While Joe Romm, Bill McKibben, and others follow the fear card script to do everything and anything they can to link severe weather to global warming, they are clearly fighting a losing battle for public opinion on the issue. Now, even Andy Revkin at the New York Times doesn’t believe it anymore when it comes to tornadoes.*
He writes:
You can’t exclude climate change, but there’s simply no evidence through a half century of tornado history in the United States of a connection to warming.
Of course one of the strongest pieces of evidence has to do with the trend in the frequency of strong tornadoes, as shown in this somewhat dated graph from NCDC:
I’m looking forward to NCDC updating this data and graph. Obviously, there will be a new spike in 2011 rivaling 1974. But clearly, even with improved detection technology, the trend is down.
But this graph only goes back to 1950, and of course if we presented climate data only back that far, critics like the nefarious “Tamino” aka Grant Foster would have a cherry flavored cow, which is the typical M.O. for him. NCDC of course gets a pass.
Fortunately, I have some new tornado data to present that goes back further.
These two graphs below, courtesy of Dr. Indur Goklany, go back to 1900 and show the trend in death rates yearly, and by decade, since 1900:
Clearly death rates per million are down, which is testament to the improved warning technology, plus the skills and dedication of the National Weather Service and volunteer storm spotters at getting “eyes on” tornadoes to provide advance warning.
*UPDATE: Andrew Revkin writes in via email with this comment, which I am happy to reprint at his request – Anthony
You’ve cast my concerns about overstated discussions of tornadoes in the context of climate change as if this is new.
You must have missed my 2008 piece, including this section:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/climate-roundup-tornadoes-coral-drought/
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So let me get this straight.. global warming is the cause of extreme weather events (ie. the devastating tornadoes) here in the US this year. According to the alarmist scientists this year has about the same average temperature as last year and the year before that. Then how come the global warming of the previous years did not produce a similar number of extreme tornadoes?
I’d think cold from the north would be a more important variable than warmth from the south. The Gulf doesn’t change on a daily basis, but cold penetration does.
I’ve been trying to find annual temp lists for places like Bismarck, but can’t find them. Does anyone have a good NOAA link to derive annual temp lists by season or by month for a city? Seems like that should be on the WUWT reference page in some form.
Might be relevant: the record low for today in Bismarck is -40 in 1974, the most recent mega-twister year.
Well according to McClatchey newspapers, (yea, I know, they are like the minor leagues as far as news services), it’s all global warming.
—
http://www.centredaily.com/2011/05/25/2736923/tornadoes-floods-droughts-scientists.html
-40 in MAY? That’s nuts.
I’ve noticed most of our local record highs in the spring date to the 30s and 40s.
Mr. Revkin says: “You can’t exclude climate change, but there’s simply no evidence through a half century of tornado history in the United States of a connection to warming.”
This sentence to me is a nonsense. The first part “You can’t exclude” means that you include it. The second part “simply no evidence” means the opposite. Except he left himself and out by using “climate change” in the first part and “warming” in the second.
Climate change maybe included if you count cooling.
Karymsky, Kizimen, Shiveluch in Kamchatka are now active regularly pluming high fliers. Kamchatka region has been active well above normal since 2008. Then the Iceland volcanic eruptions, Grimsvotn honking high altitude. Start a storm cellar installations company and you’ll do well over the next few years.
This link has context now. An astounding public display of emotional disconnectedness:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/05/26/136676621/what-motivates-climate-change-deniers
A Quote: “I know what motivates my position [climate change causes tornadoes]: the sirens, the polar-bear pictures, the IPCC reports, fear for my grandchildren’s future. What motivates the denial?”
Er, Say again? Polar bear pictures?
Doesn’t everyone recognize that we have crossed a “tipping point” in 2010 and that now the number of strong tornados is going to skyrocket – just like it did in 2011. (:))
It was 1975 that I reported a tornado in NE Oregon. seen by an FAA Flight Service station guy in Baker,Or. too. No one including the Pendelton Weather office believed us.
No kidding. If it happened now there would be evidence left -wrecked wind turbines…
That’s a down-trend, even though you’ve added 1 1/2 extra years to the last ‘decade’.
Polistra: try this:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html
Click on “Cities”, then either cities in the list on the left, or on the map.
No Bismarck, but Dickinson ND is there.
When I was flying back from Oakland California to get back to Joplin Monday morning (world’s shortest vacation to wine country that weekend), a lady at the airport said to me, upon hearing I was from Joplin, “You can’t tell me that these tornadoes aren’t caused by Global Warming.” And I said “They are caused by a strong Pacific ocean current effect from what I can tell, and there’s simply no evidence that a slightly warmer temperature would cause these storms.” She seemed genuinely shocked that I wasn’t prepared to blame the destruction in my town on other people’s SUVs I guess.
I wish it were the case that when warmers insist on linear trend lines, all other indices they wish to present must also be fitted with linear trend lines. Then they must use these lines to prove their mathematical case that global warming causes all these slanting up and slanting down statistics.
Bet we haven’t heard the last from Grímsvötn. Jön Frìmen, looking at the tremor signal doesn’t think so. Go to eruptions@bigthink and download the volcano app for android. It’s real cool, you have the location and all the info from the weekly volcanic activity reports (SMITHSONIAN) right there. You can practically see the temperature gradients sharpen from low altitude plumes near the equator and high altitude near the Arctic, or maybe it’s just me visualizing it.
Any correlation between tornado frequency/intensity and solar magnetic or sunspot indexes?
Is it just coincidence that a near record high tornado year followed on the heels of a near record low sunspot year?
There’s actually some hypothetical basis to it. Tornadoes need clouds. Solar magnetic field is suspected of throttling cloud formation where a weak field allows greater cloud formation.
While it’s true that correlation is not causation a lack of correlation is pretty strong evidence of no causation. Correlation highlights things that deserve a closer look in regard to causation. Lack of correlation pretty much means “nothing going on here, move along now”.
Cyber,
You were much too nice to her. Kudos to you for being a nice guy. But I would have explained to her that “global warming” has amounted to only seven-tenths of a degree over 150 years, and that CO2 [“carbon” to the scientifically illiterate] is only 0.00039 of the atmosphere, and that $7 – $8 billion dollars is paid out every year by the federal government to ‘study global warming/climate change’, and while she was processing that new [to her] information, I would remind her that human nature being what it is, charlatans of all kinds have their snouts in the public trough.
That’s the long and the short of it. Money and power are the motivation, and honest science has nothing to do with the CAGW scam.
As many others have pointed out, fitting a linear trend to this kind of data doesn’t make sense. An exponential curve is more appropriate. Excel gave this result:
y = 377.59 * exp(-0.2642x) (R-squared = 0.8944)
Denying recent tornadoes are caused by Global Warming will probably provoke a backlash from the warmists that you don’t “care” about people. The association of unhappiness and climate change is a prime emotional motivator for the Gore-warmist. Technical relevance is trumped by tears and fears.
I must be dumb as a rock.
If warming was the trigger for tornadoes, then July & August would be the months
with the greatest number of these storms.
However, the storms peak late April to early June in most states.
Florida is a weather laboratory unto itself
Pat Michaels has an article at forbes.com that has some updated tornado numbers as well:
The Great Tornadoes Of 2011 Put In Perspective
-Chip
Sorry, I should have pointed out that the equation I gave a few posts earlier was for the death rate per million per year.
from the briefest of view of the graph going back to 1950-it looks like the average has decreased since the global warming scare of the early 1980’s onwards
Excellent post. The L. A. Times ran a piece two days ago alleging to discuss the “science” of the recent tornadoes in the U.S. and after addressing the weather factors (warm Gulf of Mexico waters and a lower arctic jet stream) offered pure climate fear conjecture that global warming was creating more intense tornadoes. I wrote the reporter and pointed out that NOAA’s EF3-EF5 tornado tracking data from 1950 to the present completely debunked his opinion and that his biased observation had no business being addressed in a piece supposedly discussing the “science” of tornadoes. These climate fear alarmists will do doubt continue to try to make this tornado season akin to what they did to Hurricane Katrina and the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. They are wrong on both counts.
More to come I think. Plenty of colder air in the mountains according to this report;
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MEMORIAL_DAY_SNOW?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-05-27-04-51-12
No linkage? Tell that to these guys:
“It is almost impossible for us to pinpoint these specific events…and say they were caused by climate change,” says William Chamedies, an atmospheric scientist and dean of the Nicolas School of the Environment at Duke University. “On the other hand we do know that because of climate change those kinds of events will very, very likely become more common, more frequent, more intense. So what we can say is that these kinds of events that we are seeing are consistent with climate change. ”
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/US-Extreme-Weather-Consistent-with-Climate-Change–122577569.html
How do they “know that because of climate change those kinds of events will very, very likely become more common, more frequent, more intense”?