I’m caught between sessions but wanted to post this. From a presentation at AGU that I couldn’t attend. This from SciAm:
James Elsner at Florida State University has a killer curve, and lots of caveats. The curve indicates that tornadoes in the U.S. may be getting stronger. The caveats indicate they may not be.
“If I were a betting man I’d say tornadoes are getting stronger,” he noted on Tuesday during a lecture at the annual American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco.
But when asked directly at a press conference whether that is the case, he would not commit. “I’m not doing this [work] to establish the future intensity of tornadoes,” he explained, but to establish a method that someday could indeed determine if the storms are becoming more powerful.
Because the lecture was titled “Are tornadoes getting stronger?” the audience expected an answer. And their consternation rose when Elsner showed his final graph, adding up the kinetic energy of tornadoes each year from 1994 to 2012.
More here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/12/11/tornadoes-may-be-getting-stronger-or-not/
This reminds me of Dr. Ryan Maue’s ACE (accumulated cyclone energy) for hurricanes.
Since measuring tornado wind speed is a hit/miss proposition, even with doppler radar I have many reasons to suspect the data in this graph.
Elsner has 18[years of data]. His data begin in 1994 because that’s when Doppler radar, the best at tracking tornadoes, began covering the entire U.S.
The point of the curve, however, is to show that measuring the length and width of a tornado’s damage path gives an accurate indication of its strength, which is driven by the storm’s peak wind speed. It is difficult if not impossible to measure that speed directly, as is done for hurricanes by ground instruments and planes that fly into the storms.
So, like Mann’s hockey stick, it is a proxy, not the actual measurement.
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A cursory glance reveals this paper cannot be taken seriously:
1) The Y Scale is not expressed in Hiroshima’s.
2) The tornadoes are measured in archaic kilometers, rather than modern Manhattan Islands.
3) No mention at all of flying polar bears or pigs.
Reg Nelson says:
December 11, 2013 at 8:40 pm
The Y Scale in Hiroshima’s!
Now, that is funny!!
“LOL, I can’t breath, I can’t breath…” 😉
I’m very conflicted, the dearth of storms or otherwise is causing me much cognitive dissidence!
It the alarmists are correct and there are more and stronger storms, then the temperature differential points to a cooler* climate but If the skeptics are right and there are less and weaker storms, then it is warmer today! It seems like both sides want to have it both ways! Perhaps it would be prudent to conceded the wild weather! 😉
*I daren’t use cooling or warming!
“If I were a betting man I’d say tornadoes are getting stronger,”
And what would you wager? An economy?
Measuring the intensity of tornadoes by “the length and width of a tornado’s damage path” which “gives an accurate indication of its strength” is a proxy which needs to be put out of its misery right now.
Kip Hansen says:
“A raft of experts rebutted Muller here: http://www.livescience.com/41632-the-truth-about-tornadoes.html.”
Looking at the article at livescience I see it says (in the last paragraph)
“In fact, the latest climate-model experiments agree that further global warming is likely to increase the likelihood of conditions favorable to the severe thunderstorms that produce tornadoes in the spring and autumn. ”
Excuse me? Climate-model **experiments**????
Are these another bunch of guys who think the output of a computer simulation has the same status as physical evidence?
“Since measuring tornado wind speed is a hit/miss proposition, even with doppler radar I have many reasons to suspect the data in this graph”.
Indeed it is. Larger tornadoes are composed of often transient multiple vortices and the overall strength of even long track twisters can and often does cycle in strength. Those Doppler velocity measurements of tornadoes such as the May3,1999, Moore, Oklahoma one represented a “streak” of winds in which a sub vortex rotation lined up with the overall rotation of the tornado at one moment in time, if I am correct. That is why you can have such variation in damage to adjacent structures within the overall damage path.
As to the proxy for strength of a tornado based upon path width and duration, that could only be
a rough approximation at best. Whether it is as accurate as the climate proxies, I’m not knowledgeable enough to say, but if they are similar, the implication is clear.
I say that this pretty much proves tornado energy is not related to temperature, since the energy has peaked in a period where there has been little change in global warming in either direction.
It does look very much though like he has a plot with 2 outliers, I’d say you need another 10 years of data… In any case I’d conclude that the data set was suspicious, and I’d be trying to figure out why the data prior to 2005 isn’t noisier.
If I was a betting man I think I would be betting that my graph was wrong somehow.
James Elsner: “If I were a betting man I’d say tornadoes are getting stronger,”
Open offer to James.
OK. I think I can call that bet. How much do want to wager?
Honestly we are killing the AGW beast, and I wish Anthony and you all the best of Christmas tidings, but I will subscribe again in 2014. But for now I have my family and their needs to attend too and spending too much time on the internet. But see you again in the New Year
The principle is simple. Send an unsubstantiated thought- bubble out there and the MSM may pick it up. There’s no getting the genie back in the bottle once that happens.
Let’s see:
playing with the x & y axis for drama- check.
Use a proxy that rewrites history- check
Cherry pick the time line- check
Hide the larger trends- check
Looks like a typical AGW hype paper to me.
This science has devolved into nothing more than data-mining and data-raping looking for CO2-induced hockey sticks.
I mean that is a lot of PhD brainpower (100,000 people or so) just data-mining and making up false conclusions based on this mining.
And then we are wasting about 0.5% of world GDP on the research and alternative-energy-investment-diversions this movement has led to. Might not sound like a lot, but 0.5% of GDP can be the difference between declining unemployment and rising unemployment or youth unemployment at 15% versus the 50% common in many areas around the world today. Every country would be just that little better off with an extra 0.5% of GDP not wasted.
Here’s a good looking correlation – http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/dec-feb_snow_ext.png
The graph suggests that warming supresses the strength of tornados and that stable temperatures lead to increased strength. (Or is it cooling, what is the data for US only.)
Wading through tons of graphs and data (here and elsewhere) I can find no correlation between tornado frequency/intensity and global temperature.
OhWa TaGoo SciAm
I know,
The heat hiding in the deep ocean suddenly lept out against a thermal gradient, crossed 1/2 a continent manifesting itself as increased cyclone intensity, without touching anything in between. Totally consistent to Trenberths paper! Amazing stuff this CO2.
/sarc ( if anybody really wondered)
Not buying it until we see data from one complete Positive and Negative PDO cycle.
Reply to Asmilwho December 11, 2013 at 10:34 pm ==> You need to read the whole Revkin piece, the Muller Op-Ed, and the realtime comments from two of the rebuttal authors to understand what the issue there is.
Hint — nothing to do with the incredibly boring, never-ending argument about Climate Models .
John Morpuss says:
December 11, 2013 at 8:35 pm
@ur momisugly Janice Moore BAZINGA LOL Cheers
The point of the curve, however, is to show that measuring the length and width of a tornado’s damage path gives an accurate indication of its strength, which is driven by the storm’s peak wind speed.
How accurate is it? Expansion of mercury in a carefully controlled space is a proxy for temperature, an accurate enough proxy if the thermometer is manufactured within specs. Same goes with electrical current in a carefully manufactured meter as a proxy for pH. James Elsner’s comments are spot-on: if the method is well-developed and the proxy is accurate enough, he may one day have a technique reliable enough for determining the ongoing changes in annual total tornado strength.
@ur momisugly Charlie Johnson, at 10:07pm — Well put! (and fools like him would, of course, answer, “Yes.)”
“Things as they are will last out my time.” (Louis XV)
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“Excuse me? Climate-model **experiments**????” (Asmil Who? 10:34pm) Exactly!!!! Good spot.
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@ur momisugly Bob L. — Precisely. And LOL — it’s magic! It can do ANYTHING.
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@ur momisugly Kip Hansen — Certainly, there is no genuine debate about the utterly failed, damned-out-of-their-own-software, models. And pointing out that fact to the AGWers over and over and over is indeed, BORING, but, due to their never-ending propaganda campaign, it is necessary.
“Because the climate models say so” is a blunt-edged sword, yet, it must still be countered as it’s the main weapon of the Cult of Slimatology (you know what, I just made a typo there and I left it, heh).
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@ur momisugly Slacko – LOL — good one. I’m so glad you said that, too, for I watch little TV and had no idea where “BAZINGA” came from. I had to really bite my virtual lip to not reply: “Is that how they …..” aaaaack, I nearly wrote it here! (actually, I did, but I deleted it, heh)
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@ur momisugly Hunter (4:20am) — super great checklist. Wish I were that concise. (“Yeah,” about 50 commenters just muttered, “I wish you were, too.”)
#(:))
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@ur momisuglyBill Illis, Eustace C. — way to focus on data — good points!
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Alan Robertson — LOL. #(:)) Take care, out there, in tornadoland.
In a Warming World™, in which (as the models rather uniformly “predict”) the poles warm faster than the tropics, there will be less cold air to form cold fronts, weaker cold fronts, & thus much weaker & far fewer tornadoes, right?
Thats right Stark, except that we are in a probable cooling world now and certainly extracting the direct effect of CO2 the underlying trend ex of CO2 must be substantially negative if the IPCC are to be believed.