Re: [Liberal Bias] Leftist Spin on Twisters

From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sun May 18 2003 - 13:42:19 MDT

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    Harvey Newstrom claimed:
    <<Non sequitur.  I never made this claim, nor do I intend to defend it.
    You seem to have the situation backwards.  You are the one who posted the
    climatologists' data.  The data clearly shows the increasing trend in
    tornadoes.  <http://www.spc.noaa.gov/archive/tornadoes/t50-98.gif>  You
    dispute this claim from the climatologists>>

    Sorry Harvey, You provided the bar-graph. Thus, one can surmise that you
    might agree with cartoonist, Tom Toles, of the Washington Post, that a recent
    increase in tornado outbreaks is due to global warming caused by human
    activity. Was this not your point? <A HREF="http://www.spc.noaa.gov/archive/tornadoes/t50-98.gif">
    http://www.spc.noaa.gov/archive/tornadoes/t50-98.gif>

    The NOAA graph (you provided) indicates an increase in twister activity
    since 1990, not a massive increase in tornado activity, which presumably is
    caused caused by released carbon by human activities. Funny how all the coal
    and woodsmoke did not cause a similar increase in tornados in the 2 centuries
    before 1988. Coal and woodsmoke release lots of carbon, you know.

    Michaels stated in his NR article:
    <<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.>>

    <<Beginning in 1988, a new network began to take shape that was even better
    at detecting potential twisters. Instead of painting a picture of a
    thunderstorm, the new machines, called Doppler radars and designated as
    WSD-88s, actually measure the change in a storm's velocity by tracking the
    movement of raindrops. When those drops start to rotate, it's not long before
    there's a tornado warning. The rotation fields often develop before the comma
    shape, which means more tornado warnings. This gets people's attention, and
    saves more and more lives. Not surprisingly, the number of tornadoes
    increased again, in the 1990s, this time proportional to the number of
    WSD-88s, which now blanket the nation. By the beginning of this century, with
    the new network now in place, the number has stabilized again.>>

    Michaels continues:
    <<Perhaps a refresher course in high-school earth science might be in order
    here. Tornadoes occur because a portion of a normally quiescent thunderstorm
    begins to spin. That spinning is done in large part by a dip in the strong
    westerly winds ("jet stream" in common parlance) that sometimes penetrates
    the U.S. when thunderstorms are common. The jet stream is the result of the
    temperature contrast between the poles and the tropics. Global warming
    reduces this contrast (warming the poles much more than the tropics) and
    reduces the spin. That means fewer tornadoes, not more.Obviously, it's a lot
    hotter in June, July, and August than it is in the peak of the tornado season
    in May. So much for the hot-air-tornado link. And why are there so many
    tornadoes in Mississippi in February? Rather, the key ingredient that spins
    garden-variety thunderstorms into killer tornadoes, the jet stream, is
    missing during the hottest part of the year, having migrated north to Canada
    for the summer. Warm it up and the migration will start earlier, it will move
    further north.That may explain why the number of severe tornadoes is
    declining. They may be running out of spin, unlike stories attempting to
    relate these destructive storms to global climate change.— Patrick J.
    Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the     Cato Institute and
    author of The Satanic Gases.

    So Harvey, are you also claiming, (since you provided the NOAA graph) that
    increase in tornado's is due to global warming; or are you saying that I must
    prove that this isn't so? My argument is against the chicken-lttle approach
    that provided such misinformation that inspired that Kyoto agreement. That
    was another concordat that wasn't based on scientific evidence.

        

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