prove it, you’re trying to disprove it. Any good scientist is a skeptic; if he’s not, he or she should not be a scientist. But yet the language of the global warming alarmists, ‘denier’ is the language of religion, it’s heretic, you are a blasphemer. The response from the Sierra Club, ‘We have decreed this is the answer, you must accept it.’ And so he didn’t know his facts because he just knew his religion.

Notice how Cruz starts talking about evidence, but then shifts to the language of the debate? He skips right over all that evidence.

And if we’re on the subject of language as a determinant (and it’s not) Cruz’s own language is the language of religion. Science isn’t something you “believe in” or not, and if Cruz is, as he claims, the child of two scientists, he would know this. You don’t get to choose to believe in facts or not. You can argue against them and provide evidence of your own to support your position, but you don’t get to “believe.”

Cruz lamented that his fellow debaters were afraid to answer a question from Jake Tapper about whether or not they are “climate change skeptic.” He proudly asserted to Beck that he himself is one. He said that the satellite data for the last 18 years does not show any significant warming, even though the data does in fact show that it gets warmer every year, and that every year is the new warmest year on record.

In fact, after NASA and NOAA both determined that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880, both NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center said in June that the first five months of 2015 topped 2010 as the warmest first five months of any year.

There is plenty of evidence that it’s getting warmer. Ted Cruz simply rejects all evidence and then claims there is none. Here is a video from NASA which proves it:

As the Environmental Defense Fund points out,

Though natural amounts of carbon dioxide have varied from 180 to 300 parts per million (ppm), today’s levels are around 400 ppm. That’s 40% more than the highest natural levels over the past 800,000 years.

NASA has a nifty graph illustrating the evidence so that even Ted Cruz could understand it, if we could get him to look at it:

That’s pretty convincing evidence, even if rising sea levels (17 centimeters or 6.7 inches in the last century*) and increasing global temperatures aren’t enough for you.

So sure, you can be a “skeptic”: all you have to do is reject facts. Easy for a Republican, who loses his party card if he accepts facts.

The bottom line is that Ted Cruz is a big old liar. Climate change is real, and there is plenty of evidence for it, whatever yarns he wants to spin for the base and his rich, polluting owners in the fossil fuel industry.

And it’s not religion. It’s science.

* See Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.