Republicans face problems in 2016 as climate change rises up political agenda

by Sabrina Siddiqui, The Guardian, March 27, 2015


Candidate Ted Cruz’s comment likening climate change activists to ‘flat-Earthers’ begins election in which scientists suggest issue may receive much higher billing than before Republican presidential candidate US senator Ted Cruz answers questions from reporters as he walks to the Senate floor on Thursday. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Ted Cruz declared his candidacy this week, but his anti-environmental rhetoric has already set the stage for a looming war over whether climate-change denial is a legitimate barrier to the most powerful job in the world.

Leading scientists are preparing for an American election in which global warming may receive much higher billing than before – and Republicans’ statements will be exposed to a level of scrutiny they have not formally had to deal with.

The argument for divesting from fossil fuels is becoming overwhelming

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Cruz, the red-meat Texas senator with an army of conservative followers, raised eyebrows on Tuesday when he told the Texas Tribune that people who believe global warming is real are “the equivalent of the flat-Earthers.”

“It used to be it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier,” Cruz said.

The comments were emblematic of the environmental threat that has plagued the Republican party for years. Buoyed by the oil and gas companies and fossil-fuel-funder mega-donors that increasingly bankroll their campaigns, most prominent Republican politicians have either denied that climate change exists or refused to stake out a clear position, citing their personal lack of scientific knowledge.

But as the subject’s specter looms larger by the day, and as presumed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has stepped up her calls on the need to battle climate change as a potential signature issue, the “I’m not a scientist” line is infuriating scientists.

“I think frankly the Republican party is going to have to make a decision,” Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, who contributed to the Nobel Prize-winning landmark report on global warming, told the Guardian. “Are they going to move in the direction of logic and rationality, or are they going to continue to pursue this anti-scientific fringe movement within their party that is personified by people liked Ted Cruz?

“As long as the Koch brothers are pouring tens of millions of dollars into their campaigns,” Mann said, referring to the top conservative donors, “there’s going to be enough oxygen to keep these folks going.”

The real test, Mann said, lies with establishment-backed candidates like former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who recently declared himself a climate skeptic despite his previous assertion that the climate may be warming.

As the governor of a state regarded as the hotbed for hurricanes and coastal erosion, Bush fought against drilling off the Florida coast and launched a massive Everglades restoration project.

Climate-sceptic US senator given funds by BP political action committee

Among the candidates expected to announce their candidates beginning in an April wave, only Kentucky senator Rand Paul and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham have bucked their party by acknowledging that climate change is real.

The conservative field for the 2016 election is otherwise made up of proud deniers, such as Cruz, and those who would rather plead ignorance, along with Florida senator Marco Rubio and Texas governor Rick Perry.

“I’m not a doctor, but I know not to drink arsenic,” Mann said.
“Each of these candidates is going to have to decide how they’re going to contend with this.”This ambiguity falls short of the criteria by which scientists believe the media – and undecided young voters – should judge each candidate’s response.

Recent polls that show support among the majority of Americans, including half of Republicans, for government action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions may make uncomfortable reading for GOP candidates. Two-thirds of Americans said they would be more likely to vote for candidates who campaigned on fighting climate change. Among Republican voters, 48% said they preferred candidates who would take on climate change.

Growing concern among the American electorate suggests climate change may emerge as a major issue in 2016, something that would mark a change from prior elections in which it was scarcely discussed in debates or on the campaign trail, failing to make it into the topics that mattered most to voters.

In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney was not alone in ignoring climate change. Even Barack Obama, who has taken a more aggressive approach in cutting carbon emissions during his second term, took heat from environmental activists in his base for being elusive over global warming during his presidential campaign.

More recently, the president has made the fight against climate change one of the top priorities of his administration. The Pentagon’s declaration that global warming is a national security threat has also raised the debate’s national political profile.

Even so, scientists are not holding their breath for any outright climate change endorsements by Republican candidates.

“It would be suicide in their primaries,” John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St Thomas School of Engineering in Minnesota told the Guardian.

The fate of the political discourse over climate change, he argued, in many ways lies in the hands of voters in town halls as well as reporters and debate moderators – and whether they accept outright denialism from Cruz and vague obfuscation from other candidates at face value.

“If this were a political issue, the media would be entirely within its rights to provide equal voice to both sides,” Abraham said. “However, this is a story that is grounded in science – it’s a lot like what causes Ebola, what causes flu, or how do we treat cancer.

“Global warming is not a political problem – it’s a scientific problem.”

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/27/ted-cruz-climate-change-republicans-2016

Ted Cruz: "global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers"

UPDATE:  Readers, please check out the comments.  Then tell me which one is legit -- LOL.

by Philip Bump, The Washington Post, March 25, 2015

OK, so Ted Cruz said something, and we went back and forth about whether or not we should address it because it's just baffling. But then we figured, yes, even the baffling things deserve some sort of response.

In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Cruz talked about climate change. Specifically, he said this, as transcribed by the Huffington Post's Kate Sheppard:

On the global warming alarmists, anyone who actually points to the evidence that disproves their apocalyptical claims, they don't engage in reasoned debate. What do they do? They scream, 'You're a denier.' They brand you a heretic. Today, the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers. It used to be [that] it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.

And then he said:

If you look at global warming alarmists, they don't like to look at the actual facts and the data. The satellite data demonstrate that there has been no significant warming whatsoever for 17 years. Now that's a real problem for the global warming alarmists. Because all those computer models on which this whole issue is based predicted significant warming, and yet the satellite data show it ain't happening.

And then he said:

I read this morning a Newsweek article from the 1970s talking about global cooling. And it said the science is clear, it is overwhelming, we are in a major cooling period, and it's going to cause enormous problems worldwide. ... Now, the data proved to be not backing up that theory. So then all the advocates of global cooling suddenly shifted to global warming, and they advocated it's warming, and the solution interestingly enough was the exact same solution -- government control of the energy sector and every aspect of our lives.

There's not much Cruz got right here.

First, Cruz conflates the science of climate change with the politics of climate change. Scientists don't scream, "You're a denier." They point to the scientific evidence that human activity is leading to climate warming -- the evidence of which is overwhelming. (Here's the international version and the U.S. version.) There is no "evidence that disproves their apocalyptical claims," because if there were, scientists would abandon the theory. That's how science works.

Second, science works that way because scientists developed a system in which they created hypotheses and tested them. So it's silly to say that "accepted scientific wisdom" said the world was flat, because the assumption that the world was flat didn't derive from science. Instead, science challenged the conventional thinking, using a superior system for uncovering the truth.

Cruz's book. (AP Photo/Broadside)

Third, Galileo came along well after people knew the Earth was round. People had sailed around the world before he was born! His conflict with the church was that he said the Earth revolved around the Sun, instead of the opposite. (Actually, his conflict with the church was probably more about his views on transubstantiation, but that's a different topic.) Galileo challenged the orthodoxy based on evidence collected through science.

Fourth, the "warming hiatus" is not "a real problem" for climate scientists, except in the sense that it poses another question to be answered. In fact, scientists have a theory on why temperatures haven't increased as quickly as projected in recent years. (In short: They suspect that it has warmed -- but deep in the ocean.) What's more, scientists that studied the satellite data to which Cruz refers reject the idea that it somehow disproves the idea that human activity is making the world warmer.

Fifth. That Newsweek article. Oh man.

In 1975, Peter Gwynne wrote a brief for the magazine that suggested that some scientists believed the world was cooling. It was nine paragraphs long, quoting scientists who admitted that their projections were preliminary. To DailyClimate, Gwynne explained, "It was just an intriguing piece about what a certain group in a certain niche of climatology was thinking." He added, "Newsweek being Newsweek, we might have pushed the envelope a little bit more than I would have wanted."

But that article has fueled a cottage industry in science rejection. What Cruz is doing is treating as valid one magazine article from 40 years ago but rejecting as hopelessly flawed study after study showing that the world is warming.

The Galileos on climate change are, like Galileo, the scientists. The people pushing back on the science are, like Cruz, those who favor the status quo. Cruz's comments, from start to finish, are simply not correct.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/03/25/ted-cruz-compares-climate-change-activists-to-flat-earthers-where-to-begin/