After a period of low tornado activity, the United States has seen a few strong ones – and that’s all the climate change propagandists need to spin their whirlwind of doom. How much of the gloomy news is just misinformation?
Tornado Physics
Tornadoes are rare but real weather events probably as old as the earth itself. The first recorded case in human history is the Rosdalla tornado in Ireland on April 30, 1054. The most extreme recorded twister was the Tri-State Tornado on March 18, 1925. It raged for 3.5 hours, and its path was 219 miles, starting in Missouri, crossing into Illinois, and finally ending in Indiana. Although there were no scientific measurements at the time, it is widely regarded as a category F5 tornado, the strongest kind.
Tornadoes are rare because they only form under highly specific atmospheric conditions that are not fully understood and notoriously hard to predict. However, one ingredient must be present: the meeting of warm moist air and cold, dry air.
One of the uncontroversial predictions of climate models that everyone agrees on is that most of the warming comes in cold and dry areas: at night, at high latitudes, during winter, and especially in the combination of these. One of the global warming predictions is less cold air and, therefore, fewer tornadoes.
Tornado Facts
Fortunately, we don’t have to wonder about whether this theoretical prediction holds. Scientists have already measured it. Since 1970, they have counted the number of strong to violent (F3+) tornadoes in the United States. The result is a downward trend. There are about half as many of them today as 50 years ago. Since America has warmed slightly in that period, the fall in the number of observed tornadoes is not surprising. If warming continues, we should expect even fewer.
What about the catastrophic damage? The problem is that there are more people today; they are more prosperous and build more buildings and structures in tornado-prone areas. Therefore, researchers corrected for these factors by developing a Normalized Tornado Damage (N.T.D.) measure to compare damages in the past with today. Almost all 1216 peer-reviewed studies on this topic show either a flat or downward trend in N.T.D., which is expected from fewer violent tornadoes.
Graph courtesy of Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.
However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) has chosen to cite only 25 of those studies, which by extraordinary coincidence show an increase in N.T.D.
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has recently shown that 54 peer-reviewed papers have been published in the last eight years in this area. Only one of those shows an increase in N.T.D., and that is the only of the 54 mentioned by the I.P.C.C. Such careful data selection to fit the desired conclusion is evidence of deception.
Conclusion
The truth is that most extreme weather events, including tornadoes, are not getting worse. However, there is one area where there has been an increasing trend in the last few years: media disinformation.
~ Read more from Caroline Adana.
