Is global warming making severe weather worse?

[bchris02]

I was looking over Oklahoma's tornado climatology and noticed that prior to 1999, the frequency and the intensity of the storms that have hit the OKC area was lower than it has been since. OKC has gone several years before without getting hit period, let alone by an F4/F5. If I recall back in 1999, I remember people having said it had been at least 50 years since the OKC area had seen a tornado of that magnitude. In the 15 years since 1999, there has been five of them (5/3/1999, 5/8/2003, 5/10/2010, 5/24/2011, 5/20/2013). Does anybody think global warming has anything to do with this or has it just been an unfortunate weather pattern over the past decade and a half that have brought these "storms of the century" into OKC every few years? Does jet stream patterns make Central Oklahoma less of a powder keg some years over others? For instance, there was quite a placid period during the 1980s and another one during the 1990s. Or is it all random coincidence?

[SoonerDave]

Really simple answer here: Absolutely Not.

There's really a false sense of science in selecting an arbitrary period of time and defining the notion that something "caused" the storms that have occurred in that partitioned time period.

[SoonerDave]

Not sure if you're actually going to get much to work with Chris. This forum isn't full of scientists, but a lot of people who think they know more than 99% of all scientists.

Infographic: Scientists Who Doubt Human-Caused Climate Change | Popular Science

Science, fortunately, is not achieved through majority vote.

[zookeeper]

Science, fortunately, is not achieved through majority vote.

Umm...yeah...it is something close to that that. It's called a scientific consensus.

[Roger S]

Worse than what? The storms the planet experienced last week? Last year? Last decade? Last millennium?

I won't argue whether man has altered our atmosphere. Anyone that says we haven't is really naive. Whether we have altered it for the good or the bad of the planet? Well that's really subjective.

I suppose if you live on a coast line you might argue it's for the bad. If you don't quite live on the coast line and always wanted to.... Well then it's for the good.

What I do know is we don't live on a static planet and as a species we adapt or we die. Didn't turn out so well for the dinosaurs.... Here's to hoping we can adapt faster.

[Anonymous.]

We have touched on this in pretty much every thread that encompasses a severe thunderstorm/tornado event that verifies.

My quick take is everything averages out.

Longer explanation is something along the lines of:

OKC proper is a large land mass.
Population and land occupied has increased significantly.
Tornados ratings use a combination of factors, including using damage assessments. (more things to destroy, more "damage", higher ratings)
Chasers/Spotters and overall storm reports have increased significantly.
Media coverage and fearcasting has increased significantly.
People forget about boring weather. (does anyone remember May, 2005 in Oklahoma?. Zero tornadoes)

Et cetera

[PWitty]

Here's where the whole global warming thought process gets tricky. As someone who majored in the field of science, as a scientist the only thing you can use to make your conclusions is the data you have available to you. And based on all the available data we have (the last few hundred up to maybe even a thousand years) one would have to say yes.

But there are so many unknowns as to what is and is not normal over the entire temperature/climate history of the Earth. The Earth is 4.54 billion years old, and seeing as how nobody has the data for that entire range, nobody can really be 100% positive about the answer to your question. But, again, based on the data we have available to us I would have to say yes.

[PWitty]

I would also say that because of mass media and the internet, people around the world are much more cognizant of what is going on outside of their immediate surroundings. Not saying it is a reason for the answer to your question to be no, it's just something I think some people take for granted and don't think about.

[PWitty]

Whoops, sorry Bchris. I didn't see your initial comment up there on my iPad. My answer was more along the lines of addressing severe weather across the globe, not just in OKC.

[Mississippi Blues]

My 7 year old got quite the laugh. Thanks for that.

So funny.

[OKCisOK4me]

No (to the OP).

[LocoAko]

The real scientific answer: we don't know. There seem to be conflicting signals in how things are going to change, and the severe weather record is insufficient to determine if changes have already occurred due to a number of issues.

For those of you interested, I encourage you to read the work of Harold Brooks at the NSSL, who has done a lot of work related to the subject and has some very fair conclusions to be drawn.

Severe thunderstorms and climate change

http://www.essl.org/ECSS/2011/progra...tions/10_1.pdf (Good presentation, but perhaps harder to follow without having a speaker leading it)

[LocoAko]

We have touched on this in pretty much every thread that encompasses a severe thunderstorm/tornado event that verifies.

My quick take is everything averages out.

Longer explanation is something along the lines of:

OKC proper is a large land mass.
Population and land occupied has increased significantly.
Tornados ratings use a combination of factors, including using damage assessments. (more things to destroy, more "damage", higher ratings)
Chasers/Spotters and overall storm reports have increased significantly.
Media coverage and fearcasting has increased significantly.
People forget about boring weather. (does anyone remember May, 2005 in Oklahoma?. Zero tornadoes)

Et cetera

This too. You have to think... with near continuous development from Edmond down through Norman in a north-south fashion, when supercells/tornadoes move northeast up I-44 into the region there is an increasingly large change of them impacting neighborhoods. No way around that, really.

[venture]

I can't really add anything else to what Anon and Loco have already said. To me, nature is the law of averages - it will balance out at some point.

This too. You have to think... with near continuous development from Edmond down through Norman in a north-south fashion, when supercells/tornadoes move northeast up I-44 into the region there is an increasingly large change of them impacting neighborhoods. No way around that, really.

You'd think there would be a movement to rip out I-44 so the storms don't know which way to go.

[PennyQuilts]

For a lot of us, Weather has become entertainment - like a sport or fantasy sports league. We've gone from, "Hot enough for ya?" to "Looks like we may set a new low dew point record this Saturday - could shatter the one set in Durant in 1941!"

But maybe that's just at my house.

Whatever is or isn't happening, so often every single weather event is used to prove or disprove global warming. I'm not sure how all that works but my personal weather station - which I believe to be on the money based on many/multiple comparisons to other thermometers in my yard - is almost always off by 1-2 degrees and frequently 3-5 from the nearest NOAA spot, Mesonet or the airport. And depending on if a front is coming through or it is cloudy, it may wildly differ for a little while and then agree once the front has gone through. I don't know how someone can really make much of a big deal about this or that shattered record. But I'm no weather expert, just a fan.

Oh, and a lot of houses hit by recent tornadoes used to be fields. Plus, the ability to track and plot tornadoes has just exploded and I'm sure we missed a lot of them not that long ago. For that matter, absent the news, based on my own experience and eyes, there never even was a tornado in Oklahoma City for the past 45-50 years. I personally know one person who lost his house and four (including the one who lost his house) who have actually seen a tornado on the ground in this area. Two saw the Moore a Tornado and two watched the one in Union City forty or so years ago. Obviously there were more tornadoes but I can't help but think they just seem to be more common/severe. And don't they rate tornadoes based on damage? One dead cow does not translate to an F5 even if it would have wiped out a neighborhood that got in its way.

But dunno. Like I said, I'm no expert.

[Dubya61]

This too. You have to think... with near continuous development from Edmond down through Norman in a north-south fashion, when supercells/tornadoes move northeast up I-44 into the region there is an increasingly large change of them impacting neighborhoods. No way around that, really.

Clearly, what we need to do, then, is to relocate I-44 to dead end in an unpopulated area or raise the tolls for things that are generating high wind speed.

[Just the facts]

So the consensus is that global warming has taken a 20 years hiatus so wouldn't that mean any extreme events taking place over the last 20 years would be a result of NOT warming. Maybe some of those early attempts to slow/stop global warming actually worked better than expected.

[RadicalModerate]

Is global warming making severe weather worse?
Of course global warming is doing that.
Primarily due to all of the forests displaced by cellphone towers.

(frankly, i'm more concerned about all the ozone layer destroying Freon from whenever it was invented and put into general use, like, before i was born, making its way to enlarge the ozone hole over the south pole, that takes, like forty years to get there, to do the damage. Cellphone traffic is even worse. For the environment.)

[RadicalModerate]

Really simple answer here: Absolutely Not.

There's really a false sense of science in selecting an arbitrary period of time and defining the notion that something "caused" the storms that have occurred in that partitioned time period.

In reality, isn't there a qualitative difference between what a person in, say, for example, Calgary (Canada), Minneapolis (MN, USA) and Oklahoma (OK) perceives as "'severe' weather"?
My guess is that there is. (a real difference)

[MustangGT]

Humane caused warming is booyah. In the distant past it was much warmer and no human had arrived on the scene 65 million years ago. The earths climate runs in fairly predictable cycles.

[HangryHippo]

Here's where the whole global warming thought process gets tricky. As someone who majored in the field of science, as a scientist the only thing you can use to make your conclusions is the data you have available to you. And based on all the available data we have (the last few hundred up to maybe even a thousand years) one would have to say yes.

But there are so many unknowns as to what is and is not normal over the entire temperature/climate history of the Earth. The Earth is 4.54 billion years old, and seeing as how nobody has the data for that entire range, nobody can really be 100% positive about the answer to your question. But, again, based on the data we have available to us I would have to say yes.

SoonerDave would foolishly disagree with you.

[HangryHippo]

Humane caused warming is booyah. In the distant past it was much warmer and no human had arrived on the scene 65 million years ago. The earths climate runs in fairly predictable cycles.

People constantly throw this out there as if it's a known fact, yet your own post illustrates why it's such a foolish assumption. You've been around for less than 100 years of something that you say is 65 MILLION years old. We really have no idea about Earth's "predictable cycles."

[Richard at Remax]

Tree Rings and Ice Core samples don't lie

[HangryHippo]

Tree Rings and Ice Core samples don't lie

No one is saying they do. But across Earth's history, we're only seeing a relatively small sample of things so it's difficult to make statements about Earth's long term trends because we have such a short glimpse into that window. PWitty really said it best in my opinion - there's a LOT of data, and we only have so much available to us to make our assumptions, but the numbers don't lie.

[PWitty]

Too bad we don't know what happens when radiation hits carbon in the atmosphere or anything like that.

Seriously, guys, we know there's more to learn but to then make a sweeping generalization about our knowledge about systems we do know quite a bit is just reaching for straws. We've got tons and tons of data about our atmosphere and at very micro levels, we're learning to understand the effects of certain particles in it. Particles that are in fact fairly easy to measure in historic terms thanks to ice, trees, and rock preserving this for us. We don't know it all but we're not clueless.

Sid, I don't think any of the recent posts were disagreeing with you. At least I'm not. Rock cores most definitely hold a ton of knowledge about the past. That's my go to when someone I'm talking to refuses to acknowledge that the Earth's surface temperature has never been static.