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This has to be one of the most annoying videos I’ve seen so far this week, as Sen. Ted Cruz reels off one anti-science climate change denial talking point after another, trying to trick Sierra Club president Aaron Mair into suggesting the science of climate change is “debatable,” and that he should agree to “issue a retraction.”

Cruz repeats over and over that “satellite data” shows there has been no warming for the past 18 years; he’s simply wrong about that. This is a deniers’ talking point that they’ve been repeating endlessly on right wing blogs and media, and it’s utterly false. They focus on satellite data because it’s easy to misrepresent. Here’s an excellent explanation of the deliberate distortion behind these false claims: Desperate for a “Pause.”

The latest incarnation claims that there’s been no global warming for 18 years and 5 months, meaning all the way back to the beginning of 1997. Let’s look at temperature data for the lower troposphere ourselves. But instead of the satellite data, let’s look at temperature data from actual thermometers. The satellites are great, but they measure microwave brightness, not temperature — we have to deduce how hot it is from the microwave data. That’s an extremely complex problem, and splicing together all the records from all the different satellites (there have been many) is a delicate issue. All of which is part of the reason the different groups doing so don’t agree on exactly how, or what the result is, and so often the satellite temperature data have been adjusted and revised.

For decades various organizations have been sending thermometers (and other weather instruments) up in balloons to measure the conditions at altitudes throughout the atmosphere. This has enabled us to combine the results from the long history of balloon-borne data into estimates of the temperature in earth’s troposphere.

And here’s what that balloon temperature data shows:

That’s right; there’s no “pause” at all. This is what every graph produced from real scientific data shows.

Every point Cruz makes about climate science in this frustrating video is bogus and dishonest. Mair refuses to fall into Cruz’s traps, but of course Ted Cruz declares victory anyway because that’s what Republicans always do.