by R. Pielke, Feb 13, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch
This is the latest post in an ongoing series, titled “what the media won’t tell you about…”, which is motivated by the apparent systemic inability of the legacy media to play things straight when it comes to extreme weather and disasters.
Climate change is real and important, but its importance is not an excuse for the pervasive climate misinformation found across the legacy media. [emphasis, links added]
Here are the previous installments in the series, which are among my most popular posts and which have gone unchallenged.
Today’s post focuses on U.S. tornadoes. This year so far has seen a lot of tornadoes — 178 were reportedthrough February 11th, the 2nd most since 2005 and well above the 2005-2022 mean of 66 to date.
For instance, after a tornado outbreak last month, the Associated Press reported that the tornadoes had been “juiced by climate change.”
Similarly, The Washington Post said that in the past it was difficult to tie tornadoes to climate change but now, “science is accumulating to support the linkage.”
Neither reported any of the data and science I share below. So, let’s take a look
A rational look at the data and physics tell us there are no real signs that tornadoes are going to get more frequent and worse.
German Die kalte Sonne’s 2nd part of its most recent video looks at tornadoes, a ferocious and extremely destructive meteorological phenomenon that global warming alarmists claim will only get worse and worse. They want6 you to panic over it.
But Die kalte Sonne’s video report notes that a number of sources say that trend has yet to materialize. Many statistics in fact have shown the opposite is happening:
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Ideal conditions for tornado formation could weaken
The ideal conditions that lead to the formation of tornadoes are lower warm moist air clashing with cold dry air moving above. The conditions are common in the springtime, when warm, humid air from southern USA clashes with a cold air mass blasting in from the north. Yet, should the these cold masses of air warm up, then this would lead to a smaller temperature gradient and thus be less favorable for tornadoes to form.
After every tragic meteorological event there will inevitably be the alarmist cries that climate change was a substantial influence. The recent late-season tornado outbreak of Dec 10-11 is no exception. Usually most of these are appeals to emotion with no data to support the relationship between extreme weather and climate change. However, this tweet from Michael Mann pointed to a 2019 peer-reviewed study titled “Increasingly Powerful Tornadoes in the United States” by Elsner et al.1
Climate scientists love to blame every bad weather event on global warming. Yet we never hear them cite climate change for the relative absence of bad weather!
One such example are tornadoes in the US, where we now have several decades of carefully collated data.
With the year near an end, we know that the number of tornadoes has been above average this year, though well below 2008 and 2011. Primarily this is due to several outbreaks in February and April:
In describing the errors in the Fourth National Climate Assessment, ‘NCA4’, I’ll use the words from the Executive Summary which purport to link climate changes in the USA to global climate change.
The first claim, “The last few years have also seen record-breaking, climate-related weather extremes,“ is shown to be false, simply by examining climate records, some from the National Climate Data Center.
Tornadoes have been decreasing over the past six decades as temperatures moderate from the significant cooling of the 1940s to 1970s. As a basic knowledge of meteorology teaches, it is the pole to equator temperature difference that drives the intensity of cold season storms and especially the spring-season storms which bring the extremely strong tornado outbreaks.
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Figure 1. Annual count of strong to violent tornadoes from 1954-2014, showing a significant decrease of tornado activity the past 60 years, based on data from NOAAs Storm Prediction Center. [Note: This graphic replaces the original graphic that showed all tornadoes EF1 and stronger. Correction made 1/25/2019].
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.
In the whirlwind that is 2018, there has been a notable lack of high-end twisters.
We’re now days away from this becoming the first year in the modern record with no violent tornadoes touching down in the United States. Violent tornadoes are the strongest on a 0 to 5 scale, or those ranked EF4 or EF5.
It was a quiet year for tornadoes overall, with below normal numbers most months. Unless you’re a storm chaser, this is not bad news. The low tornado count is undoubtedly a big part of the reason the 10 tornado deaths in 2018 is also vying to be a record low.
While we still have several days to go in 2018, and some severe weather is likely across the South to close it out, odds favor the country making it the rest of the way without a violent tornado.
If and when that happens, it will be the first time since the modern record began in 1950.
One of the main difficulties with tornado records is that a tornado, or evidence of a tornado must have been observed. Unlike rainfall or temperature, which may be measured by a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable. If a tornado occurs in a place with few or no people, it is not likely to be documented. Many significant tornadoes may not make it into the historical record since Tornado Alley was very sparsely populated during the 20th century.
Much early work on tornado climatology in the United States was done by John Park Finley in his book Tornadoes, published in 1887. While some of Finley’s safety guidelines have since been refuted as dangerous practices, the book remains a seminal work in tornado research. The University of Oklahoma created a PDF copy of the book and made it accessible at John Finley’s Tornadoes(link is external)
