From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Thu May 15 2003 - 10:48:49 MDT
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-michaels051503.asp
<<May 15, 2003, 9:00 a.m.
Tornado Spin
Global-warming sneaks back into the weather report.
By Patrick J. Michaels
No doubt about it, it's been a good month for tornadoes even by the "spinny"
standards of May, when most twisters occur. Even more predictable than the
development of severe storms in spring, however, is the phenomenon of people
trying to tie such bad weather to global warming. Witness Tom Toles's cartoon
in the May 7 Washington Post, which intoned, "These super powerful tornadoes
are the kind of storm we're likely to see more of with global climate
change." Who'd he get that from, Al Gore?
It has become standard operating procedure in climate-change hype to never
bother with inconvenient facts. Tons of tornado data are only a few
mouse-clicks away. And they show that Toles was dead wrong in his implication
that the recent storms show any link to the slight warming of the atmosphere
that has occurred in recent decades. In fact, just the opposite may be
occurring despite a perception of increased storminess.
Two interesting facts: The number or reported tornadoes has increased for
decades while the number of deaths has dropped.
What's going on is called "radar." Thanks to an awful 1953 tornado in
Worcester, Massachusetts (far from the Oklahoma and Texas "tornado alley"),
the Weather Bureau (today's National Weather Service) went on a crash program
to develop a national network of weather radar. Spearheaded by David Atlas
and Ted Fujita (whose "F-scale" rates tornado severity on a 1-5 basis, as is
done for hurricanes), meteorologists soon learned that when the radar paints
a thunderstorm that looks more like a comma than a blob, there's often a
tornado buried in the curliest point.
...Any reporter (or cartoonist) doing his homework might have asked if indeed
the number of big storms (categories 3-5 on the Fujita scale) is increasing.
The fact is that the vast majority of tornadoes are in the "weenier" classes.
Only about 5 percent reach category 3 or higher. (The severity data is here.
Click on, graph it up, and you'll see that the number of severe tornadoes is
dropping.) >>
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