So much for the “Years of Living Dangerously“
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr writes in the WSJ:
So far in 2014, the United States has experienced fewer tornadoes than in any year since record-keeping began in 1953, or even before. Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has called this “likely the slowest start to tornado activity in any year in modern record, and possibly nearly a century.” But just because tornado activity has declined doesn’t mean that we can let down our guard, as potentially large impacts are always a threat.
![ED-AS122_PIELKE_G_20140424165704[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/ed-as122_pielke_g_201404241657041.jpg?quality=83)
Overall, however, the good news for residents of the Midwest’s “Tornado Alley” and elsewhere is that over the past six decades America has witnessed a long-term decrease in both property damage and loss of life. That’s the finding that I and Kevin Simmons and Daniel Sutter, two of the nation’s leading tornado experts, have gleaned from studying the data on almost 58,000 tornadoes observed since 1950.
Using estimates collected by the NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center, we used several approaches, including taking inflation into account, to “normalize” historical losses to 2014 dollar values in order to estimate how much damage would occur if tornadoes of the past occurred with today’s levels of population and development.
…
The average annual U.S. property losses caused by tornadoes, from 1950 to 2013, is $5.9 billion in today’s dollars. However, for the first half of the data set (1950-81), the annual average loss was $7.6 billion, and in the second half (1982-2013), it was $4.1 billion—a drop of almost 50%.
Does the substantial decline in average annual damage mean that there have actually been fewer tornadoes? Not necessarily. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded recently that the quality of the available data on tornado frequency and intensity makes drawing conclusions about long-term trends problematic: “There is low confidence in observed trends in small spatial-scale phenomena such as tornadoes and hail.”
What we can say with some certainty is that the number of years with very large tornado losses has actually decreased. Consider that from 1950 to 1970 the U.S. saw 15 years with tornado damage in excess of $5 billion a year. From 1993 to 2013 there were only four such years, with three since 2008.
Full story here at the WSJ
http://news.yahoo.com/forecasters-already-predicting-massive-tornado-outbreak-weekend-151627265.html
Forecasters Are Already Predicting a Massive Tornado Outbreak This Weekend
William: The warmists are continuing to look for any extreme weather events to push their agenda.
“Holthaus notes that the best historical comparisons to a weather pattern like this point to some of the worst tornado outbreaks in U.S. history. That includes the April 26, 1991, stretch of tornadoes from Texas to Iowa that caused a billion dollars in damage and included a rare F5-strength tornado.”
The tornado outbreak in April 26, 1991 was not caused by global warming. F5-strength tornadoes are rare as specific rare atmospheric conditions are required for the F5 tornado to form.
The term “suggestive” seems wise and appropriate. Yet it will not make headlines. And that is why, for the most part, this news will not make it out in the MSM (WSJ not withstanding).
An excellent analysis with a lot of very useful information.
Since the only states in which I’ve ever resided are the three at the top of the damage-per-unit-area list, I’m particularly sensitive to how bursty the data are. For example, I wonder where Massachusetts would have ranked if the data had begun in, say, 1955, rather than in 1953, the year of the tornado that tore up Worcester.
I just attended a seminar at Ohio State University where the speaker, who works in a area related to global warming, asserted that extreme weather events were up.
He had bought into some other lunatic ideas like ocean acidification, which he called the chief threat to fisheries, not overfishing.
In the midwest of the USA, it has been a cold winter, and that leads into a cool late spring.
I expect the tornado season will have a late start as well, along with my vegetable garden.
Didn’t Dr Lindzen say that warming would actually produce less storm activity because of the equator to poles differential thingy? If i were an alarmist I would now start funding the good Doctor! Of course all the warmunists would have to delete their old posts about that smoking rubbish.
Let me get this straight: allegedly climate change was responsible for our extremely cold winter and spring this year; the reason why we have had a very slow start to the tornado season is because of the cold, even though climate change is supposed to give us greater and very fierce tornados; therefore, climate change counteracted climate change; in other words, climate change shot itself in the foot this year. What a marvellous thing, this climate change.
As a tornado chaser and anthropocgenic influence climate skeptic, the chart is meaningless. One tornado in downtown Amarillo , TX would wreak billions of $ in havoc. It’s just dumb luck that we don’t get tornadoes in cities… yet.
A meaningful chart would be one of total tornado energy, as a product of intensity and count. Even then I don’t see how the climate effects. Since these are formed high in the troposphere, where we don’t measure “global warming”. The factors in tornado formation don’t depends on absolute factors, jut relative factors. But these to combine into one important measure at the surface: dewpoint. Everything else happens thousands of feet up.
blackadderthe4th says:
April 25, 2014 at 3:13 am
We must unequivocally start a drinking game for every time 4th writes “could, may, may not, suggests, if, might, might not, predicts, models”
ok, im done being a pr!*k now. carry on.
Do we know the reasons for this?
We all know the problem is the conspiracy of tornado ‘deniers’… They just don’t believe hard enough in man-made tornado formation and we need a trillion dollar tornado tax to absolve our tornado guilt!
@ur momisugly Tom Moran says:
April 25, 2014 at 8:59 am
‘“start a drinking game…could, may, may not, suggests, if, might, might not, predicts, models”
Excuse me, but that report was in 2007! Which has appeared to come true, so be prepared to have a lot of hang overs! As more and more predictions turn into reality.
Oops! “Appeared” there’s another drinking word.
Let me make sure I have this right… Hurricane Sandy happened in spite of wind-sh and became the poster child for global warming Atlantic hurricanes. The magic heat changes the wind patterns so that the Atlantic has wind-sh but the Pacific doesn’t?
And now you make me Kerry Emanuel?
“Hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel, at MIT in the US, disagrees: “Sensitivity to shear may be overestimated,” he says of the study. Emanuel published a modelling study in October 2006 (Journal of Climate study, DOI: 10.1175/JCLI3908.1) suggesting a 10% increase in water temperature would increase hurricane intensity by 65%, whereas a 10% increase in shear would decreases hurricane intensity by only 12%.” Isn’t he claiming that there will be decrease in intensity but not in frequency?
Tom Moran says:
April 25, 2014 at 8:59 am
We must unequivocally start a drinking game for every time (blackadderthe)4th writes “could, may, may not, suggests, if, might, might not, predicts, models”
Tom,
You’d turn us all into alcoholics!
No ifs, maybes, buts,… or 4ths about it!
It never ceases to amaze me how facile the AGW crowd is with their models. They make predictions for 2 decades that AGW will cause more and larger hurricanes. When that doesn’t happen, they realize they must acknowledge the hard facts so they gin up a new model that shows why AGW is causing fewer and smaller hurricanes! Simples!!!
They make used car salesmen and patent medicine purveyors look like paragons of virtue, by comparison!
Mac
I’ld like to start a drinking game everytime someone brings in the Sun. Replace Gia worship with odes to the Sun. And I’ve read some of them (gag me). Jump from one “burning stupid theory” to another. Now that’s an improvement…not.
Gia, Gaia, Ghia, whatever the hell it’s called.
[The mods remind Miss Pamela that the green fuzz all over her Karmin Ghia did not make it go faster …..]
Yeah, it will be VERY BAD!!! when all that absorbed tornadic energy is finally released