Houston, we have a problem. It's called global warming, whether you admit it or not.

Hurricane Harvey poured more rain on Texas and Louisiana last week than this country has ever seen from a single storm. The city of Houston is now suffering from historic flooding, with many calling this a "1000-year flood." Congress is likely to pass a huge bailout bill in the coming days, starting with a $14.5 billion "down payment," suggesting much more is to come.

The storm's eventual costs could rise even higher than the costs of 2005's Hurricane Katrina, which cost $160 billion according to NOAA.

Let's not dance around the issue: Hurricane Harvey was a direct consequence of global warming, which in turn is a direct consequence of human activities.

It's ironic that Texas (and Houston in particular) has an economy that is dominated by on oil and fossil fuels. Burning these fuels is what got us in this mess.

It's also ironic that Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is now at the front of the line asking for a federal government rescue package, is a scientifically illiterate climate change denier. As I wrote shortly after he announced his candidacy for President in 2015, Cruz not only denied that global warming was happening, but he then went on to compare himself to Galileo, as if he were taking a brave and bold scientific position. Right.

A few facts: the Gulf of Mexico is 4 degrees warmer than normal this year, and it has been getting worse. Back in March of this year, the Washington Post's Jason Samenow reported that the Gulf was "freakishly warm, which could mean explosive springtime storms." Warm water feeds hurricanes, and Harvey feasted on it, sucking up energy and using it to dump ridiculous amounts of water onto south Texas.

Noted climate scientist Michael Mann, writing in The Guardian, took the slightly more nuanced position that "climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly." True enough: if you want to be strictly accurate, we can't prove that warming temperatures are the sole cause of Harvey. Maybe with cooler temperatures, we'd have had a hurricane anyway–but it would have been a far smaller one, and the damage would have been far less severe.

Mann also pointed out that global warming has already caused sea levels to rise over half a foot, which made the flooding in Houston significantly worse than it would have been otherwise.

Now it's time to rebuild, which raises a dilemma. The U.S. can't just abandon Houston, one of our country's largest cities, even if most of its residents deny the reality of global warming (and perhaps they don't). But given that global warming is well under way, with rising sea levels and warming oceans, more catastrophic flooding events like Harvey are highly likely. Should we pay to rebuild the city exactly as it was, basically ignoring the problems of floodwater management as Houston has done until now? Or should we use the government bailout funds to reduce the risk from future flooding?

Actually, it might do even more good to impose a simple requirement, before Texas gets any of our bailout funds. Let's require U.S. senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, and Texas governor Greg Abbot, to state publicly that global warming is real, that humans are making it worse, and that they will work in the future to mitigate the risks posed by continued climate change. Wouldn't that be something? A simple statement, nothing more, to unlock billions of dollars in aid.

If we just rebuild everything like before, then Houston will continue to have a problem.

(*Note about the title of this article. The original quote was "Houston, we've had a problem," famously utterly by Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell. In the movie Apollo 13, actor Tom Hanks (playing Lovell) instead said, "Houston, we have a problem.")

Ted Cruz is not as smart as Galileo, whatever he claims

Global temperatures for the past 125 years. It's getting hot!

The word in Washington lately is that Senator Ted Cruz–who just announced that he’s running for President–is supposed to be a very smart guy. Some of this comes from Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who said last year that Cruz was “clearly among the top students” at the prestigious Harvard Law School. Dershowitz is very liberal, while Cruz is very conservative, so one assumes that Dershowitz wouldn't say this if it weren't true.

Perhaps Cruz was an excellent law student. But when it comes to science, Cruz is no whiz kid. On the contrary, he seems to be woefully ignorant. We know this because despite his lack of expertise, he doesn’t hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about scientific matters.

In just the past week, Cruz has weighed in on two major science issues, and he's been wrong on both. First, in an interview a few days ago with the Texas Tribune, Cruz stated that global warming isn’t happening. This wasn’t the first time he’s made that claim, but this time he threw in what’s known in skeptical circles as the "Galileo gambit," a well-known ploy of conspiracy theorists. He compared his global warming denialism to Galileo thusly:

“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.”

Cruz managed to get at least two things wrong in a single sentence here. 

First, Galileo did not become famous for arguing against flat-Earthers: he argued that the Earth revolved around the sun (the heliocentric model of the solar system) rather than the sun revolving around the earth (the geocentric or Ptolemaic model, after the Greek philosopher Ptolemy).

Second, Galileo was not a denialist, nor was he called one. He was not denying a vast array of scientific data to make his point–just the opposite, in fact. The data showed that the Earth and other planets revolved around the sun, and the Catholic church (among other institutions) didn’t want to believe it, and therefore they forced him to recant. The Church didn't call Galileo a "denier."

Cruz's statement is not just wrong: it's also arrogant. Cruz is comparing himself to Galileo, one of the greatest scientists in history, as if he (Cruz) were making a brave scientific stand against a dogmatic opponent. This is the crux of the Galileo gambit: the speaker claims to take a heroic stand against a powerful foe while defending the truth. Sorry, Senator Cruz: you’re no Galileo. Not even a little bit.

And let's not ignore Cruz’s scientific claim: that the Earth isn't getting warmer. Here's one of his quotes:

"And many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem cause the science doesn’t back them up. And in particular, satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years, there’s been zero warming. None whatsoever."

Oh good. Ted Cruz has evaluated the satellite data and figured this out. Who knew that he was not only a lawyer but also a scientist? Real climate scientists–who understand this issue far, far better than Cruz–disagree. For example, NASA and NOAA recently announced that 2014 was the warmest year on record. They also explained that 

“The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000. This trend continues a long-term warming of the planet, according to an analysis of surface temperature measurements by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies.” (See the Figure.)

There’s no mystery about why Cruz and others deny global warming: the oil and coal industries have conducted a vigorous campaign for years now, primarily targeting Republicans, to cast doubt on the science. The reason is simple: fossil-fuel companies are worried that if we take global warming seriously, we might burn less fossil fuel. Their lobbying campaign is working: Cruz has certainly fallen into line.

Meanwhile, coastal areas are fighting rising sea levels, and the Arctic and Antarctic are melting. Lobbying might change the minds of politicians, but the planet doesn't care.

Now let’s look at the second bit of dodgy science that Senator Cruz endorsed this week. He announced his candidacy at Liberty University, a Christian fundamentalist college in Virginia that was founded by Jerry Falwell, an evangelical Southern Baptist minister. Liberty University’s Center for Creation Studies teaches students that the the Earth is only a few thousand years old and that all species were placed here by an all-powerful god, exactly as described in the Bible. Not surprisingly, students and faculty at Liberty University deny the facts of evolution. To a scientist, Cruz's appearance at Liberty University is an in-your-face endorsement of creationism.

I should be clear that Ted Cruz didn’t explicitly embrace creationism and deny evolution when he announced his candidacy, but he did choose Liberty University, and he must know its views about evolution. I wrote to Senator Cruz to see if he believed in young-Earth creationism, or if he believed that species evolved over millions of years, as science has demonstrated. He didn’t reply.

Virtually all of modern biology and medicine has its basis in evolution. No serious scientist disputes that evolution is by far the best explanation for the species around us, and for a thousand other phenomena that scientists study every day. The debate about the fact of evolution is long over. As a scientist, I find it just embarrassing to have prominent U.S. politicians publicly deny evolution.

Actually, I suspect that Ted Cruz isn’t really a creationist. I find it hard to believe that a guy who went to Princeton and Harvard, and apparently did quite well at both schools, can really believe the Earth was created 4,000 years ago. I also wonder if he truly believes that the world's leading climate scientists are just making stuff up about the Earth warming. Maybe he’s just pandering to his right-wing audience and his campaign donors.

Do politicians need to make decisions about science? Of course they do. But science can be incredibly complex and specialized. A good president (or prime minister, or governor) will identify experts–independent ones, without conflicts of interest–and seek their advice. Ted Cruz is no scientist, as his recent comments demonstrate, but I predict he won't be the only U.S. presidential candidate to make misguided remarks about science.