AndyH
Well-known member
See? We just cannot keep from falling into the 'let's debate climate change' trap! We shouldn't be debating 'is it or isn't it' - that's best left to climate scientists. Our job is to decide if we act or not based on what we know today. Which lottery ticket do we buy? Change is real and it's going to mess up our back yard so we better prepare, or acting is worse than the possible problem so I'm going to buy the 'do nothing' lottery ticket than head out to play a few rounds of golf.Stoaty said:Warning is not the same as measuring an actual effect. In the case of tornadoes, Jeff Masters points out that there aren't any reliable measurements to tell us whether this is actually happening. Read the article referenced to see why this is so. Of course, there are plenty of other measurements which DO confirm that climate change is occurring as predicted from basic science.AndyH said:Sorry, no. Science has been warning of increasing effects from the beginning! More frequent catastrophic storms, more frequent droughts, more frequent deluges, more frequent fires (like, oh, 1.5 million acres of Texas charred for instance?)...Stoaty said:It appears that there isn't any scientific data to tell whether tornadoes are getting more frequent with climate change...
Debating the existence of climate change simply ties us up and keeps us from doing the work we need to do! This is the real problem with the blasted "debate" - we might as well all be shot with a secret DoD non-lethal bubble-gum dispenser that keeps us stuck to the side of buildings instead of chasing the bank robbers!
Back to Masters - who is he? What's his background? Why should I care what he says? At BEST - if he's a climatologist and a 'confirmed good guy' with no funding from questionable organizations and all his biases in check, he belongs in the second from the bottom "individual Professional" tier. He might be correct, or not - but he references five papers. The top-level organizations work thru THOUSANDS of papers.
There IS enough information on the increasing likelihood of more severe storms from the significantly more credible sources - and unless it's our job to build the "Tennessee Tornado Model" what's the point of getting bogged down with Masters?
The absolute best information is going to come from higher sources of information. But the entire field is highly specialized and will therefore need significant synthesis to make a decent 'big picture'. That's what the NAS and AAAS do, and is the charter for the IPCC. Go there for 'fully digested and reviewed information' rather than a blogger - even a Dr. Blogger.- because a couple hundred scientists working on climate change are going to be able to create a significantly higher quality assessment than a single guy even if that single Dr. (a dentist maybe?) is inside the IPCC. I hope that makes sense a little?
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-5-3.html
General features include a poleward shift in storm track location, increased storm intensity, but a decrease in total storm numbers...
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-8-4-2.html
Evidence for changes in the number or intensity of tornadoes relies entirely on local reports. In the USA, databases for tornado reporting are well established, although changes in procedures for evaluating the intensity of tornadoes introduced significant discontinuities in the record. In particular, the apparent decrease in strong tornadoes in the USA from the early period of the official record (1950s–1970s) to the more recent period is, in large part, a result of the way damage from the earlier events was evaluated. Trapp et al. (2005) also questioned the completeness of the tornado record and argued that about 12% of squall-line tornadoes remain unreported. In many European countries, the number of tornado reports has increased considerably over the last decade (Snow, 2003), leading to a much higher estimate of tornado activity (Dotzek, 2003). Bissolli et al. (2007) showed that the increase in Germany between 1950 and 2003 mainly concerns weak tornadoes (F0 and F1 on the Fujita scale), thus paralleling the evolution of tornado reports in the USA after 1950 (see, e.g., Dotzek et al., 2005) and making it likely that the increase in reports in Europe is at least dominated (if not solely caused) by enhanced detection and reporting efficiency. Doswell et al. (2005) highlighted the difficulties encountered when trying to find observational evidence for changes in extreme events at local scales connected to severe thunderstorms. In light of the very strong spatial variability of small-scale severe weather phenomena, the density of surface meteorological observing stations is too coarse to measure all such events. Moreover, homogeneity of existing station series is questionable. While remote sensing techniques allow detection of thunderstorms even in remote areas, they do not always uniquely identify severe weather events from these storms. Another approach links severe thunderstorm occurrence to larger-scale environmental conditions in places where the observations of events are fairly good and then consider the changes in the distribution of those environments (Brooks et al., 2003; Bissolli et al., 2007).
Although a decreasing trend in dust storms was observed from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s in northern China, the number of dust storm days increased from 1997 to 2002 (Li and Zhai, 2003; Zhou and Zhang, 2003). The decreasing trend appears linked to the reduced cyclone frequency and increasing winter (DJF) temperatures (Qian et al., 2002). The recent increase is associated with vegetation degradation and drought, plus increased surface wind speed (Wang and Zhai, 2004; Zou and Zhai, 2004).
edit...fixed a URL