From: Alfio Puglisi (puglisi@arcetri.astro.it)
Date: Thu May 15 2003 - 14:23:11 MDT
Hey, I have from a seeeecret govt. source that the last year's twisters
were all spinning anticlockwise, in the left direction. Is this some
leftist plot??
Ciao,
Alfio
On Thu, 15 May 2003 Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-michaels051503.asp
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><<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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