The Midwest Tornadoes Weren’t Caused By Global Warming

November 19, 2013

(Investors Business Daily) We thought we’d try to head off the sure-to-come claims that man-made global warming caused the deadly Midwest storms over the weekend. But we were too late. The alarmists got to work early.

A swarm of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms blew through at least a dozen states Sunday, killing, maiming and destroying.

Entire neighborhood blocks are gone, trees have been torn out by their roots, hundreds of thousands have no power and stunned survivors try to slog through the recovery and restoration of their lives.

Making this tragedy even worse are alarmists who try to score political points on the lost and devastated lives.

Before the winds had hardly died down, Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who was once a United Nations adviser, tweeted Monday about the “weather tragedy in Illinois” and said, as if he were speaking from Heaven, that “research shows human-induced warming is likely to lead to more severe thunderstorms.”

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Sachs, now director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, also appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday claiming, “we’re causing this because there are more and more of these storms, because of the way that humanity is changing the world’s environment. . ..

“This kind of event,” said Sachs, who clearly missed the news about early snows in Washington, Colorado and Western Canada, “will happen more frequently unless we change the way we run our energy system.”

As Sachs hectored America, Secretary of State John Kerry was telling the U.N.’s climate change conference that global warming “is happening now. …

“There isn’t a more important” duty, he said, than “fulfilling our responsibility to the future inhabitants of our planet” and moving ahead on the “ambitious goal” of fighting global warming, which he called a “crisis” that “waits for no one.”

Meanwhile, Twitter was alive with less-prominent believers who thought it was a good time to both perpetuate the man-made global nonsense and make snarky comments they thought would make them look clever.

Surely there are more tweets coming. Expect many well-known figures who themselves don’t well know anything about climate to offer their pithy insights.

Such a response has become an automatic reaction: a super storm wrecks and ruins lives and property, and the protectors of the man-is-changing-the-climate faith have to blame modern human life for the disaster.

And as much as it is automatic, it is also wrong.

While we admit that November tornadoes are not common, Sunday’s unusual burst is not the biggest since 1950. Jeff Masters of Wunderground.com wrote on his blog that the “outbreak will probably rank as the fourth most prolific November tornado outbreak since 1950,” the year modern tornado records were first kept.

The fact there were more November storms in 1992, 2001 and 2002, brings up a material question:

If global warming worked the way its believers tell us it does, wouldn’t we be setting storm records every year — or almost every year — rather than merely approaching the landmark year of 1992, when there were 95 November tornadoes?

Overall, tornadoes are down in our modern era of greenhouse gas emissions.

Just last year, Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, said that “over the past six decades, tornado damage has declined after accounting for development that has put more property into harm’s way.”

And earlier this year, Pielke also documented that there were 38 F5/EF5 category tornadoes from 1953 to 1982, while there were only 20 from 1983 to 2013.

It’s time the myth that our CO2 emissions are causing more severe and more frequent storms be retired with the Greek and Roman gods.