Ted Cruz

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) speaks during a campaign stop at the Freedom Country Store in Freedom, N.H. Answering a question this week about climate change during a campaign stop in New Hampshire. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

(John Minchillo)

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.

You see these extremes almost daily. Record heat from California to Indonesia. Devastating floods from Japan to the Caribbean to the U.K. Horrendous droughts from Africa to Oklahoma.

Please, someone introduce Ted Cruz to television.

Last month, 196 nations pledged to cut emissions from burning fossil fuels. For the U.S., that means the GOP can no longer duck its responsibility by mouthing the dim-bulb cant, "I'm not a scientist." It can no longer use ignorance as an excuse for inaction.

The U.S. just had a month that was 2 degrees above the global norm. In fact, December was both the warmest and wettest month on record - no other month has ever held both distinctions in this country.

Indeed, it was partly influenced by El Nino, that Pacific phenomenon in which warm water releases heat and disrupts temperatures across the world. But as the NASA report states, the high heat was "largely driven by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere."

Will the GOP continue to deny this? Some will see the light, but those who cling to this absurd ideology will do it because it is profitable. According to the Center for American Progress, the 38 Republican climate-change deniers in the Senate have taken $27.8 million in donations from coal, oil, and gas industries, or $732,788 per Senator. The 62 Senators who haven't denied science took in $11.3 million, or $182,902 per person.

And the energy agenda of the fossil fuel industry has been at the heart of this GOP-dominated Congress.

Never mind the disconnect with the voters, 83 percent of which consider global warming a "serious" problem.

This comes down to whether you believe in experts or your campaign donors. When we build billion-dollar weapons systems, we assume the engineers know what they're doing. When we invest millions in cancer research, we assume the doctors at know what they're doing.

But when the majority party in Congress rejects climate change despite the consensus of the scientific community - 97 percent of it, anyway - this is willful ignorance. And that should burn us all up.

More: Recent Star-Ledger editorials.

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