How horrible… Think Progress mocked southern red states after the devastating tornadoes this week.
In order to back up their ridiculous title Think Progress cites this:
“Given that global warming is unequivocal,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth cautioned the American Meteorological Society in January of this year, “the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”
There’s one rather large problem with that assertion. As Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist at NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma pointed out, “There really is no scientific consensus or connection between global warming and tornadic activity.
Fox News reported:
A top official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected claims by environmental activists that the outbreak of tornadoes ravaging the American South is related to climate change brought on by global warming.
Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist at NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, said warming trends do create more of the fuel that tornadoes require, such as moisture, but that they also deprive tornadoes of another essential ingredient: wind shear.
“We know we have a warming going on,” Carbin told Fox News in an interview Thursday, but added: “There really is no scientific consensus or connection [between global warming and tornadic activity]….Jumping from a large-scale event like global warming to relatively small-scale events like tornadoes is a huge leap across a variety of scales.”
W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), when asked during a conference call with Alabama Governor Robert Bentley about the possibility that climate change is playing a role in the tornado outbreak, Fugate shot back:
“Actually, what we’re seeing is springtime. Unfortunately, many people think of the Oklahoma tornado alley and forget that the Southeast U.S. actually has a history of longer and more powerful tornadoes that stay on the ground longer — and we are seeing that, obviously, in the last week and yesterday.”