Senator Stabenow’s Flying Climate Circus Examined by SPPI

In a just released paper, the Science and Public Policy Institute examines Senator Stabenow’s fanciful claim that “we are paying the price” for human advancement “in more hurricanes and tornadoes.”

Stabenow (D-Michigan) in an interview with the Detroit News in mid-August 2009, said: “Climate change is very real.” She endorsed cap and trade's massive tax increase on Michigan industry, saying it would not lead to an increase in manufacturing costs or energy prices. “Global warming creates volatility," said Senator Stabenow. “I feel it when I'm flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes.”

SPPI’s analysis and science fact-checking easily show that, like recent comments by Senator Kerry, every part of Senator Stabenow’s statement is misleading at best, false at worst.

Her climate-phantasm that “global warming” creates “volatility”, which she feels when she is flying, is entirely without scientific foundation, for the simple reason that there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years; a period longer than Michigan’s first female senator has even been in office. Indeed, there has been rapid and statistically-significant global cooling for almost eight years. So the “volatility” which she feels when flying cannot be caused by “global warming”, because there has not been any.

Says SPPI President, Robert Ferguson, “One of the clearest demonstrations that politicians like Senators Kerry and Stabenow are simply inventing scare stories about the climate is when they attribute recent events, such as “volatility” when flying, to “global warming” that has not happened for almost a decade and a half.

Additional facts Senator Stabenow apparently doesn’t know include:

* There’s been a rapid fall in hurricane activity over the past three years, so that there has been less tropical cyclone activity planet-wide at present than at almost any time in the past half century.

* The Waxman-Markey climate bill will close down five-sixths of the US economy, killing five jobs in six.

* “Green jobs” is the new code-word for mass unemployment.

* It is fanciful in the extreme to assume that windmills and solar panels will make up the coming shortfall in electricity.

* Michigan has just had its coldest July on record.

* Water levels in the Great Lakes have resumed their 30-year cyclical rise.

The SPPI paper concludes, “If false science and baseless climate scares lead to passage in the senate of anything like the Waxman bill, the lights will soon go out all over America; factories will close at a faster rate; transportation systems will shut down and hospitals will be crippled.”

Read Senator Stabenow: “Global Warming Causes More Hurricanes and Tornadoes” here:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/sen_stabenow_global_warming.html

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Contact - Robert Ferguson
www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org
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