Media accurately reporting links between climate change and tornadoes

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.

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.

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
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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.]

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.

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

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…]

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?

[ryanm: btw, the first three weeks of May 2011 saw the fewest tornadoes on record…]
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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

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.

The new term is “climate breakdown”.

And then…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-link-between-climate-change-and-joplin-tornadoes-never/2011/05/23/AFrVC49G_story.html

Ryan Maue,
“We all pray for the survivors and victims of the tornado tragedy in Joplin.”
I have the greatest sympathy and concern for the victims of this tragedy but I do not pray. Is it asking too much for believers not to make such remarks especially on a website dedicated to scientific inquiry? How about at least the usual inclusion of “thoughts” with the prayers or maybe “many of us pray”?
Then when you click on the hyperlinked word “pray” there is a photo of a statue of praying hands with the caption “…this photo shows the only thing on the Joplin campus that was untouched by the tornado”.
Do you really endorse the idea that a deity allowed an F-5 tornado to smash a religiously affiliated hospital killing five patients, not to mention the many innocent people in the surrounding community, but purposely intervened to spare a concrete statue of praying hands?

Gedzelman sees nothing strange in the weather pattern this year.
A strange comment really. He must not of been watching this years jet streams. The current large trough over the USA pushing cold air into warm is part of the current jet stream pattern that is a product of the low solar output.

It was the extremely cold central states air mass causing the warm, relative, air from the Gulf of Mexico causing an energetic cold frontal system that spawned these tornado clusters. It you call that climate change it is up to you but inaccurate.
Before the media got as big or as news grabbing as it is today many tornadoes were not reported and there are also far more people around to report such events. Ergo- more reports so more tornadoes. But not true since we do not know exactly how many tornadoes there were 50/100 years ago. tornadoes are also more likely to destroy towns now since towns are now much bigger so statistically more likely to be hit. Still does not mean an increase in tornadoes.

Ryan,
If you have a less atmospheric pressure, you have less friction in the atmosphere that would slow down and break up tornadoes. So, they can be more powerful.
Science has many time ignored the obvious just for the push of the dreaded AGW.

Just a thought- but does the ‘Urban Heat Island’ effect give more likelihood to the chance of a tornado touching down where there is a relatively open area with lots of tarmac and buildings – where heat is causing updraft just as the cooler air of the thunderstorms is overhead… If so – would it be possible to modify the air movement by changing the shapes of streets and buildings?

davidmhoffer says:
May 23, 2011 at 9:45 pm
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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.
…
(And yes, I noticed the /sarc). Anecdotally, I’ve wondered about this, not the “sucked toward them by UHI”, but by the increase in updraft over larger urban areas (even over smaller urban areas in discrete rural areas) , due to UHI. Watching urban development across the lower Great Lakes region, I seem to be seeing an increase in intensity in convective cells over a larger area that appears to correlate with UHI. Remembering back to my youth in the 50s and 60s, I remember summer thunderstorms as being more compact, discrete late afternoon cells over a city with population density of approx 50-60K. Much of the rural area surrounding that city is now built-up, and the greater region has grown by several orders of magnitude. Could we be seeing larger tornados in UHI areas simply due to the contribution UHI enhanced updraft may be providing to convective complexes? I appreciate there is a difference between larger air mass interaction and local convective updraft, but in either case, could larger area UHI not be an intensity factor?

Awful carnage in Joplin. Condolences to thosewho have lost loved ones..Will there come a time when goverment/insurance companies say sorry we will not insure you if you live in these severe weather areas.As some one who lives in England and has a benign climate i always ask myself when i see this sort of death and destruction, why would you live there knowing that could happen?.

Regarding tornadoes and populated areas in simple terms: The larger the target, the more likely it is to get hit. As the population grows towards 9 billion in the next 40 years, we can certainly expect a corresponding increase in storm damage and deaths, unless building codes are revised substantially. Solidly built dome structures would fare far better than slab sided structures with lots of glass.
People should not blame mother nature. This is a result of our lack of foresight.

Paul Coppin;
I appreciate there is a difference between larger air mass interaction and local convective updraft, but in either case, could larger area UHI not be an intensity factor?>>>
Well there are others far more qualified to respond than me. I have to admit, I never gave my tongue in cheek remark a moment’s thought as anything but sarcasm.
I will note though that I grew up on the prairies where you could see a lot of sky. Every once in a while you could like up, and WAY up there see an air mass spinning. OK, you couldn’t see it, you could only see the whisps of cloud swirling inside it. Often you could see two, spinning in opposite directions. My understanding has always been that this is how tornadoes form, and they only touch down if the right conditions in the air mass around them tips them sideways.
As to that, I don’t see UHI being involved. We’re talking two air masses moving in opposite directions starting some air between them spinning. But UHI causing the conditions for the spinning air to tilt seem equally unlikely to me. UHI isn’t something that has a sharp demarkation point. It is a very gradual increases from the edge of the city to the centre. So even a large UHI of 2 degrees C would still be a gradient tens of miles long from city edge to city centre.
Further, we’ve seen evidence that would make me think the opposite is true. No real increase in the number of tornadoes, the bulk of them touch down over water or fields where they do little harm. Cities have been growing in size, so with more area to hit, you would think the incidence of tornadoes hitting urban areas would rise accordingly. This year we’ve seen a spate of hits on urban centres, and given natural variability, that is what one would expect. A year here and there that stands out either for an unusual number of incidents, or lack thereof.
I remember one year…would have been roughly 1990 give or take a couple years, when tornadoes just had it in for trailer parks on the Canadian prairies. I dimly recall one trailer park getting clobbered twice about a week apart (Edmonton?). It was a very odd year, a lot of lives and damage, and everyone started coming up with theories about what was causing it. Then it didn’t happen again for a few decades and everyone forgot about it.

Steven Goddard asks “Why Did They Choose To Start Counting In 1950?” He provides the answer. Very interesting.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/why-did-they-choose-to-start-counting-in-1950/
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html#history

I did not read all the comments. Watching the Weather Channel this morning, the expert repeated the claim about warm Gulf air. But couldn’t the snowmass remaining from the winter be keeping the cold fronts cooler? Isn’t the frontal instability influenced by the temperature differences, not the absolute temps?

Lance , May 24, 2011 at 1:50 am
Well said.

Jim,
As the events unfolded that (April 27). The cell phones would work when the system wasn’t overloaded. As the tornado numbers increase so did the down time for cell phones to actually work. On my first try during the first round during lunch time, I had to try twice. First time to report massive rotation with hangings, by my second try and NWS picked up it was obvious one of those hangings was a large twin funnel on the outside of the rotation headed my direction.
It took usually 2-3 times of trying and finding that the system was over loaded when I made calls, same for my daughter who kept texting info from her network of friends. When the big EF 4/5 hit, my daughter got a text reporting our grocery, gas and Rx stores were leveled and that was the last text. Later that evening while traveling to get to a relatives house who somehow had power I manage to get a call out again to NWS reporting the damage near the Limestone county line. Once I got the forecaster on the phone it was clear to hear in his voice they weren’t getting all the reports. Several days later we were eating with some cops at a relief site and talked about the event. This young cop got stuck in a car wash and had tried to radio base to report damage, he couldn’t. That evening all we heard on the few radio stations still on the air was to wait and see if power would be back during that night. No mention of all the damage . In my cell phone call while near Limestone county I had to relay all the places I was seeing emergency lights and where responders were turning traffic around.
The Huntsville NWS office has a facebook page and one of the articles which was put up the week afterwards was about how difficult their jobs became when they didn’t get as many reports as they expected. They could see the radar returns showing that debris was being picked up but they weren’t getting the usual reports as to the type of damage that were out in the field.
All areas in and outside the EF 4/5 zone had massive tree, power poles and tower damage including one media weather radar were taken out. So generators had to be brought in to help get the emergency communications back up. Heard also that portable towers for cell phone coverage had to be brought in.
My guess is that Joplin is having a repeat of what we went though and seeing the twisted pieces of cars, houses there are still people to be dug out. When you are an emergency responder you got to have your teamwork to get the job done.
BTW, our company is Verzion and they do many of the company contracts in Huntsville.

Lance says:
May 24, 2011 at 1:50 am
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Please do us all a favor and try peddling your intolerance somewhere else.

I read yesterday that the sirens were sounded 24 minutes before the tornado struck.
Perhaps that could be part of the problem. The sirens were sounding too early, and since nothing had happened for almost half an hour, people were starting to come out of their basements and safe rooms when the tornado struck.

“Phil Nizialek says:
May 23, 2011 at 8:44 pm
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.”
I had not checked this but suspected it so. We have had over two months of strong, sustained winds off the gulf here on the coast. I’ve been here all my life and cannot recall a spring with sustained southerlies for this long a period of time. Normally we cannot fish the gulf in March due to winds, but they have usually settled by mid April.
The normal warming of the gulf may be dissipating northward due to these winds. If so, the upside may be less energy for hurricanes. The downside would be the tornados we are seeing.
The yin and yang of “Mother Gaia”.

New 3 part series on the BBC second part next week
“A series of films exploring the idea that we have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011rbws
“This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counterculture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world.
But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. But the dream of the self-organizing network had by now captured our imaginations – because it offered an alternative to the dangerous and discredited ideas of politics”
No idea how the second programme is going to pan out. The first one attacked the use of computer models in the financial markets. This is the BBC remember, can’t see it being aloud to question AGW.

Good to hear some in the MSM are getting it right, but not last night (May 23) on the ABC news. Their sole “expert” climatologist said the we have to expect more severe weather events like this with a warmer Earth due to global warming.

It is residential house building code and strength problem, stupid !
American house is being built cheaper and faster than ever, like assemblying LEGO toys.
If people knows it is the tornado prone area, why not build residential house like hospital shown on TV with concrete cement and steel bar than can stand with the tornado, flood, fire, just not earthquake.
Don’t blame nature, blame people themselves on building the cheap wood structure house with paper like roof.

wayne,
This is my favourite storm resistant building. My favourite lecture theatre in fact.
The Australian Academy of Science building, “the Dome”.