Is it the same rationale behind the motivations of the military industrial complex (except, that one actually exists and has a much greater budget than anything dealing with climate change)- i.e. more money?

By the way, what “Climate Change” was responsible for this little out break in 1884? What was going on back then?

“February 19, 1884: The Great Southern Tornado Outbreak
Over 60 tornadoes swept the entire Southeast. At least 170 were killed, possibly more. Considered the largest outbreak until the Super Outbreak of April 3-4, 1974. ”

http://www.ezl.com/~fireball/Disaster15.htm

1) Little science behind tornadoes- they are natural, much like Hurricanes, etc. What this post is saying is that we should witness more intense tornadoes due to increase moisture and heat convection. While frequency may not increase, larger storms will. It’s quite unfair and unscientific to say that just because a tornado occurred in the past, that it negates the role of climate change in tornado creation today. It’s the same argument that people use to compare the amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions today with what the Earth naturally emits. You can’t compare one event to the baseline.

2) What we don’t know behind the 1884 Tornado is how strong it was, as we did not have a categorization system back then. So… having 170 people killed doesn’t say how intense the storm is.

What kind of source is Joe’s Fireball Express page???? Seriously, need something more credible than http://www.ezl.com/~fireball/

Or at least, less animated .gifs

And I know that tornadoes and other forms of weather “extremes” are natural and even normal, always have been and always will be.

My original response was to that noted climate expert Kerry jumping on the bandwagon.

“It is clear that human-made forcings have begun to exceed the magnitude of natural climate forcing agents during the past few decades.”

This is 6 years old of course. He quantifies this in many of his recent papers, most of which I have linked to on this site.

Now Hansen does have an agenda, though, as I do. He is desperately trying to stop humanity from destroying the climate and hence the livability of the planet for centuries if not millennia….

I no longer have a sub so I can only read the abstract, but I think it does. Certainly I have had issues in the past with Joe’s interpretations, but not this time. Essentially, the paper claims frequency of storms may decrease, but the frequency of the most intense will increase.

Best,

D

Sure does. It suggests that “climate change” is the norm. Always happened, always will.

Unless you are referring to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 as a cause of extreme weather.

Dano - the GRL submission is linked above.

Joe’s summary is a good one and in no way overreachs the paper’s conclusions.

The denialist in this thread is using the long-ago refuted argument that has passed beyond tedium into a condition where it doesn’t even register any more - kinda like pictures on a wall in the hallway: yes you see them, but they barely register in the consciousness. “There’s a picture of your mother, honey, in the hall?!? Um…oh, yeah, yeah - in that nice dress, right?”

Here’s a highly recommended Oreskes talk that should be viewed and passed around. Good enough that you can walk around with the sound on and not miss anything, as she’s not a Tuftean.

Best,

D

But tornadic storms are not necessarily more intense than non-tornadic storms. The measure of intensity they use in the paper is parameterized updraft strength and updraft strength is tied much more closely to hail than to tornadoes. The decrease in environmental wind shear the paper reports is detrimental for tornadoes.

The press release and the paper seem somewhat disconnected. The only mention of tornadoes in the text is in a background sentence, “The central/east U.S. experiences the most severe thunderstorms and tornadoes on Earth.” The paper makes no attempt to link changes in tornado frequency and intensity to the modelled environmental changes. When I read it, without seeing the press release, I assumed the results applied to the hail problem, mostly, and that the results were consistent with a couple of other papers that were published last year.

There’s also some in-press historical work on hail and environmental changes in the last quarter of the 20th century that suggests a relationship between US mean temperatures and large hail occurrence, but the record isn’t long enough to reach statistical significance, given the problems in the reporting database.

This is perhaps made more confusing than it should be because they don’t like CAPE (maybe they had a word limit or suggestion to take it out). Wrt your intensity statement, if I think of PE of the storms rather than whether simply hail or tornadic activity occurs as a result, it becomes clearer for me to understand what they are trying to say.

I’d also like to see a bit more work on convective activity wrt more intense precip episodes, as this has a lot of effect on soil moisture flux & crop health and also lessened evapotranspiration, which is less moisture for cloud formation overall.

Best,

D

As far as precip is concerned, that’s a nasty problem on the scales of the models. The work on thunderstorms essentially is looking at relatively large scale environmental conditions, in a manner akin to a forecaster looking for the large area of potential threat for storms, not as a forecaster warning on a particular storm. Converting those large-scale conditions to precip is really challenging.

I think you can get at the precip bit with PDI and many of the ag networks with pan evaporation that are out there now. I can’t go out and Google the papers right now, but IIRC there are a couple papers out there attempting to look at soil moisture and rainfall records to gauge the effects of what appears to be more episodic precip, esp in upper midwest (totals about the same, but more episodic hence more drought stress). I come at this from the plant side now, but I was a weatherman in the service ~25 years ago…long enuf to be dangerous, surely.

Best,

D

The industrial revolution began in, say, 1750. By 1880 already humans had burned enough fossil carbon to raise the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 20 ppm or so. This during an extended period when the natural forcings should lead to slightly less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Now that I have spelled it out for you, does this suggest anything regarding your question?