Post by Ryan Maue
We all pray for the survivors and victims of the tornado tragedy in Joplin.
The mainstream print media has done an excellent job reporting on the disaster. When asking questions about relationships between climate change and tornadoes, it is very encouraging to see who is on the journalists’ Rolodex in this instance: forecasters and scientists who are actually responsible for severe weather warnings and are true tornado experts — rather than the usual attention-seeking political climate scientists and their sycophant bloggers. I’ll highlight some of the quotes by prominent experts in three articles from ABC, CBS, and Reuters. Suggestions for comments: find alternative viewpoints, clip a sentence or two, and provide the “expert” along with the URL link. The hand waving may require a wind warning…
Brave souls should get a vomit bag ready when listening to simpleton Al Roker pontificate on the cause of these tornadoes: climate change which is bringing typically rural tornadoes into urban areas…yep.
WUWT May 9, 2011: NOAA CSI: no attribution of climate change to tornado outbreak
Lead forecaster Greg Carbin of the National Weather Service’s National Severe Storm Laboratory was asked why the 2011tornado season has been so extraordinarily devastating. — Question (1): Have there been more tornadoes in 2011 than previous years? From ABC News online: Joplin, Missouri Tornado: What’s Causing the Rise in Deadly Storms?
Carbin’s answer: “There is no indication of an upward trend in either intensity or numbers. We’ve had a lot more reports of tornadoes, but most of those tornadoes are actually the weak tornadoes, the F-0. When you take out the F-0 tornadoes from the long-term record, there is very little increase in the total number of tornadoes, and we don’t see any increase in the number of violent tornadoes. It’s just that these things are coming, and they’re very rare and extreme, and they happen to be hitting populated areas. So right now, no indication of an upward trend in the strong to violent tornadoes that we’re seeing.”
Next question (2): Are strong tornadoes a result of global warming?
Carbin’s answer: “With respect to a connection to climate change … it’s an unanswered question, essentially. We know that there are ingredients that thunderstorms need that could increase in a warmer world, but we also know there are ingredients that may decrease, so the connections if any are very tenuous and the scientific discoveries on this have yet to be made.”
CBS News online: Deadliest tornado season in 50 years – but why?
Quoting the article:
At the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma last week, lead forecaster Corey Mead was already tracking the early stages of a storm system that would devastate Joplin.
We don’t fully understand how tornadoes form,” Mead says. But, as CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason reports, this 17-year veteran of the National Weather Service says forecasting has improved significantly.
“We can actually anticipate the potential for those types of storms several days out,” Mead says. “But the exact locations and timing of more significant tornado threats – sometimes we don’t know up until just a few hours leading up to the events.”
…City College of New York’s professor Stan Gedzelman … He says superstorms are formed by an instability in the air that usually occurs in the Spring. “Yesterday’s instability – and the instability of the storms that hit Tuscaloosa is just about as large as I have ever seen,” he says.
Gedzelman sees nothing strange in the weather pattern this year. But year-to-date, tornadoes have killed more than 500 people. That’s seven times the average, making this the deadliest tornado season in more than half a century.
“The warning system was absolutely as good as it could be,” Gedzelman says. In fact, Joplin residents were given a 24-minute warning. Studies have shown that warning of just 6 to 15 minutes reduce the expected fatalities by more than 40 percent.
“It’s really remarkable the accuracy of the forecasts,” Gedzelman says. “It’s just that the level of destruction is beyond belief.”
It’s rare for tornadoes of this force to form at all. It’s rarer still for them to find population centers like Tuscaloosa and now Joplin.
Next up in the mainstream media: Reuters — La Nina weather pattern may be factor in more tornadoes
“La Nina typically has a more active southern jet stream. This spring that has played a role in the severe weather,” said Mark Paquette, meteorologist for AccuWeather.com.
Another factor may be warmer temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, which helped contribute to a warm and muggy air mass in the south, Paquette said.
But meteorologists said it was impossible to determine if climate change is responsible for the surge in natural disasters.
…
It could be climate change might cause more tornadoes, or less tornadoes, or there might be no change,” Wurman said.
The tornadoes that hit the south in April were exceptional in their number, according to weather experts. What was unusual about Sunday’s Missouri tornado was that it made a direct hit on a small city.
“It’s bad luck,” said Paquette. “Sometimes you have tornadoes that hit in the cornfields of Kansas or Nebraska or Iowa and the only person affected is that farmer and it doesn’t even hit his house. But here we have a tornado that hit a hospital.”
The expanding population of the United States, with accompanying suburban sprawl, has created more areas for tornadoes to cause serious damage.
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Poor suburban always gets blamed. Eighty years ago, farm communities were much than they are now. When those people moved to the cities to get work, they shrunk the density of people in the rural parts of the country that typically get hit by tornadoes. I doubt suburban sprawl around Boston is increasing tornado fatalities.
Where is everyone getting the idea that the GOM is so warm this spring? Michael mann mentioned that “fact” in his hurricane forecast last week. According to UNISYS, the GOM is almost 2 degrees C below normal for the date right now.
Current Gulf of Mexico SST anomaly: Not record high…
So much has been learned about climate hucksterism these last couple of years (and no better than here at WUWT) that fewer folks are willing to look like fools by exaggerating possible climate change connections to current events, especially terrible tragedies as occurred in Joplin.
Only slightly OT, yesterday I visited Yosemite National Park for the first time. I was on guard, Yosemite being kind of a temple to Gaia for many eco-worshipers, and me not subscribing to their religion. But a great thing happened:
At the entry gate, as I paid the fee, I asked the ranger on duty if the road through the
east mountain pass out of the park was open yet. “No,” she said, “Not till July. We had too much global warming this winter, 40 feet of it.” And she kind of winked.
I was in a good mood the rest of the day. I mean, if a kind of high priestess to Gaia can make a joke like that to a random citizen, we are winning.
KW
Phil Nizialek says:
May 23, 2011 at 8:44 pm
That’s the kind of data that the MSM prime time needs to be telling people. With an attention span on news reports of 30 seconds, nobody is going to dig deeper and find the facts that the Meteorologists are trying to get across.
So, insert one warming allusion on the Nightly News, and that’s what people come away with. Most are quite aware of the very long Winter and cooler Spring, ergo you have the disconnect.
I hope he, somewhere, told reporters that part of the reason there is an increase of reports. Especially of lower level tornadoes. Is due to the “ability” to detect those tornadoes, that have happened before, with newer more sensitive detection technology.
I just watched ABC’s Nightline, and they called in one one of the high priestesses of AGW, Heidi Cullen. She referred to longer term events like droughts as something that could be linked to global warming, but said we can’t link this year’s tornado crop to it.
For Heidi Cullen, that’s a lot more sensible than I expected to hear!
In comments on the post below about NOAA’s elusive search for integrity, rbateman alerted me to this ABC report:
rbateman says:
May 23, 2011 at 8:00 pm
You be the judge: What did Cullen allude to?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/joplin-missouri-tornado-deadliest-year-13670115
—
Note how Diane Sawyer opens the report by framing the question…”Is this a preview of life under global warming?”
Reporter Jim Avila then asks noted (notorious) climate and tornado expert (/sarc) Heidi Cullen about the link between global warming and tornadoes…and attributes her as saying that global warming is responsible for “increases in humidity levels” and “a general increase extreme weather” (while showing images of wild fires, droughts, floods, tornadoes, etc.). Heidi then says that we should expect to see more wild fires, floods, drought, and general extreme weather in a “warming world”. When asked about tornadoes specifically, she hedges by saying “we really don’t have enough data to make the case…” Meaning, yeah you probably should expect more tornadoes but, darn it, we just don’t have enough data yet, but don’t worry, we’ll find it…
I’m sorry…in my opinion, ABC News showed extremely poor taste injecting the CAGW political agenda into what has turned out to be an extremely sad and horrific event for the poor people of Joplin, MO.
[ryanm: Dr. Heidi Cullen is not a tornado researcher or expert. She would not be deemed credible if asked to be witness in any court case. Dr. Greg Forbes, on the other hand, is indeed top notch caliber when it comes to severe weather. No one in meteorology that I know takes Heidi Cullen seriously.]
Interestingly, the BBC ran an early web story on the Joplin tornado and they included a sidebar with historic information:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13497489
March 1925: Deadliest twister in US history as so-called Tri-State Tornado kills 695 in Missouri, southern Illinois and south-west Indiana
March 1932: Deep South tornado outbreak kills 332 people from Texas to South Carolina, with 270 dying in Alabama alone
May 1840: The Great Natchez Tornado kills 317 people in Mississippi town, most living on flatboats on the river
April 1974: 310 killed in 24-hour “super outbreak” of 148 tornadoes across 13 states.
May 1896: Two weeks of storms kill 305 people in Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These are early-in-the-season reports. I do not see where their information came from for either the story or the sidebar.
I think it’s our nature to ask why with all the deaths and people having to start their lives over from just rumble. I have experienced several major events in my life time now. The April ’74 event, EF 4 of Huntsville, AL, 1989 and recently the EF 4/5 tornado in AL. I live only 1/4 mile from worst damage.
The last line in the above report sums it up, more suburban sprawl. Many of the local area to take such absolute devastation here on the April 27 were not here several decades ago. It was cotton fields and forests.
Another thing to take into account, in the past if a house or business wasn’t hit then it didn’t get reported. Growing up in the 60’s I remember several such touchdowns but they were never reported in the news. NWS still to this day doesn’t always get the report so they can survey the damage , if the damage is rural isolated areas. I think it’s fair to say that we did have the same number of tornadoes hitting in past history.
Today with cell phones it is easier to file a report as it is happening but when “the big one” comes along even cell phones fail as does emergency radio as it did recently here.
NOAA weather radios save the day for many of us locally. having a game plan or a place that can take a hit was the other way to survive such an outbreak.
In the 60’s we got used to seeing fallout shelter signs in the SE United States due to our Cuban neighbors . I remember they got used for tornado emergencies as my dad volunteer time with Civil Defense. Maybe time to revisit that idea if we can not improve building codes seeing what mother nature can dish out.
We have simply been horribly unlucky as these tornadoes have swept right through populated areas. Had they tracked a few miles North or South, it would have made all the difference.
Mother nature has a way of making up for lost time.
After a couple of previous rather non-eventful tornado years…this season has collapsed into a tragic and historic continuous nightmare of large, long-track, and violent tornadoes.
No other natural disaster on earth can reduce entire communities to splinters in a matter of seconds.
On a much larger scale, the tsunami has the same effect but that happens in a matter of minutes. The EF4 or 5 tornado….a matter of seconds….and all of the trees are stripped of their bark and nothing is recognizable.
Waiting for that dolt from the UK after the last tornado outbreak in AL who tried to compare such an outbreak to the big straight line blow in the UK in the 1980s….and blame US building codes on the problem.
There is no comparison to an EF4 or EF5 tornado to any other hazard on earth, in terms of its immediate destruction.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/multimedia/youtube_c551330c-8560-11e0-afe5-0019bb30f31a.html
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Well OBVIOUSLY global warming doesn’t increase the frequency of tornadoes. That would be just silly.
What it does is make them more likely to hit population centres because they get sucked toward them by the UHI. That is why the third world isn’t getting hit by increases in tornadoes while the first world is. We’ve got high enough UHI to suck the tornadoes off their path and into the cities, the third world doesn’t.
This is part of the benefit of the whole carbon credit system. We in the first world pay the third world to NOT use fossil fuels, thereby not only protecting the world from the ravages of global warming, but also protecting the third world from having their cities destroyed by UHI seeking tornadoes. Third world countries are ill equipped to handle tornado attacks, so this is for their benefit.
Set/sarcasm=off
Condolences to the families who’ve lost homes and loved ones to this remarkable, but dangerous, weather phenomenon which from time to time in history strikes, unfortunately, more than fields or lakes.
It was interesting listening to an interview between NBC reporter Brian Williams, who cut his teeth in Joplin, MO and the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore.
Cantore, in the past, even though I think he is a very astute and articulate, meteorologist, dropped the climate change bomb and I was like “Jim are you ****ing kidding me??”
SO…..tonight….with the apocalyptic remains of a Joplin neighborhood in the background, Brian Williams (who was a weatherman, not a meteorologist) made some interesting observations about the local economy of MO and how they deal with the tornado threat.
But then he went on to say…”when I was here decades ago….there was nothing of this scale. What is going on??”
In other words….cue the CACC chorus…..”it must be climate change.”
Funny….neither Brian went there with his commentary NEITHER DID JIM CANTORE.
Wow….common sense….rules, after all.
Good to hear. Brian and Jim both, being intelligent animals, had the good sense to bite down on expressing their opinion in the given moment, and let the gravity of the tragedy and the awesome power of nature…to speak for themselves.
These storms striking urban areas and urban encroachment bring a new level of horror to the situation.
It is truly a remarkably BAD tornado season…but…not outside the realms of the variability of climate over the eons.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
[ryanm: btw, the first three weeks of May 2011 saw the fewest tornadoes on record…]
Ryan Maue says:
May 23, 2011 at 8:52 pm
Current Gulf of Mexico SST anomaly: Not record high…
In fact, if the zero is correct it looks normal.
winterkorn,
Caution! They may calculate, who was on duty at the Yosemite gate yesterday, and fire her for joking about precepts of the new mass religion.
If you think this is below the Big Brother’s moral level, think again.
The eternal war between reason and obscurantism has never been more serious. Billions of people are losing old religions, and our reptilian rulers know only too well that “lackeys need God,” as Voltaire once put it. So, they are busy inventing new gods for their lackeys, and who are we, the non-suggestible misfits, to interfere?
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?bmb=1&desktop_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DXT7CtF5ljxY%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&feature=youtu.be&gl=US&v=XT7CtF5ljxY
That basehunter video third down is just ridiculously frightening.
Notice at the beginning the you can barely see the violent suction vortices were it not for the power flash, and then you see them doing the whirling dervish death dance.
Then, all of the sudden the cyclone organizes and intensifies and a huge wedge appears as if by magic.
Then–even worse–the wedge quickly grows into the so-called “black fog”, approaching the width of a mile or more.
Something about this tornado, when I am normally in awe….this one makes me just sick to my stomach to watch.
The stuff that nightmares are made of…
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Joe Bastardi, before he went behind the paywall, discussed how these outbreaks are attributable to the COLD in the north meeting the warm from the south. Check the wayback machine for his earlier forecasts a week or more in advance of the event, and his explanations. He is now hidden on weatherbell.com. For only $150/yr you can read him. The WSJ recently offered a print and e-subsription for about 1/3 that.
Terry
Correction:
That link that is referenced above no longer links to the horrifying and instantaneous cyclogenesis that actually occurred.
(replaced by some dude playing the guitar. WTF?)
So….the link that you need to see, if you have not already seen, is THIS one:
http://www.stltoday.com/news/multimedia/youtube_c551330c-8560-11e0-afe5-0019bb30f31a.html
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
[ryanm: btw, the first three weeks of May 2011 saw the fewest tornadoes on record…]
================================
Interesting how we are entering into a time of extremes.
Statistically the quiet early May may mean something…
But the historic death toll this year…be it from bad luck or not…makes that early May stat mean nothing at all.
Also…even if early May was quiet….the sheer number of long track twisters this year has been really impressive.
I am old enough to remember 1974 like it was yesterday, so 🙂
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Terry Jackson says:
May 23, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Joe Bastardi, before he went behind the paywall, discussed how these outbreaks are attributable to the COLD in the north meeting the warm from the south. Check the wayback machine for his earlier forecasts a week or more in advance of the event, and his explanations. He is now hidden on weatherbell.com. For only $150/yr you can read him. The WSJ recently offered a print and e-subsription for about 1/3 that.
Terry
==================
And Bastardi said back in February that this would be a bad, BAD tornado season.
He predicted it. Hats off to his long-range abilities.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I think I read that the Svensmark theory would, if we get a grand minimum, predict an increase in cyclone energy. Would that translate into more tornadoes too?
Meanwhile, solar cycle 24 has gone into a frightening slide.
Weather had always differentiated tween rural and urban areas. But now urbanites are seeing what ruralites have always experienced. and it’s all because of global warming. Tornadoes used to make their way around cities, especially big cities, and preferred smashing the rural locales.
But now because of manmade co2 tornadoes are after every kind of city. They have decided not to make differentiations anymore.
Al Gore’s movie never warned us about that. Global warming is turning out to be worse than even he thought!
—————————————————–
Al Roker is a weather expert—sheesh!
Lots of tornadoes track parallel with Interstate 44, ice storms too. It is a corridor where the big air masses frequently collide, making life difficult and sometimes deadly. Strong, friendly people live there. Good people that have often helped out and sheltered folks from surrounding states during their times of need.
Norway’s largest paper Aftenposten did not miss the opportunity to spread CAGW misinformation: http://ipad.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/article4128841.ece
Apparently, they based the story on this: http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/22424