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/
Ric, This has been bugging me, so I tried to reconcile my memory with what you, and Smokey and others have been saying. I did a search and here is a chart of average prices for the State of Vermont:
http://66.70.86.64/ChartServer/ch.gaschart?Country=Canada&Crude=f&Period=60&Areas=Vermont,,&Unit=US%20$/G
I don’t remember the 6 month period (my son was 2 1/2 and learning to walk and talk…) when prices dropped below $2.50/gal, but that’s what the graph says they did. Oh well, my apologies to all. Just goes to show how things can slip past you when you have kids.
This is interesting to review…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_F5_and_EF5_tornadoes
The only one of these monsters I witnessed was the supercell for the Plainfield, IL F5 tornado, from about 100 miles south. I turned to my chum and said “Whoever is underneath that thing is getting hammered!” Little did I know…
As Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls.
These guys are desperate. They have been running a scam that is several orders of magnitude larger than Maddoff’s. They will now say anything to buy some time. They are becoming a joke. Just for fun look at the comments on climate articles on Huff Post. The skeptics are now laughing at the alarmists. The alarmists are getting really nasty, which elicits more joking from the skeptics. You know you are in real trouble when people are laughing at you. Nothing hurts more than that.
The wheels are coming off this bus.
Jeff Alberts:
“Gavin said no such thing.”
He didn’t use the same words I did but he wrote the same content, or at least he wanted the reader to make exactly this conclusion and many fanatical AGW readers will do nothing else. That’s the only reason why he wrote a message about tornadoes in the thread.
There is clearly no link between tornadoes and the topic of climate change discussed in the main article of RealClimate.ORG – unless one claims that tornadoes are encouraged by climate change – which is the first part of Gavin’s statement. And there’s absolutely no reason to discuss the relative position of Roy Spencer and the tornadoes. About 1/50 of the Americans live in Alabama and Spencer is among them. Richard Lindzen and most others are not.
So Schmidt also implicitly claims by his observation of the “coincidence” that Spencer’s location has some relevance for the topic of climate change.
Cheers
LM
And of course we should listen very carefully to Kevin (Can’t find the missing heat) Trenberth because he has the most accurate models and is better places to make such claims about Global Warming causing these tornadoes.
Perhaps he should go and find the missing heat and make comments only after he has found it.
As a long term critic of the way the BBC have reported these kinds of events as “yet further proof of global warming”, I have to say that the complete absence of any mention of climate change clearly marks a complete change in BBC reporting.
Obviously, like the boy who cried wolf, it will take an awful long time before we can trust the BBC on climate, but at least it is making the long journey back to impartiality in this area.
One thing to remember. When the world cools down, these bad weather patterns will accelerate enormously. It is, after all heat differentials that create bad weather. So there will be much more of this nonsense.
I think the public would see through the alarmist stuff in this case. Disgusting, I agree, because it seems these folks are happy there’s a big death toll just to prove (in their minds) a point. But it is nothing to be worried about – ultimately truth comes out. Don’t let yourself slip to their level. By once again responding with some useful information you’re showing you are not answering cheap shot with cheap shot.
Gerard Harbison says:
April 29, 2011 at 11:07 am
Think Progress is the leftist equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church.
I know I’m late to this game, but a minor correction. They supported Al Gore and Fred Phelps ran as a Democrat for governor and the senate.
The Westboro Baptists *are* the left’s equivalent of the Westboro Baptists.
Dear Southern Storm Victims, you’re dead because you didn’t believe in Global Warming.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/04/dear_southern_storm_victims_yo.html
I’ve seen a wonderful picture of Al Gore and Fred Phelps laughing it up. It was a while ago, but still.
==========
Yep, at flickr.com, #4 on the Google list for ‘Fred Phelps and Al Gore’.
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Bennett says @April 29, 2011 at 8:30 pm [ … ],
Memories play tricks on us, Bennett. [Just wait ’till you’re in your ’60’s!]
Good on you for being a stand-up guy and apologizing. When I made my original comment I was going by memory; a risky proposition. But I recalled that on inauguration day I was listening to the radio while waiting to fill my tank, and thinking that gas prices at $1.87 were finally getting back to normal.
Only five days later Obama imposed an onerous new drilling moratorium on the country, and the chart you posted shows the result: the futures market pushed prices up to current levels, knowing that future supplies would be restricted.
Curiousgeorge and James Sexton are right, this is not entirely Obama’s fault – he’s just the puppet of the eco-lobby. But Obama could singlehandedly reverse the price rise by doing exactly what George Bush did: announce that he was lifting his new drilling moratorium and encouraging oil production from everywhere, including Alaska’s north slope. The results would be immediate, and the great weight of high gas prices would be lifted off the backs of Americans [prices in the the EU countries are more a function of taxes, but they would also see immediate relief].
But Obama is a captive of the eco-zealots. He may take the minimal action required to insure his own political survival, but he wasn’t kidding when he said that prices will necesarily rise. His whole administration consists of people pushing to raise the price of energy to Euro levels [IIRC, in some European cities the dollar equivalent is around $12 a gallon].
The entire basis for this heavy burden, and the concomitant craziness of heavily subsidized alternative energy windmills, is the false belief that CO2 [“carbon”] is dangerous. It is not. It is a tiny trace gas essential to life, comprising only 0.00039 of the air. It is completely harmless and beneficial at both current and projected levels.
Your son is going to grow up in a world of shortages and rationing, of very expensive food and energy, and arbitrary rule by nameless, faceless bureaucrats – unless we can derail the slow motion “carbon” train wreck. It is the biggest scam in history; it is based on anti-science, and it will take all of our effort to force a change in course.
Cheap energy is achievable. The only real obstacle is bad government policy.
If the climate morons want to whine about mankinds release of greenhouse gases causing the atmosphere to warm up and do….well, something, why is that the three largest tornado outbreaks in the last 60 years in the month of April have come during cooling trends? April 1965, 1974, and 2011, all periods during cooling. Remember, they were all sorts of worried about a coming ice age during the mid-1970’s.
Smokey says:
April 30, 2011 at 5:39 am
……………………………….
While this thread is primarily focused on weather/climate/energy, the issue I mentioned in connection with this is far more comprehensive. Those are only a subset of a larger agenda – a tactic if you will rather than a grand strategy. Think about what is included in the phrase “Fundamental Transformation” . What are the fundamentals of American culture and society? What process and end result is implied by transformation of those fundamentals? Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the little things.
Proof positive that global warming is more a cult than it is science.
Smokey says: April 30, 2011 at 5:39 am
Thank you for your kind response. My original comment didn’t come off as I intended, and then to be so wrong to boot was shameful. I’m 52 and already see how double checking fact versus memory is mandatory. It’s not that the memory is bad, it’s that we have a lot of memories to sort through.
High regards,
Bennett
Jimmy Haigh says:
April 29, 2011 at 8:20 pm
And for 20 years I was a geologist and mining engineer working in the coal/precious metals/dimension stone sectors of the industry. What must be considered is the total ROI and NPV of a project, then collectively as a company comprised of many projects.
But your point about “it’s all profit” is simply not true–you still have royalties, processing and production costs (or do you work for free?), profit for those “greedy investors”, and taxes on the profit–more so when you convert the raw crude to salable product.
Then expand your scope to include all the activities your company undertakes to survive, and there’s a constant expenditure to find new reserves (one of the companies I worked for spent $10 million every year on exploration alone), the fact that oil wells are a finite resource and eventually quit producing, and on top of that the fact that oil reserves worldwide are shrinking–and while some of your costs may be completely amortized, nothing is pure profit. Indeed, if you don’t have a significant payback period on most of the production, your company will no longer have a future; it will end up going out of business.
It is sad for science that one of its most outspoken members, Michael Mann, resorts to kindergarden intelligence, splicing two different graphs to concoct his famous Hockey Stick. This Frankengraph is discredited by simply looking at the 10,000 year GISP2 temperature record. We are getting colder and colder Dr. Mann, and you know it! You should be ashamed of yourself for continuing this charade.
I realize this post is getting old, but Pielke Jr. has an interesting post up:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/05/revkin-on-tornadoes-vulnerability-and.html
Revkin has another lucid moment. I wonder if he hasn’t been trolling WUWT comments for ideas:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/29/never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste-tornado-deaths-blamed-on-lawmakers-opposed-to-climate-legislation/#comment-650620
Of course, global warming alarmists could argue this point the other way. Since the 100-year trend in temperatures in the South (0.00 deg F./decade) and Southeast (-.05 deg F./decade) has been neutral or declining (see NCDC’s “Climate at a Glance” website), not rising, the graphs showing a decline in violent tornadoes and a decline in the number of deaths from tornadoes are completely consistent with being alarmed about the dangerous effects of global warming!