Are Extreme Tornados a Harbinger of Global Warming? Not so far. “This is climate change. We were warned about extreme weather: Not just hot weather, but extreme weather,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) declaredon the floor of the U.S. Senate last week. “You’re going to have tornados and all the rest.” The senator’s impassioned outburst of climatological alarm was provoked by a mile-wide tornado that had just struck Moore, Oklahoma. The same twister provoked a Washington Post piece to speculate that record insurance losses in the past five years may be the result of tornados and other storms “possibly ramped up by climate change.” Are extreme tornados becoming more frequent, as Sen. Boxer’s remarks suggest? Doppler radar has made it much easier to detect EF-0 tornados (with wind speeds of 65 to 85 mph), resulting in a dramatic rise in the numbers reported. If you exclude those, the agency reports, “There has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.” ...the rate of deaths from tornados has fallen about 90 percent in the last 90 years, from just under 2 per million in the 1920s to 0.2 per million recently. In another analysis—this one for the Geneva Association, an international insurance think tank—Overall, there was a 63 percent decline in normalized damages across the six-decade period. their analysis suggests that this normalized decline in damages may mean that damaging tornados are becoming fewer.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Jun 2013 15:10:33 +0000
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