From NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center (SPC) Facebook page, a silver lining to the heat wave/drought of 2012:
Check out these 2012 numbers from NOAA SPC, showing only 757 confirmed tornadoes as of September 21. That compares to an annual average of 1,300 tornadoes, and 1,692 that touched down last year as of late September.
SPC writes:
“After a busy start, tornado events in the U.S. in 2012 have dropped well below the expected normal. The preliminary total of 757 tornadoes is about 400 tornadoes below what might be expected in a typical year. This chart shows that in late 2011, the annual running total was over 400 tornadoes above normal. This depicts the dramatic variability that can occur in tornado numbers from one year to the next.”
I’d call this an “inconvenient truth” when compared to Al Gore’s latest pay for play bloviation:
Al Gore hopes to show links between climate change and the effects of extreme weather worldwide with an online and social media-fueled event built around the idea of “dirty weather.”
Gore’s advocacy group, the Climate Reality Project, announced Sunday that its second multimedia “24 Hours of Reality” event will occur Nov. 14-15 and bear the title “The Dirty Weather Report.”
Gore still hasn’t fessed up to the “24 hours of reality” lie he foisted on the public last year with his Climate101 video where he faked the results of a CO2 experiment in post production because it couldn’t possibly ever work on its own.
I located all the exact same props and replicated his experiment, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the end result of that experiment presented to the viewer was faked.
See my findings here.
I wonder how much fakery we’ll see this year?
h/t to A. Scott for the SPC graph
Thank YOU!
davidmhoffer says: “So no, you’re not having a stupid moment, but the commenter right after you appears to be afflicted with something similar or worse.”
I thought it was me.
MarkW says:
September 25, 2012 at 10:05 am
of course (except when it’s say something like rainfall, when below normal would be AGW ! – but I get your point).
Post Normal Science = Science based on ‘Normals’ we Post – though it isn’t science and they cannot define the normal!
“Michael (Mann) Lewis says:
September 25, 2012 at 10:30 am
Obviously the warming is reaching all layers of the atmosphere, resulting in less variation between the layers. This reduction in energy differential is reducing the number of electric storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes along with their severity.”
If you checked before you made the claim you would see that AMSU shows now convergence of temperature difference between layers thereby reducing the energy differential.
Hot air claims belong to Al Gore. Are you Al Gore?
AndyG55 says:
September 25, 2012 at 1:31 pm”Be careful, the next ALARM will be that there are NOT ENOUGH tornadoes, because of CO2!”
You’re catching on.
@Nik Marshall-Blank – Give me a few minutes while I fudge the AMSU data to support my claims. 🙂 My original post was lacking a /sarc tag but was intended to be tongue in cheek.
John Blake says:
He’s the antithesis of John Galt.
“After a busy start, tornado events in the U.S. in 2012 have dropped well below the expected normal. The preliminary total of 757 tornadoes is about 400 tornadoes below what might be expected in a typical year. This chart shows that in late 2011, the annual running total was over 400 tornadoes above normal. This depicts the dramatic variability that can occur in tornado numbers from one year to the next.”
Add to that a dearth in tropical storm energy this yr in the N Atlantic — again.
@Michael (Mann) Lewis
Message received 🙂
Poor AlGore…. No matter what he touches it does exactly the opposite….
Perhaps someone could convince him to start a rant about our impending economic DOOM and the plunge into poverty happening now!!!! Then in no time we could all have jobs and rising incomes….
FWIW, it looks to me like the energy flux “in” is down with the sleepy sun. The flux “out” is a bit high with LOTS of global rain and a nice radiating Arctic. But the gradient between equator (cooling with the rains) and Arctic (not yet cooled / iced over) has decreased. So mostly we’ve just got less “bad stuff” happening (other than the places getting boatloads of rain… rather like the last time a big flip to cooling happened…)
So the whole weather thing is ramping down with the ramp down in solar flux / UV ….
After a couple of years of high rain, I expect it, too, will drop off into a drought as less will be driving that heat engine.
(California, in particular, has a history of “droughts after rains” as we take a cold turn. In the late ’50s we were flooding, then in the cold ’70s it was a drought period.)