"This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
"In December, GOP senator, presidential hopeful, and outrageous science denier Ted Cruz held a Senate panel about climate change that could charitably be called a farce. He impaneled a series of people who ranged from lukewarmers (believing the Earth is warming, but it's not dangerous, or not rapid enough to worry about now) to out-and-out head-in-the-sand deniers.
During the hearing, Cruz said a lot of completely false things, but two things he hammered over and again were the reliability of satellite data, and how those data don't show any warming over the past 18 years - the so-called pause.
As I've written many times, that "pause" doesn't exist; we're still getting warmer and have been for decades. He cherry-picked the data, looking only as far back as 1998, when a huge spike in temperature due to an El Niño event made it look like temperatures are flat since then (when you start high, it makes the rest of the graph look flatter). That's hugely misleading, of course........."