Where Have All the Tornadoes Gone?

Beware the Dust Devil

Anyone who has watched the Weather Channel this spring has heard reports that, despite the miracles of Doppler Radar and deployment of a massive technological armada, the WC's Tornado Hunt Team has been having a hell of a time spotting twisters.   Just yesterday, in the absence of anything real to report, they got all worked up about dust stirred up by gusts of wind. Imagine that! Well, the Weather Channelers can come by the Gallitan Valley most any day and get the same effect following a Ford F-150 pickup along our many unpaved roads.

Tornado activity has been one of the scare tools of the climate change alarmists.  Let's look at what the climate changers have been saying about the linkage of the 0.04 percent of the atmosphere that is carbon dioxide and tornadoes.

The White House has sponsored research,

A 2008 report from the U.S. Global Change and Research Program, a federal interagency research program overseen by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, found that more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could lead to an increase in severe storm conditions that make tornadoes possible.

"We can’t say there is a correlation between a specific tornado and global change," said program director Thomas Armstrong. "But the reports do indicate that there is a positive correlation between climate change and the frequency of conditions favorable to the formation" of tornadoes, he said, while stressing that the research is still preliminary.

The loony left progressive press reports climatologists insist on a tornado, climate change link.

The unexpectedly fierce and fast tornado outbreak so early in the season has folks asking again about a possible link to climate change. Climatologist Dr. Kevin Trenberth emailed me that, because of climate change, “there is every expectation that the [tornado] season will move up in time. The warm winter in the US is perhaps an indicator of the nature of the changes to be expected.”

The former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research stands by his 2011 statement, “It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.”

Al Gore -- Early Adherent of the
Stop Tornado Movement

No less of an authority than big Al Gore speechified "there seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory" in his global warming presentation, before he went on to castigate the evil, profit-addicted oil sheikhs, you know, those fellows who gave Al a $100 million payday for his share of a cable television network -- capitalist cronyism in the extreme. 

And now the Obamanistas are weighing in with their normal bitter, arrogant, name-calling tactics, tagging anyone who disagrees with their spectacular climate change claims as "crazy." Is it no wonder that Barack Obama is despised by so many?   The man and his supporters are unmitigated jerks.   But that is a side issue, let's get to the facts.

Here comes USA Today reporting that tornado activity has hit a new 60 year low, noting that the U.S. in the past 12 months has seen the fewest number of tornadoes since at least 1954." Loss of human life is lower than at any time than in more than a century.

The seven people killed from May 2012 to April 2013 is the fewest in a 12-month period since five people died in September 1899-August 1900, according to Harold Brooks, research meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla.

The year-to-date count of tornadoes is probably approaching the lower 10% of all years on record, said Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center in Norman.

Tornadoes have not only been very few, but incredibly weak.

So far in May — usually the USA's most active month — only three tornadoes have formed. All have been rated EF-0 on the Fujita scale of tornado intensity. EF-0 is the weakest rating for tornadoes, with wind speeds of about 65-85 mph.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, for climate scientists, climatologists and the junk extrapolation crowd to develop global dusting models that link climate change and that slithery, dirty, grimy stuff.  Come on guys, ignore 99.96 percent of the atmosphere.  Attribute everything to 0.04 percent -- you've done it before and you can do it again!