Gregory Wrightstone – December 12, 2021
President Joe Biden wasted no time in politicizing the recent tornado tragedy that claimed the lives of nearly 100 people in Kentucky, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri. Speaking less than 24 hours after communities and lives were devastated, Biden linked the storms to man-made climate change.
“All I know is that widespread weather intensity has some impact due to planetary warming and climate change,” Biden said. “The reality is we all know things get more intense as the climate warms. Everything. And obviously it has some impact here.”
Is that really the case? Are violent tornadoes on the rise? The answer to that question is obvious, but you won’t find it in the agency most responsible for overseeing such things. Looks like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is playing a game 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) were unreliable:
“One of the main difficulties with tornado profiling is having to observe a tornado, or evidence of a tornado. Unlike rainfall or temperature, which can be measured with a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and difficult to predict. A tornado in a largely uninhabited area is unlikely to be recorded. Many large tornadoes may not have gone into the historical record because Tornado Alley was so sparsely populated in the early 20th century.”
As a result, NOAA recommended (at the time) to use only the strongest tornadoes as a measure of pre-Doppler numbers and provided this chart that captures the overall decrease in terms of the number of strong and intense hurricanes classified as >EF 3 (I added carbon emissions to the graph).
Access to very similar link for NOAA today moved on to their latest iteration, showing a graph of ALL tornadoes dating back to 1950 and showed a steady and significant increase in the number of tornadoes from 1950 to the late 1990s. Remember that just a few years ago, NOAA specifically warned against correctly use this data as it will be missing numbers before 1995.
Updated data on tornadoes through 2020 is available at ustornadoes.com and show why using Doppler data first is misleading. Figure 3 shows the pre-Doppler count of reported tornadoes. Importantly, this is not a shoot increase the actual amount tornado happened, but instead of increasing the report.
Figure 4, below, is a graph of all Doppler-era tornadoes showing no increase.
All of this begs the question: Why would a government agency promote erroneous data? The answer is simple: It “confirms” their preconceptions about increasingly severe weather and supports alarming claims of increasing death and devastation.
You can be sure that Joe Biden won’t be the last to use these deaths and the deceit of this tornado to sow fear and alarm in support of a trillion dollar spending plan. their way to solve a climate crisis that doesn’t exist. The Biden administration should “follow the science” and get to work helping victims and stopping spreading misinformation.
Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist and executive director of CO2 Alliance, Arlington, Va., and author of “Inconvenient truth: Science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know. ”
This commentary was first published by the CO2 Coalition on December 12, 2021.
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