Every year around this time, the Mainstream Media is filled with claims from "experts" who tell us that there are more tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, and every other form imaginable of severe weather, thanks to climate change.
Expect a whole new raft of such claims in the weeks ahead, thanks to this past weekend's outbreak of tornados in Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere in the Midwest. The drone shots of the flattened downtown of Sulphur, Okla., demonstrate that severe weather is a seriously damaging and dangerous phenomenon.
When people first began to make these claims, I was naturally skeptical. Having grown up in central Oklahoma, the heart of Tornado Alley, I experienced more than my fair share of trips to the storm cellar, watching TV and listening to the radio for tornado warnings, and reading newspaper stories about familiar towns and cities being devastated.
And I also experienced, more often than I care to recall, actually being in our family home as tornadoes ripped and bounced around our neighborhood. I will never forget one stormy night as a 10-year-old in 1960 when a strong twister hit our neighborhood and, despite literally bouncing over our suburban street, still hurled softball-size hail, shingles, rain, splintered 2-by-4s, and shards of glass through the blown-out windows of our home in Southwest Oklahoma City.
For what seemed like an eternity but was probably "only" about 30 seconds, I was terrified, huddled with my mother and then four-year-old sister in the living room watching Dad holding a blanket up to a window in hopes of protecting us. To this day, that moment stands out in my memory as one of the bravest acts I've ever witnessed, even though, in retrospect, Dad could easily have been seriously injured or killed, considering all the objects-turned-missiles that were flying through the air.
So why am I sharing this with you? A recent report from the Fraser Institute, a non-profit research firm that stands out as one of the last redoubts of sanity in Canada, makes clear the paucity of evidence for claims that climate change is causing more severe weather:
"According to the UN's Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), evidence does suggest that some types of extreme weather have become more extreme, particularly those relating to temperature trends. • However, many types of extreme weather show no signs of increasing and in some cases are decreasing.
"Drought has shown no clear increasing trend, nor has flooding. Hurricane intensity and number show no increasing trend. Globally, wildfires have shown no clear trend in increasing number or intensity, while in Canada, wildfires have actually been decreasing in number and areas consumed from the 1950s to the present.
"While media and political activists assert that the evidence for increasing harms from increasing extreme weather is iron-clad, it is anything but. In fact, it is quite limited, and of low reliability. Claims about extreme weather should not be used as the basis for committing to long-term regulatory regimes that will hurt current Canadian standards of living, and leave future generations worse off."
But the conservative Canadian outfit is far from alone in reaching that conclusion. Take for example this from the National Geographic Society, which is anything but a voice of anti-climate change analyses:
There is no real evidence that tornados are happening more often. A lot more are being recorded now than in 1950, but a closer look at the data shows the increase is only in the weakest category, EF0. There's been no increase in stronger twisters, and maybe even a slight decrease in EF4s and EF5s.
That suggests we're just spotting more of the weak and short-lived tornadoes than we did back when the country was emptier (the United States population in 1950 was less than half what it is now), we didn't have Doppler radar, and Oklahoma highways weren't jammed with storm-chasers.
I love that reference to Oklahoma highways being full of storm chasers. Those guys are crazy, to be sure, but they have helped grow our understanding of what causes tornadoes.
So the next time somebody tells you climate change is causing more severe weather, point them to these two studies and encourage them to stop letting climate agitpropsters in the mainstream media do their thinking for them.
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