"Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I’m flying"

From Planet Gore: Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Energy Leader [Henry Payne]

from http://stabenow.senate.gov/

Detroit, Mich. — Michigan just experienced its coldest July on record; global temperatures haven’t risen in more than a decade; Great Lakes water levels have resumed their 30-year cyclical rise (contrary to a decade of media scare stories that they were drying up due to global warming), and polls show that climate change doesn’t even make a list of Michigan voters’ top-ten concerns.

Yet in an interview with the Detroit News Monday (a private meeting with the DN editorial board), Senator Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) — recently appointed to the Senate Energy Committee — made clear that fighting the climate crisis is her top priority.

“Climate change is very real,” she confessed as she embraced cap and trade’s massive tax increase on Michigan industry — at the same time claiming, against all the evidence, that it would not lead to an increase in manufacturing costs or energy prices. “Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes.”

And there are sea monsters in Lake Michigan. I can feel them when I’m boating.

Since Stabenow says Global warming causes more hurricanes and tornadoes, lets have a look at the data.

Graph from NWS/NOAA. Smaller (F1) tornadoes seem to be on the increase, but not larger ones.

Even though tornado reports seem to be on the rise, the larger damaging tornados, F2-F5 don’t seem to be. There are some good reasons for this, and it might be a good primer for readers to revisit this report I made about the issue of tornado reporting:

Increasing tornadoes or better information gathering?

On the issue of Hurricanes, even USA Today is beginning to have doubts:

excerpt:

The official start of the hurricane season is June 1. And not since 1992 — the year of Hurricane Andrew — has the Atlantic Ocean been silent past Aug. 4. Meteorologists have yet to name even a single tropical storm in the Atlantic in 2009.

So is global warming really doing anything?

“While it is commonly thought that global warming would increase hurricane activity, that is far from a settled issue,” said Rob Eisenson, a meteorologist at Western Connecticut State University. “There are some research studies that suggest global warming would not have that effect.”

NOAA has lowered their hurricane season forecast.

And Accumulated Cyclone Energy is quite low so far this year and lower than usual last year:

Ryan Maue of Florida State University writes in comments in a previous WUWT story:

Global (Northern Hemisphere) tropical cyclone ACE for the months May – June – July is the lowest in at least the past 30-years or more.

I, for one, am not surprised.  Continued inactivity should persist for the next few weeks until the atmosphere catches up with the radiative warming of the tropical oceans due to the season called summer.

2007 was a dud.   2008 was saved from being a record year by 2007.  2009 is behind the pace of both years.  Amazing how natural variability affects tropical cyclone formation, tracks, and intensity.  Who would have thought?

Ryan’s Tropical web page at Florida State University has this graph that shows accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) :

click for larger image

Sorted monthly data: Text File

Note where 2009 is in the scheme of things.