Tag: extreme weather

Last three years the quietest for tornadoes ever

11:55 am

The uncertainty of science: 2014 caps the quietest three year period for tornadoes on record, and scientists really don’t understand why.

Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., said there’s no consistent reason for the three-year lull — the calmest stretch since a similar quiet period in the late 1980s — because weather patterns have varied significantly from year to year. While 2012 tornado activity was likely suppressed by the warm, dry conditions in the spring, 2013 was on the cool side for much of the prime storm season before cranking up briefly in late May, especially in Oklahoma, SPC meteorologist Greg Carbin said. Then, activity quickly quieted for the summer of 2013.

Global warming activists had confidently predicted that, because of global warming, we were about to see killer tornadoes of unprecedented frequency. Well, not only has the climate not warmed these past 18 years, we are seeing fewer extreme weather events.

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Extreme weather events in 2013 are at an all time low.

9:53 am

Another global warming prediction fails: Extreme weather events in 2013 are at an all time low.

There have been many forecasts in the news in recent years predicting more and more extreme weather-related events in the US, but for 2013 that prediction has been way off the mark. Whether you’re talking about tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat or hurricanes, the good news is that weather-related disasters in the US are all way down this year compared to recent years and, in some cases, down to historically low levels.

As I wrote back in April,

Global warming scientists have spent the past two decades telling us that we were all gonna die from increasing temperatures caused by the increase in CO2. Now that this prediction has proved false, they apparently are shifting gears. Instead, it is extreme events — big storms, long droughts, intense heatwaves — that are going to kill us.

But not only have they no evidence that the increase in CO2 will cause these extreme events, there is no evidence that more of these extreme events are even occurring.

In other words, these stories are mere political advocacy. They have nothing to do with science, but with propaganda, based on fantasy with the goal of trying to convince everyone that we are all gonna die if we don’t do exactly what these scientists say. [emphasis in original]

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A good scientist, who also believes in global warming, explains the irrelevance of “extreme weather” to the climate change debate.

12:27 am

A good scientist, who also believes in global warming, explains the irrelevance of “extreme weather” to the climate change debate.

Yet [an increase in extreme weather] is not supported by science. “General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” climate scientist Gavin Smith of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last month. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10 seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

The scientist writing this op-ed is Bjorn Lomborg. He gives a lot of details. Here’s just one:

Global warming, in general, will mean higher temperatures. This causes more heat waves — more extreme weather. But it also causes fewer cold waves — less extreme weather. Many more people die from excessive cold than excessive heat, so fewer people will die from cold and heat in the future. By mid-century, researchers estimated in 2006, that means about 1.4 million fewer deaths per year. In the continental United States, heat waves in the past decade exceeded the norm by 10 percent, but the number of cold waves fell 75 percent.

Moreover, global warming will mostly increase temperatures during winter, at night and in cold places, making temperature differences less extreme.

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Climate scientists have been forced to revise their climate models due to the unexpected refusal of the climate to warm since the late 1990s.

9:12 am

The uncertainty of science: Climate scientists have been forced to revise their climate models due to the unexpected refusal of the climate to warm since the late 1990s.

In related news, the certainty of some ignorant politicians: A Democratic senator used the Oklahoma tornado to rant against Republicans who have expressed skepticism about human-caused global warming. Update: Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) followed up by blaming the tornado on global warming while pushing her carbon tax bill today.

The first story attempts very hard to keep the narrative alive that we are all going to die from global warming, even though the gist is that the warming has stopped and all the predictions of global warming scientists have been wrong. The second story illustrates the typically close-minded attitude of liberal politicians. The senator not only refuses to recognize the new data showing that warming has stopped, he has accepted the global warming narrative completely, including the entirely false claim that extreme weather is rising because of global warming.

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The high peak in tornado in 2011, the most in fifty years, was quickly attributed to global warming. Eric Berger asks: How does this explain this year’s low number, the fewest in fifty years?

10:27 am

The uncertainty of science: The high peak in tornado in 2011, the most in fifty years, was quickly attributed to global warming. Eric Berger asks: How does this explain this year’s low number, the fewest in fifty years?

If you click on the first link, you will see that the global warming scientists quoted, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and Gavin Schmidt, were all involved in the climategate emails, where they came off very badly. Moreover, there have been significant questions about the work of Michael Mann himself. I also wonder if these guys will have anything to say about the dearth of tornadoes today.

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The Fantasy of Extreme Weather

10:06 am

This week there were three stories describing new research proving that global warming is going to cause an increase in the number and violence of extreme weather events. Each was published in one of the world’s three most important scientific journals.

Sounds gloomy, doesn’t it? Not only will extreme heatwaves, cold waves, and droughts tear apart the very fabric of society, you will not be able to drink your soda in peace on your next airplane ride!

However, one little detail, buried in one of these stories as a single sentence, literally makes hogwash out of everything else said in these three articles.
» Read more

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Weather, not climate

10:35 am

From Walter Russell Mead: Weather, not climate.

Those Via Meadia readers old enough to remember Hurricane Katrina can no doubt remember the many moralizing predictions of smug and condescending green climate hacktivists that followed: global warming was going to mean more hurricanes and bigger ones. Our coasts were toast; it was baked in the cake. The rising sea level combined with the inexorably rising number of major hurricanes were going to knock the climate skeptics out of the park.

Well, no. Andrew Revkin has called attention to this post from Roger Pielke’s blog which shows that as of today it has been 2,226 days since the last major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) hit the US mainland. Unless a big hurricane hits this winter, it means we are on track to break a 100 year record for the longest gap between major hurricanes hitting the coast. (The last Big Calm was between 1900 and 1906.) [emphasis mine]

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