Real Climate Science

The fact remains that there is 4 percent more water vapor–and associated additional moist energy–available both to power individual storms and to produce intense rainfall from them. Climate change is present in every single meteorological event, in that these events are occurring within a baseline atmospheric environment that has shifted in favor of more intense weather events.

– Michael Mann

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/29/climate-science-tornadoes/

Excellent. We can thank global warming for the longest stretch of hurricane free days in the US since the Civil War. We can also thank global warming for the decline in severe tornadoes from 1975-2000.

Using Mann’s logic, global warming has saved countless lives.

The weather has been much better than the 1930s, so thank global warming. There simply wasn’t enough CO2 in the air in 1930 to prevent the Dust Bowl.

This will add to the record snowpack in the Colorado River watershed.

http://graphs.water-data.com/ucsnowpack/

Global Warming Will Bring Violent Storms And Tornadoes, NASA Predicts
ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2007) — NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth’s climate warms.

Previous climate model studies have shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate, but few global models have attempted to simulate the strength of updrafts in these storms. The model developed at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies by researchers Tony Del Genio, Mao-Sung Yao, and Jeff Jonas is the first to successfully simulate the observed difference in strength between land and ocean storms and is the first to estimate how the strength will change in a warming climate, including “severe thunderstorms” that also occur with significant wind shear and produce damaging winds at the ground.

This information can be derived from the temperatures and humidities predicted by a climate computer model, according to the new study published on August 17 in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters. It predicts that in a warmer climate, stronger and more severe storms can be expected, but with fewer storms overall.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Their model makes no sense theoretically or empirically. Severe tornadoes declined as the world warmed from 1975-2000, just as theory predicts they should. Severe tornadoes increased from 1950-1975, as the world cooled. 1975 was the peak of the global cooling panic

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/tornadotrend.jpg

Obama : “Vancouver which supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow.”

http://mediamattersaction.org/blog/201002190005

This year it is hot in Texas and cold in Vancouver, and they are blaming that on global warming.

Whatever the weather is that week, it is global warming. Wasn’t someone trying to claim this morning that Obama is smart?

Update: In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.

Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:

Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all.

The Chronicle’s report is accurate.

If the White House has indeed decided not to ban our reporter, we would like an on-the-record notice that she will remain the San Francisco print pool reporter.

I was on some of those calls and can confirm Ward’s statement.

Messy ball now firmly in White House court.

http://www.sfgate.com/

It’s unknown how long the underweight cub was by herself without food, or what actually happened to her mother and sibling. One thing that’s unlikely is that a subsistence hunter from the nearest community — the Inupiat Eskimo village of Nuiqsut — shot the mother. Only Alaska Natives are allowed to hunt polar bears, and they are required to report their subsistence harvest to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Agency biologists contacted the village and learned that no locals have taken a polar bear recently.

There are several possible scenarios that could have led to abandonment. The mother might have been in poor condition and unable to care for the cubs. Or the cub might have gotten separated from her mother in a storm, or if the mother was trying to protect the cub from an adult male bear. The mother and the other cub could be dead or alive.

The Alpine field is operated by ConocoPhillips.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

The poster child for active tornado seasons was the Superoutbreak of 1974, which was during globally cool conditions. This year, we are seeing much cooler than normal conditions through the corn belt, even delaying the planting schedule. Cool La Nina years seem to favor more tornadoes, and we are now coming out of a persistent La Nina. The global-average temperature has plummeted by about 1 deg. F in just one year.

An unusually warm Gulf of Mexico of 1 or 2 degrees right now cannot explain the increase in contrast between warm and cold air masses which is key for tornado formation because that slight warmth cannot compete with the 10 to 20 degree below-normal air in the Midwest and Ohio Valley which has not wanted to give way to spring yet.

The “extra moisture” from the Gulf is not that important, because it’s almost always available this time of year…it’s the wind shear that caused this outbreak.

More tornadoes due to “global warming”, if such a thing happened, would be more tornadoes in Canada, where they don’t usually occur. NOT in Alabama.

It is well known that strong to violent tornado activity in the U.S. has decreased markedly since statistics began in the 1950s, which has also been a period of average warming. So, if anything, global warming causes FEWER tornado outbreaks…not more. In other words, more violent tornadoes would, if anything, be a sign of “global cooling”, not “global warming”.

Anyone who claims more tornadoes are caused by global warming is either misinformed, pandering, or delusional.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/

h/t to P.J.

http://books.google.com/books

http://books.google.com/books

Hansen says that 2010 was the hottest year ever. The tornado count was just below the mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2010_United_States_tornado_count_graph.png

Temperatures have plummeted since last spring, and we are having a very active tornado season.

Romm adds 2+2 and comes up with zero.

Higher temperatures in the mid-troposphere would make make the atmosphere more stable and produce fewer severe storms.

Similarly, polar amplification would reduce temperature differences between the equator and the poles, once again reducing the numbers of severe storms.

The reason we are seeing stormy weather over the last 12 months is because of La Nina – which makes the world cool.

People touting the global warming/severe storms idea are scientifically dysfunctional. Like Mr. Romm.