Next week Sen. Ted Cruz will lead a group of senators in examining the extent of humanity’s impact on climate change and whether political bias is tainting the ongoing debate.
On Tuesday, Cruz, chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, is holding a hearing titled “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate.”
According to the hearing description, the subcommittee will seek answers on “the impact of federal funding on the objectivity of climate research” and “ways in which political pressure can suppress opposing viewpoints in the field of climate science.”
The hearing was announced last week as the United Nations’ climate conference in Paris was getting underway. President Obama attended the start of the event, pushing his goal of reaching an international deal to cut global emissions, even as Congress picks apart his climate agenda at home.
Cruz, who sits second in the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, has long been a skeptic of global warming. In 2014, Cruz told CNN that climate change is not supported by data. And in October, Cruz told Glenn Beck that “Climate change is not science. It’s religion,” explaining that global warming alarmists use the word “denier” for skeptics, much in the same way “heretic” is used in religion.
The Texas senator also lampooned Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry for overplaying the threat of climate change. On Fox News last week, he criticized the two for telling Americans “that they think essentially your SUV in the driveway is a greater threat to our security than is ISIS, than is a nuclear Iran and it makes no sense whatsoever.”
In an October hearing, Cruz grilled Sierra Club President Aaron Mair for close to 10 minutes on climate change. Muir repeatedly defended his position that there is such a thing as man-made climate change, repeatedly saying that 97 percent of scientists agree that there is global warming. Cruz fired back, saying that the statistic is based on one “bogus study” and that satellites don’t show any evidence of any significant warming.
Expected to testify at Tuesday’s event are John Christy, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama in Huntsville; Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology; William Happer, professor of physics at the Princeton University; Mark Steyn, international bestselling author; and retired Rear Adm. David Titley, professor in the Meteorology Department at Pennsylvania State University and director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk.
