John Kerry: Global Warming™ Behind Tornado Outbreak

World renowned climatologist and atmospheric scientist, John “Bush Beat Me” Kerry, names Global Warming™ as the driving force behind Tuesdays devastation in the Mid-South.

“[I] don’t want to sort of leap into the larger meaning of, you know, inappropriately, but on the other hand, the weather service has told us we are going to have more and more intense storms,” Kerry said. “And insurance companies are beginning to look at this issue and understand this is related to the intensity of storms that is related to the warming of the earth. And so it goes to global warming and larger issues that we’re not paying attention to."

Roger Edwards, who is an actual world renowned meteorologist and works for the SPC, disagrees.

Second, a gigantic problem relating global average temperature shifts and tornadoes is in the huge differences in size, time scale and physics between them. Even more so than with hurricanes, a very delicate balance of numerous dominoes must fall to get a supercell, even more still for a tornado, and these tiny little dominoes simply aren’t visible to global climate models. Local–scale tornado weather still depends on too many things to happen which are independent of small shifts in the climate. Global climate models, by contrast, focus on gradual shifts of some measurable part of long–term weather (average temperature, for example) covering broad swaths of the plant over periods of years, decades and more.

What was the most unusual thing (which wasn't that unusual) about this outbreak was not its intensity or location, it's that the tornadoes occurred in a densely populated area and they actually hit buildings.

Below are four maps that shed some light on this. Click for larger image.

2/5/08 Outbreak Map (SPC)


"Tornado Alley," >F-1 (SPC)


Combined with population density (USCB)


Below is the final map, also from the SPC. This shows the(F-3 or greater) tornado climatology of the US.


Notice that the dark red areas are mostly around cities and the surrounding areas, i.e. high population density areas. More buildings = more targets. It's that simple.

-Tommy