By Paul Homewood
Talking of tornadoes, this is a good example of how the climate scam works.
This PBS report was published in May 2019:
When Americans hear the word tornado, their minds may bolt to huge twisters rolling across northern Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Kansas, like a scene out of “The Wizard of Oz.”
But the deadliest U.S tornado in six years didn’t strike the Great Plains — instead, it touched down Sunday hundreds of miles away in Alabama and Georgia. On Monday and Tuesday, search crews, aided by dogs and drones, sifted through wreckage caused by the violent tornado, which blew across 30 miles with winds reaching up to 170 miles per hour. So far, the storm has killed 23 people, including three children, and dozens remain missing.
Rather than lie squarely in the Great Plains, America’s tornadoes appear to be sliding into the Midwest and Southeast.
While this weekend’s storms took the Southeast by surprise, the events fit into a growing trend for a region meteorologists now call Dixie Alley. Since the turn of the millennium, the Dixie Alley has witnessed an ever-increasing onslaught of tornadoes.
Rather than lie squarely in the Great Plains, America’s tornadoes appear to be sliding into the Midwest and Southeast.
“Whether this is climate change or not, what all the studies have shown is that this particular part of the U.S. has been having more tornado activity and more tornado outbreaks than it has had in decades before,” said Mike Tippett, a Columbia University applied mathematician who studies the climate.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/is-climate-change-making-u-s-tornadoes-worse
In fact, as the SPC point out, the hot spot for the strongest tornadoes, EF-4+, is not the Great Plains at all, but Dixie Alley centred in Mississippi and Alabama, based on 1986-2015 climatology:
https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/climo/viotorn.png
The same is true with all tornadoes:
https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/climo/ef1torn.png
The article goes onto quote the hopelessly flawed study by Victor Gensini:
“As an entire country, the United States hadn’t seen much change in the frequency of tornado events [since the 1970s,]” said Victor Gensini, an atmospheric scientist at the Northern Illinois University who studies extreme weather. But last October, his team reported a major geographical change.
After examining a giant repository of severe weather reports — collected by storm chasers, news outlets, emergency managers and the public — the team found a shift in the location of the nation’s so-called Tornado Alley.
Rather than lie squarely in the Great Plains, America’s tornadoes appear to be sliding into the Midwest and Southeast. This finding is worrying because it means severe weather and tornadoes are pushing into states and communities with higher densities of people — raising the chances of human casualties and property destruction. Gensini’s lab has also found hailstorms, another feature of convective storms like tornadoes, have increased across the nation — though this work is yet to be published.
“That doesn’t mean that Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas don’t get tornadoes. They still see a majority of the tornadoes every year,” Gensini said. It’s more [that] the trend in those locations is downward over the past 40 years and increasing in places further to the east.”
I demolished that study at the time here. Below is the key chart:
Clearly, apart form the outlier year of 2011, strong tornadoes have been declining in Alabama, the opposite of what was being claimed. As often with these sort of studies, Gensini used 1979 as the start of his analysis. I wonder why?
So much of this PBS story is straight out of the climate change playbook – take a single weather event, claim it is part of a trend, quote a highly flawed study with cherry picked dates written by someone who is not even an expert in the subject, and blame it all on climate change.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
April 21, 2020 at 12:39PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 