[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
Hey, folks in the South -- you'll be happy to know those
unusually nasty tornadoes that just
blew through your towns and killed hundreds of your neighbors aren't any kind of serious long-term problem. At least not according to Fox News.
Because to think so would be to perhaps admit that climate scientists
might be onto something to suspect that climate change might have had a
hand in these extreme storms. Perish the thought!
Filling in for Neil Cavuto yesterday on Fox, Connell McShane invited on Marc Morano of
ClimateDepot,
fondly remembered by some of us as wingnut Republican Sen. James
Inhofe's ex-communications chief. (I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn
that his outfit is primarily funded by money from corporate sources like
ExxonMobil and Richard Mellon Scaife.)
Morano was appalled that environmentalists might connect this week's
devastating tornadoes to scientists' warnings of climate change and
global warming:
MORANO: Well, this is following them blaming the tsunami
on climate change, the record cold on climate change, the blizzards and
record snow on climate change. This is them blaming record ice in
Antarctica on climate change. This is them blaming any weather event on
climate change. It's the latest incarnation. The problem is, this time
it's even more absurd than the previous times.
Actually, Fox News probably isn't the place you want to be making this charge, considering that
Fox anchors have a
long and colorful history of using extreme winter storms to claim that it's evidence global warming is, in Sean Hannity's words,
"the biggest scientific fraud in our lifetimes". Indeed, one of the more notable such cases involved
Neil Cavuto.
And of course, Morano also repeats previously debunked falsehoods about the weather. For instance, it is a
a lie
that Antarctica as a whole is getting record ice: "Antarctica is losing
land ice as a whole, and these losses are accelerating quickly."
To claim that the tornadoes had nothing,
nussink! to do with
climate change, Morano cited previous tornado data and claimed they
showed "absolutely no trend" to increasing tornadoes. So don't worry
about it, folks! Nothing to see here! And anyone who thinks so is just
like those primitive Aztecs who cut out people's hearts to make it rain:
MORANO: So any way you cut it, tornadoes are not a crisis.
For them now to use this is yet another example of climate astrology.
They're trying to peddle the idea that our SUVs are causing severe
tornadoes and our light bulbs and our industry and our way of life.
It's no better than in 1450 when Aztec priests encouraged people to
sacrifice to the gods to end a drought. We actually are going back to a
primitive culture where we actually think that we can affect the weather
to this level, like a tornado is caused by our cars.
Yes, because being encouraged to drive a hybrid car in place of your gas-hogging SUV is
just like having your heart cut out and sacrificed to the gods.
Morano then wrapped up by attacking discussions of the tornadoes in
the context of climate change as "purely a propaganda tool" without even
a hint of irony.
In reality,
the trends aren't clear, as Bryan Walsh at Time explains, but there is unquestionably change in the patterns afoot:
And the answer is... Scientists really don't know. It's
true that the average number of April tornadoes has steadily increased
from 74 a year in the 1950s to 163 a year in the 2000s. But most of that
increase, as A.G. Sulzberger reports in the New York Times, comes from
the least powerful tornadoes, the ones that touch down briefly without
causing much damage. Those are exactly the kind of tornadoes that would
have been missed by meteorologists in the days before the Weather
Channel and Doppler radar—scientists today would almost never miss an
actual tornado touchdown, no matter how brief or weak. That makes it
very difficult for researchers to even be sure that the actual number of
tornadoes is on the rise, let alone, if they are, what might be causing
it. The number of severe tornadoes per year has actually been dropping
over time.
It is true, however, that as the climate warms, more moisture will
evaporate into the atmosphere. Warmer temperatures and more moisture
will give storm systems that much more energy to play with, like adding
nitroglycerin to the atmosphere. This month's possibly
record-breaking tornadoes are due in part to an unusually warm Gulf of
Mexico, where as Freedman reports, water surface temperatures are 1 to
2.5 C above the norm. The Gulf feeds moisture northward to storm systems
as they move across the country, and that warm moist air from the south
meeting cool, dry air from the Plains often results in some powerful
weather. But at the same time, other studies have forecast that warmer
temperatures will reduce the wind shear necessary to turn a routine
thunderstorm into a powerful system that can give birth to tornadoes. So
in a hotter world we could see more frequent destructive thunderstorms,
but fewer tornadoes—although some researchers think we could still end
up with both.
Moreover, as
at ThinkProgress reports,
a number of scientists think that climate change is obviously part of
the picture here, and ignoring it not only won't make it go away, it's
profoundly irresponsible:
In an email interview with ThinkProgress, Dr. Kevin
Trenberth, one of the world’s top climate scientists, who has been
exploring for years how greenhouse pollution influences extreme weather,
said he believes that it is “irresponsible not to mention climate
change” in the context of these extreme tornadoes. Trenberth, head of
the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric
Research, added that the scientific understanding of how polluting our
atmosphere with billions of tons of greenhouse gases affects tornadic
activity is still ongoing:
It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. …
The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are
occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes
come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of
the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is
from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies
aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted
to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the
atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With
global warming the low level air is warm and moister and there is more
energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy
of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research
on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level
air is 1 deg F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.
Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science
Center at Pennsylvania State University, explains further that “climate
change is present in every single meteorological event”:
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.
But then, at Fox News "profoundly irresponsible"
isn't anything unusual. It's part of their business model.
