By Roy Spencer | Fox News
Progressive politicians like Al Gore, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.N.Y., don’t hesitate to blame any kind of severe weather – even if it is decreasing over time – on global warming.
With the devastating Dayton, Ohio tornadoes fresh on our minds, it is useful to examine exactly why (modest) global warming has produced fewer – not more – of such events.
The simple answer is that tornado formation requires unusually cool air.
Very few thunderstorms produce tornadoes. In the hot and humid tropics, they are virtually unheard of. The reason why is that (unlike hurricanes) tornadoes require strong wind shear, which means wind speed increasing and changing direction with height in the lower atmosphere.
These conditions exist only when a cool air mass collides with a warm air mass. And the perfect conditions for this have existed this year as winter has refused to lose its grip on the western United States. So far for the month of May 2019, the average temperature across the U.S. is close to 2 degrees Fahrenheit below normal.
Every year, springtime thunderstorms in Central and Southeast U.S. have plenty of warm, moist air to draw on from the Gulf of Mexico. What they generally don’t have is a persistent cold air mass producing strong wind shear at the boundary between a warm and cold air mass.
In recent decades, slow warming in the U.S. has been accompanied by fewer of these cold springtime air masses over the West. As a result, based upon official National Weather Service statistics the long-term trend of strong (EF3) to violent (EF5) tornadoes has been decidedly downward, with 2018 experiencing a record low in activity.
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Rear. Earth 2, May 29. As to the “”Why do intelligent people believe””
.
Because either A .they are not clever, or B. Because they want to believe,
its what their “”Belief system” requires them to believe.
For example if you think that a form of World Government is desirable,
then you will do all that you can do to bring this about. So you must
believe in that particular “Cause”.
While on topic, why do we use the word “Progressive” in front of names
such as Al Gore. Yes I know why they use it, but why do we use it. The
reality is that the word Progressive means to move forward, to improve, to
make better. Yes they the people like Al Gore feel that they are in this
particular category, but why do we use it., when we quite obviously do not
think that they are truly progressive. ?
MJER VK5ELL
Funny that. The Roman Empire thought it was being “progressive” before it disintegrated into dust.
Leaving those city gates open to encourage immigration by Barbarians helped a lot, no doubt.
Pamela and jtom: yours are the funniest paired comments I’ve seen to date!!
The term, “climate change” should be reserved for the down and up periods when we slide into and out of a cold period, leaving “climate stability” to the peak plateau of the warm period.
That’s a great truthful statement!
Roy,
with the greatest respect, the list of opportunistic creeps you opened the article with are NOT “progressives”, not by any metric reasonably applicable.
Progress is the result of trial, error, retrial and eventual success. It relies on ‘scientific’ method and an openness associated with intellectual cultures that are open to new ideas and especially ones confronting existing pockets of ‘settled opinion’.
The galoots listed and their ilk forbid proper trials and would never accept any ‘error’ on their part.
They may well brand themselves as “Progressive” but in reality are simply intoleranat, arrogant, narcissistic, jackbooted ideologues.
The news reports stated that 5 million people were without electricity. I have to wonder what the number would be if the affected areas were supplied with electricity produced by wind turbines. I know a guy at ARPA-E who claims that offshore wind turbines can now withstand hurricanes (I have no reason to doubt him, but I’ve seen no evidence). I doubt if any amount of engineering could produce a wind turbine that would survive an F-5 tornado. A series of tornadoes could easily wipe out vast numbers of wind turbines, and restoring power would not be a matter of “simply” repairing downed power lines; it would mean rebuilding the powerplants.
Nuclear doesn’t have this kind of problem. A containment building in the U.S. has to be able to withstand the impact of a 747 at landing speed, and the largest credible earthquake in its geologic region.
(y)
Good post!
It’s sad that the high-schools of the 1960s and ’70s did such a bad job, on average, at teaching basic physics, meteorology and weather to the students of the day. Additionally, the colleges and universities, to gain more “paying” students lowered science requirements for entrance and graduation, in general, and began institutionalizing “soft science” curricula as “environmental ‘science'”, “earth ‘science'” and others. In the ’90s, Geography, became “a ‘hard science'” though it lacked any general hypotheses or any central Theory of Geography. Geography Departments scrambling for dollars, not students, and some-kind-of-legitimacy recognition quickly adopted, “Geographic Information Systems” and the, notion, of “System ‘Science'”, though both are still vaguely defined and illegitimate as Science Disciplines. Long gone are the days when Latin, was an ability for entrance to even very modest colleges and universities of the late 19th and early 20ith centuries.
Thus, the abortions, Al Gore, Bernie Sanders and AOC, are well explained by simple logic.
QED
I think science was taught quite well in the 60s, thanks to the moon program and the Left hadn’t taken over education, yet. It was where I went to high school. I did go to a Catholic high school, but I still think the curriculum in public high schools was strong in science, too. This is probably why we didn’t fall for the Ice Age Cometh and Global Cooling scam brought to us by the same people who turned on a dime and decided the same villains that were causing an Ice Age were causing runaway warming, CO2 and fossil fuels.
Also, I had four years of Latin in high school.
So you’re saying it’s cold air in May that’s the problem?
CLIMATE CHANGE!
Did I do that right?
A tornado is an atmospheric heat engine – as such it needs a hot source and a cold sink. As such it could be possible to argue (in the normal hand waving style of the climate cult) that because CO2 is “trapping” heat that this is likely to mean a reduction in hurricanes.
So, like chess – working out what a sane opponent would do next and trying to work out your counter move – I’ve wondered what I would say when the alarmists made this argument (as I called them before I realised they were a cult).
Instead, the way they refuse to point out reducing hurricanes (when the trend showed a large decline) or now decreasing Tornadoes as “proof of global warming”, shows:
1. They don’t understand very basic science
and/or
2. That they won’t ever suggest that “global warming” does anything other that a “doomsday” scenario.
or
3. The cult members are lunatics
Mike Haseler – embrace the healing power of “and.” 😀
http://whrc.org/john-holdrens-presentation-of-climate-change-and-the-human-condition/
Not sure the Order of the Rising Sun recipient agrees.
Still trying to absorb seeing “AOC”, “Bernie Sanders”, and “think” in the same sentence.