Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wants the record to show that he didn't frighten a 3-year-old girl Sunday when he told her the "world's on fire." <br /> <br />In a Monday appearance on NBC's "Late Night," host Seth Meyers asked Cruz about a viral clip of the senator speaking at an event in New Hampshire. <br /> <br />"The Obama economy is a disaster. Obamacare is a train wreck and the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind -- the whole world's on fire," Cruz tells the audience in the clip, prompting a young girl to call out "The world is on fire?" <br /> <br />Cruz noted that many media outlets covered the video with headlines like "Cruz terrifies little girl." <br /> <br />"By the end of it I was Freddy Krueger," he told Meyers. "I had the fingernails, it was terrible. The funny thing is it's not true." <br /> <br />Cruz said he'd spoken by phone with the girl's mother, who had appeared on a Boston talk radio show earlier Monday to defend him. He said the woman told him her daughter was "incredibly happy." <br /> <br />Meyers later used Cruz's "world's on fire" comment to pivot to the subject of climate change. <br /> <br />"I think the world's on fire, literally. Hottest year on record," Meyers said. "But you're not there yet, right?" <br /> <br />"My view actually is simple: debates on this should follow science and should follow data," Cruz responded. "Many of the alarmists on global warming, they got a problem because the science doesn't back them up." <br /> <br />Cruz argued that satellite data going back 17 years shows there's been "zero" warming. But that argument appears to stem from a flawed 2011 study that gained traction among climate change skeptics when Forbes covered it under the headline "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism."
