Further Update:
Turns out I was hoping for too much. Brad Johnson found at least three scientists eager to be quoted in his follow up article: Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and Gavin Schmidt. The quotes from these top scientists are worth going over there and reading. No additional comments are warranted.
Top Climate Scientist On The Monster Tornadoes: ‘It Is Irresponsible Not To Mention Climate Change’
Update by Ryan Maue:
Under the title of “Tornado and global warming“, Brad Johnson disgustingly uses quotes by Dr. Kevin Trenberth, and grotesquely blames the recent tornado outbreak on (GOP) congressional delegations in states that opposed climate legislation. I hope no scientist wants anything like this said on their behalf.
Update by Anthony:
4:45PM PST I have an updated article on this issue here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/29/the-folly-of-linking-tornado-outbreaks-to-climate-change/
9:30AM PST:
I was writing simultaneously with Ryan Maue and I couldn’t even come up with a title I was so disgusted. So I made the title “No title”. I’ve combined the articles. This is what I wrote:
This post has no title because the closest title I can think of is of the caliber of [expletive deleted]. The Center for American Progress and NCAR’s Dr. Keneth Trenbert invoke the thought of famous line from Joseph N. Welch “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
I wonder how long they had to search for this particular (uncredited) photograph, choosing the juxapostion of the Chevron sign with the tornado. For all I know, it may even be photoshopped. (update: After about 30 minutes of searching, I found the original here http://yfrog.com/h232uwjij )
To say I’m disgusted, simply does not do justice to the feelings I have about this. The real test will be to see if CAP paid disinformer Joe Romm reposts this article from Brad Johnson on Climate Progress.
Here’s the proof that refutes the issue, and pigeonholes these clowns for what they are, which is nothing about science, but about hateful political cheapshots.
From the National Climatic Data center. Tornadoes of the intensity seen in Alabama this week (F3-F5) on the Fujita scale:
Source: National Climatic Data Center http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/tornadotrend.jpg
They New York Times got into the act too. CCM Mike Smith of Meteorological Musings writes:
Leave it to the NY Times to Write an Inaccurate and Insensitive Article
I had planned on moving on to other topics today. There is little more to say about the tornadoes of the last three weeks until the investigations are completed. As I was going through my email this morning, a reader sent me a link to this article inThe New York Times:
Predicting Tornadoes: It’s Still Guessing Game
Compared to the slime job by the Center for American Progress, it’s tame.
I urge readers to read this article below from Physorg and to use it and the graph above to refute comments in online forums.
“…it would be a mistake to blame climate change for a seeming increase in tornadoes”
Update: The graph that Joe Romm and Brad Johnson don’t want you to see: tornado deaths per million over the last century
Source: NOAA’s US Severe Weather Blog, SPC, Norman Oklahoma
http://www.norman.noaa.gov/2009/03/us-annual-tornado-death-tolls-1875-present/
Lifted from IOWA48
“Njörd, the Norse god of the wind, is actually to blame for these storms, and since Mr. Trenberth and Mr. Johnson are obviously religious Mythologists, it is blatantly blasphemous for them to attribute the cause to anyone or anything other than Njörd. You have to keep in mind that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a relatively new religion (actually a sub-sect of Mythology). While it is probably the most reliant upon blind faith of all the religions, you can expect some confusion among its followers as to which particular god is in charge of any given phenomenon, due to its newness and the lack of any discipline within this religion. It is somewhat ironic that adherents of the antithesis of this particular religion, Scientific Method-ists, are condemned to Hell by AGW believers. In Norse mythology (AGWists overriding true belief) hell was called Niflheim oe Hel, it was “world of the ice and that of the dead, which is also know as Hel.”
If the denier-haters were truly interested in saving lives lost due to disasters resulting from climate change, then their focus logically should be on adaptation vs pollution mitigation. Immediate results can be gained from adaptation (as advocated by Pielke, Sr.), whereas the CO2 train left the station well before anything could effectively be done about it. And consider that it will take great many years for carbon sinks to make a difference even if humanity ceases CO2 production altogether. So, the primary focus by denier-haters on mitigation diverts attention away from life-saving, adaptive actions that nearly everyone can agree on.
Also:
Neo says:
April 29, 2011 at 10:03 am
(snip – quoting Fugate)
“Many people think of Oklahoma as ‘Tornado Alley’ and forget that the southeast United States actually has a history of longer and more powerful tornadoes that stay on the ground longer.”
That’s an interesting point since in the area of the southeast I live in, only houses built on a slope can have basements due (I believe) to the clay content of the soil. I wonder if anyone has done a study to link numbers of deaths by region, while looking at availability of cellars/basements to hide in.
ew-3, you have it backwards. First comes the inflation (devaluation of the currency), then comes the price increases. Oil, which is denomenated in dollars merely is tracking the flood of currency this Administration (through the Federal Reserve system) has created. Same thing happened with Nixon in 1971-73. The politicians never learn. And the people naively blame the producers rather than the real culprits.
It seems a large number of people in the USA are awake to the serious effect on their economy of the futile efforts to control the climate. In the UK we are still running headlong for the cliff edge!
How exactly does one go about ‘polluting the climate”?? For that matter how do you go about ‘polluting the weather’?? And these characters are intimating that the skeptics are anti-science?
Speaking of Joe Romm, one of his headlines today reads “2010 extreme weather cost lives, health, economy”. So I left a comment, it’s awaiting moderation. What are the odds?
Beefeater says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
April 29, 2011 at 1:42 pm
1932 extreme weather cost lives, health, economy
1965 extreme weather cost lives, health, economy
1974 extreme weather cost lives, health, economy
And so on and so forth. You could do a peer reviewed study. (That means you could look it up)
Is the global temp. anomaly even positive right now?
“Given that global warming is unequivocal,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth cautioned the American Meteorological Society in January of this year, “the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”
Just to add a little bit more to the debate. The last two winters in the UK have been dire, especially the last one. As I understand it, this was due to a weak jetstream allowing cold air from the Arctic to move south. It is also my understanding that heat=energy which means that the jetstream should be stronger due to “global warming” therefore we should not have had these cold winters. The warmists did say in the 1990’s that snow would be very rare in the UK at the beginning of this century.
The mushroom policy is alive and well (kept in the dark and fed on s**t).
That these are people who should know better is what makes this really disgusting. In the area of Ohio I live in, people remember the ’78 outbreak very well. And look at how low the number for ’78 is. And we have much more rigorous detection technology and defining criteria for what is a tornado in our days. Shame on those who would use the deaths of other human beings as leverage in a pissing match.
No, it’s been negative since it fell at the end of Dec.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Mar_2011.gif
I guess it matters not to these people that the actual average temperature right now is about what it was in 1980?
Blaming the victims for acts of God (his wrath of course) is a well established premise in religious history, including recently, various well known American TV preachers. Now we seem to have entered the age of scientists as hatchet-men of the Gods. Be afraid; be very afraid – you have sinned and the God of Climate has come to mete out his punishment. God help us all.
So what would you call people like Trenbeth? “Evangelical scientists” is an insult to many well-meaning Christians.
Sorry, my point in the above post is that, despite improved detection capabilities, we do not have an uptick. And it is clear that a devastating tornado doesn’t have to happen in a ‘busy’ year.
Never forget that “Think Progress” and “Climate Progress” are organized and financed by the same people and are essentially the same organization.
Looking through those comments at thinkprogress, it seems like a good 70% of them are anonymous. I’m a little confused what kind of progress they are thinking about when their comment behavior reads like an echo chamber that Maximilien Robespierre would be proud to oversee. They express glee in death and destruction to those they do not agree with. That’s about as American as nazism, and no I don’t consider that hyperbole. These thinkprogress comments mock and laugh about how these “religious people” in the south are getting what they deserve for their “sin” against earth while completely missing the point that their comments confirm themselves as believers of an unproven apocalyptic religious cult complete with full definitions of sin and salvation. Worse yet this religion of theirs gets federal funding to continue to spout the nonsense of future calamity and the requirement that all people change their lives and remove their definition of “sin” from the earth. This is literally religion versus religion, only one side is mistakenly convinced they’re secular and have reason on their side.
Thinkprogress??? I think not. That domain should be stripped from them and replaced with TAXPAYERFUNDEDDOGMA.COM
I have been noting in past comments on cold, snow, floods, wildfires, etc. that most often an article will note that it is the worst whatever in 30 -40 years. Here is another one. My point in this and others is it would appear to be the first stages of a cooling period – not warming. We may see a return of stronger cyclone activity (like that of 40 years ago or so?) and other weather extremes. I think rebuttals should always look back at these cycles to show that we are cooling, not warming.
And yes, this is outrageously low behavior to be blaming victims of these storms for causing them. The Chevron sign is in color in a black and white photo (I know it gets dark in such a storm but you would see some color on the close up objects).
In all honesty, 99% of scientists that advocate even the most draconian climate mitigation measures, do not give any credibility to Brad Johnson’s comments. It is clear that he is drawing a parallel (though he does not wish to write it down), between cataclysms purported to be related to certain lifestyle choices by famous televangelists — and the tornado outbreak.
There is room in the debate for pointing out double standards and hypocrisy, but this is beyond the pale. I give credit to Obama for flying into Alabama: it is something he should have done right away in Nashville last year with their floods. Instead of castigating blame upon victims of tragedy and scoring political points (just like Paul Krugman and the left after the Gabbie Giffords shooting), we should offer prayers. And, it all comes full circle as Gifford’s husband blasts into space — signaling the end of the current shuttle program. It’s a sad day for a multitude of reasons.
Think Progress is the leftist equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church.
What’s funny the Warmists want to tie this outbreak to an increase in a global average, even though the region of the globe the outbreak occurred in has been in a long term cooling trend according to NCDC:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/time-series/index.php?parameter=tmp&month=12&year=2010&filter=12&state=104&div=0
Here’s the image for March tornadoes from 1950 to date: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/tornado/2011/mar/mar2011_tornactivity.png
What do you expect from the same bunch of lefties that immediately blames the GOP for trying to kill old folks and children when Ryan tries to cut ONE THIRD of just the INCREASE in the budget the democrats have created for the US in the last year? The communist strategy has always been to tell a lie enough until it becomes the truth and with a cooperative media it works well. Green on the outside is red on the inside.
I hate it when people use something like this to further their agenda. I live 1/4 mile for massive destruction from one of these, which follow the almost exact same tract in 1994.
“Gary Pearse says:
April 29, 2011 at 11:06 am
I have been noting in past comments on cold, snow, floods, wildfires, etc. that most often an article will note that it is the worst whatever in 30 -40 years. Here is another one. My point in this and others is it would appear to be the first stages of a cooling period – not warming. We may see a return of stronger cyclone activity (like that of 40 years ago or so?) and other weather extremes. I think rebuttals should always look back at these cycles to show that we are cooling, not warming. ”
Exactly. We are heading into a cold period and the warmist predictors who call this
“Gaia’s ” Wrath, are going to look like fools..
Woke up to 1/2 in of snow on the yard this AM April 29th. we have had snow at least 20 days this month in La Grande Oregon, according to one local, whom I trust with his
weather expertise.-Ex USMC Weather/Recon guy…
He also thinks that we are in a Dalton, not Maunder type minimum…
Smokey wrote: “And speaking of a crisis, oil was $33 a barrel, and gasoline was $1.87 a gallon when Obama took office.”
I stubled over your assertion because I KNOW that I haven’t seen gas under $2 a gallon for better than 5 years, I think it has been north of $60/bbl since at least 2005. It was around $2.70/gal here in VT in Nov 2008. This page seems to back up my memory bank:
http://flowingdata.com/2008/08/08/watch-the-rise-of-gasoline-retails-prices-1993-2008/
I admire the focus on honesty way too much to let ANY misinformation go unchallenged.
Thanks, and I’m sure it was an honest mistake.
Here’s a lede for you
“No Lie to Great for Global Warming Believers”