Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe is getting a boost from a liberal veterans group claiming that electing the Democrat will make the state’s weather better.
The ad also slams McAuliffe’s Republican opponent, Ken Cuccinelli.
“Virginia needs a governor developing policies that make extreme storms less likely, keeping Virginians and our Guardsmen out of harm’s way,” said retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, a self-described conservative Republican, in a radio attack ad.
“Cuccinelli avoids the clear facts – putting Virginia families at risk. Denying climate change isn’t fighting for Virginia. And it’s not fighting for you,” Anderson said in the two week ad campaign.
The group has spent more than $58,000 on the ad which complements efforts by the McAuliffe campaign to label Cuccinelli as anti-science for his skepticism of the theory of manmade global warming.
Last summer, former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann began stumping for McAuliffe’s campaign, making appearances with the Democratic candidate and going on TV to bash the Cuccinelli campaign.
“Virginians have a very stark choice before them. On the one hand you have Terry McAuliffe who embraces science and technology, who recognizes that technological innovation is what’s going to help Virginia compete in a world economy in the 21st Century,” Mann said on MSNBC’s “All In” with Chris Hayes.
“On the other hand, you have Ken Cuccinelli. Somebody who views science as something to attack if it doesn’t comport with his ideological views, or the views of the special interests that fund his campaigns,” Mann added.
Mann has a personal ax to grind with Cuccinelli. In his capacity as attorney general, Cuccinelli investigated alleged fraud by Mann who was obtaining grants to conduct global warming research in 2010.
Mann was also at the center of the “Climategate” email scandal and the researcher behind the controversial “hockey stick” curve that predicted catastrophic global warming.
The “Climategate” controversy began when emails surfaced from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit that referred to a statistical “trick” he used in his research to show catastrophic global warming.
The “hockey stick” graph has also been attacked by critics for being misleading and having “poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.” The graph was held up by environmental activists and politicians as evidence that the earth was rapidly warming and government action was needed.
“I published 15 years ago this graph called the ‘hockey stick’ that shows how unprecedented recent global warming is, and it became an icon in the climate change debate,” Mann said. “Over the past 15 years my co-authors and I have been subject to a crescendo of by politicians, typically aligned closely with fossil fuel interests or front groups advocating for the fossil fuel industry, that see the need to discredit this iconic graphic.”
However, there has been no significant rise in global temperatures in the last 15 years or so, calling into question Mann’s claims.
“Heretofore, facts have proven Dr. Mann and his cohorts wrong,” writes lawyer Paul Jossey. “The earth’s temperature has remained mostly flat for a decade and a half despite the addition of over 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere… In fact, should the current temperature ‘pause’ persist for a few more years it will completely discredit the models consistently touted by ‘consensus’ scientists.”
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