Climate Change-Denying Senator Ted Cruz Will Oversee NASA

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas will chair the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, providing him with an oversight role of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA.

That slight twinge you felt was the proper emotion. The Senator, by way of a single example, tried to reduce NASA funding to be, in his view, compliant with a Federal spending cut. His amendment failed on a party-line vote.

The Huffington Post noted, when covering the Senator’s new gig, that he has disputed the science of climate change. And, as the same article points out, NASA has “conducted research on climate change,” making for something of an awkward combination. (Here’s NASA’s climate page, if you are so inclined.)

Elections have consequences.

Here’s NASA:

In its recently released Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world under the auspices of the United Nations, concluded there’s a more than 90 percent probability that human activities over the past 250 years have warmed our planet.

And here is the Senator kicking it with CNN:

“The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened,” said Cruz.

Cruz spoke to CNN in an exclusive interview following an event here to promote his new energy plan, which he says he will formally introduce in the Senate next week.

When pressed about the fact that the arctic is melting, and whether that helps prove climate change is real, Cruz dismissed it.

“Other parts are going up. It is not – you know, you always have to be worried about something that is considered a so-called scientific theory that fits every scenario. Climate change, as they have defined it, can never be disproved, because whether it gets hotter or whether it gets colder, whatever happens, they’ll say, well, it’s changing, so it proves our theory,” argued Cruz.

This should be fun!

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