Links tagged “tornados”

Accuweather: "During the month of May, the United States saw 288 preliminary reports of tornadoes, above the May average of 276 tornadoes. None of these storms were rated as stronger than an EF2, marking the first time there has not been a tornado of EF3 strength or stronger in May since 1950, when record-keeping began. There were also no deadly tornadoes in the U.S. in May, making this the first year without a killer tornado in May since 2014." ...

"This year has been a quiet one for severe storms in general," said AccuWeather Senior Weather Editor and Meteorologist Jesse Ferrell. ... The U.S. is experiencing a separate tornado-related drought — one that may delight those who fear some of nature’s most powerful storms. No EF5 tornadoes have been recorded in the U.S. for more than eight years, eclipsing the previous record, which was the period between the May 3, 1999, Moore F5 tornado and the May 4, 2007, Greensburg, Kansas EF5 tornado.

Friederike Otto, a climate expert at the University of Oxford: ‘Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind." 

In fact, Otto herself has relied on climate attribution work to support climate lawsuits as a 2019 E&E News story mentions: “Friederike Otto, a climate expert at the University of Oxford and lead scientist at the World Weather Attribution project, said she talks ‘a lot with lawyers’ about how attribution science could be used as a litigation tool.” ... Otto also signed onto a motion in support of San Francisco and Oakland’s climate lawsuit and the E&E News article mentions that she works with Myles Allen, another climate academic at Oxford, who, the publication notes, “authored what is widely considered the first attribution study on the 2003 European heatwave,” and he wrote an op-ed that same year linking attribution science and lawsuits.

Dr. Matt Briggs points out that most attribution claims are based around comparing simulations of the climate today to simulations of the climate as it might have been without human activity. But as he explains, this approach has a fundamental problem: “We simply have little or no idea what the climate would have been without human activity. Moreover, we can’t ever know what it was like.” ... 

“In order to attribute individual weather events to humankind, scientists need a perfect model of the climate. They do not have this. Therefore, claims that we are responsible for any particular weather event are at best overconfident, if not plain wrong.”

Media & NOAA hyped claims: Record 22 Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters Struck the U.S. in 2020, NOAA Says

But Bjorn Lomborg rebuts: "Tremendously misleading. The number of billion-dollar disasters will of course increase as society gets richer. When corrected for increased wealth, the world and the US are not seeing increasing damages (but insignificantly *decreasing* damages)." - "Despite breathless climate reporting, the relative cost of global weather catastrophes 1990-2020 not increasing (actually insignificantly decreasing)."

Prof. Roger Pielke Jr.: "NOAA is a great agency & contributes massively to saving life and property. It is thus so embarrassing that they dabble in bad economics for media catnip and clicks. Everything you hear about 'billion $ disasters' is wrong."

Meteorologist Anthony Watts: "The United States in 2020 experienced fewer tornadoes than average, continuing a long-term trend of fewer of the deadly, extreme-weather events. The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center (NWSSPC) reports 1,247 U.S. tornadoes in 2020, as shown in the graph below from the NWSSPC website...The official data show trends in observed U.S. tornadoes have been declining down over the past 15 years." ... 

"7 of past 9 years have been below the mean for U.S. Tornadoes, which is reflecting a long-term downward trend. Because the vast majority of tornadoes globally occur in the United States, this means that global tornadoes are becoming less frequent, also. ... 11 of the past 15 years have been below the mean for U.S. Tornado counts as well."