Joe Biden Spins Tornado Misinformation. By Gregory Whitestone.
Have violent tornadoes been increasing? …
It appears that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is playing games with tornado data. In 2017, while researching tornado data, I archived the NOAA site’s page on tornadoes and data. At the time, NOAA specifically warned that pre-Doppler radar records of tornadoes (before 1995) are unreliable.
Because of this, NOAA recommended (at the time) only using the strongest tornadoes as a measure of pre-Doppler numbers and provided this chart that documented an overall decrease in the number of strong and violent storms that were categorized as =EF 3 (I have added the carbon emissions to the chart).
Accessing the very same link for NOAA today takes one to their latest iteration, which showcases a chart of ALL tornadoes dating back to 1950 and shows a steady and significant rise in the number of tornadoes from 1950 to the late 1990s. Bear in mind, that just a few years ago, NOAA specifically warned against using exactly this data because it would under-count the numbers before 1995. …
This is not capturing increasing actual numbers of tornadoes that occurred, but rather increased reporting. [Tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable, so only major ones can be reliably counted.]
Yet another case of bureaucrats pushing truth aside to publish only data that conforms to their own narrative.
Recent Tornadoes are Due to Unusually Cold Weather. By Roy Spencer, from 2019. It’s cold again this year, so the explanation is probably the same. As the world has warmed (primarily due to the grand solar maximum of the late 20th century), tornadoes have receded.
Joe Biden predictably blamed global warming for the recent US tornadoes, but the truth is very likely the opposite.
(As carbon dioxide levels rise, the lower troposphere (0 – 5km) warms fastest. This puts more energy into the part of the atmosphere with storms and so on — which makes for stronger storms. But a warmer lower troposphere is also a moister lower troposphere, and water has a moderating and calming presence, so the storms will be weaker. No one really knows theoretically which of these countervailing forces will dominate, but the empirical evidence of the last 50 years is that the storms have become less frequent and less violent. However, as global cooling gathers pace, expect a return to more frequent, more violent storms.)
