THE MORNING RANT: The Only New “Records” Involving Tornadoes Are Record Hysteria and Record Media Coverage

Tornadoes have been all over the news recently, with non-stop coverage on most major media outlets. Of course, reporting on weather has long since ceased to be about just the weather events and their aftermath. Instead, we are treated to stories about Planet Earth raging in apocalyptic fury, with all manner of “extreme” weather events resulting from man-made global warming that altered the once-perfect 20th Century climate.

It is reported repeatedly – and falsely - that bad weather is due to man’s destructive reliance on fossil fuels, and that extreme weather events are getting more frequent and more intense because of man’s carbon sinning.

Because spring is the most tornadic season, tornadoes are the current hot topic. (To be fair, much of the media is already reporting as an undisputed fact that this is going to be a record year for hurricanes, even though there have been exactly zero tropical storms so far.)

Every story I’ve read about a specific tornado incident this year includes a paragraph or two with boilerplate language discussing how “experts” blame climate change for tornados becoming worse, or more intense, or more frequent, etc. Beyond that, there has been a blizzard of stories in major media outlets where the topic is specifically about how climate change / global warming is worsening the tornado problem. Here are a few examples.

“In a warmer world, tornado behaviour is changing” [BBC – 5/22/2024]

“Is there a climate change link to deadly, destructive tornadoes?” [ABC – 5/06/2024]

“Climate change is moving Tornado Alley and driving more tornado outbreaks” [NBC – 5/06/2024]

“Storm supercells will become more frequent in parts of U.S. thanks to climate change” [CBS – 02/21/2024]

“Here’s What We Know About how Climate Change is Influencing Tornadoes” [Washington Post – 04/02/2023]

As documented below, this is all simply false. Tornadoes are neither more frequent, nor more intense. In fact, there is currently a trend of decreasing numbers of the strongest tornadoes, which itself is just part of a cycle, of course. From the “Climate at a Glance - Tornadoes” page at The Heartland Institute, here is a graph using NOAA’s own data which shows that EF3 or higher tornadoes in the US (on a scale of EF0 to EF5) have been decreasing over the past half-century.

During that same recent stretch of mild tornado activity, there was also a record set for consecutive days without a tornado death.

Part of the great dishonesty in reporting “extreme” weather events such as tornadoes is that the likelihood of any specific location suffering a direct hit is very low, just like the odds of winning a raffle are very low. But it is an absolute certainty that someone will win the raffle, and it is also an absolute certainty that about 1,200 tornadoes per year are going to touch down in the United States. Certain communities are going to get hit by a tornado for the first time, an “unprecedented” event. That is not climate change, it’s probability and statistics.

While there may not have been an increase in the strongest of tornadoes in recent decades, there has been an increase in the total number of tornadoes detected in recent decades. But this is not due to there being more actual tornadoes, rather it’s due to improved technology that is able to record tornadoes that would otherwise be undocumented. Shockingly, NOAA still confirms this simple truth at its website. This is from the FAQ section of NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center:

Have there been any major changes or trends in yearly tornado counts?Tornado reports have increased, especially around the installation of the NEXRAD Doppler radar system in the mid 1990s. This doesn't mean that actual tornado occurrence has gone up, however. The increase in tornado numbers is almost entirely in weak (EF0-EF1) events that are being reported far more often today due to a combination of better detection, greater media coverage, aggressive warning verification efforts, storm spotting, storm chasing, more developmental sprawl (damage targets), more people, and better documentation with cameras (including cell phones) than ever. Modern averages of roughly 1200 per year nationwide probably are as close to the truth as we've ever seen. Another few decades of well-documented tornadoes will tell us more. To compare tornado counts before Doppler radars, we have to either adjust historical trends statistically to account for the unreported weak tornadoes of before, or look only at strong to violent (EF2-EF5) tornadoes, whose records are much better documented and more stable. When we do that, very little overall change has occurred since the 1950s.

Tony Heller has done amazing research on old, archived newspaper reports of various natural disasters, including droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, flooding, etc. Regarding tornadoes, here are just a few of the numerous old stories he has dug up. These were all awful events, but there wasn’t national broadcast media giving round the clock coverage to them. Mr. Heller’s links include a snapshot of the newspapers’ front pages if you’d like to see the actual page-one coverage from many decades ago of these terrible weather events.

“On March 21, 1932, tornadoes killed more than 200 people in the south, including more than 150 in Alabama.”

“On May 25, 1955, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas were devastated by tornadoes which killed more than 100 people. Udall, Kansas was completely destroyed.”

“On this date in 1896, an F4 tornado killed dozens of people near Des Moines.”

“More than 100 people were killed in Illinois by tornadoes on May 26, 1917.”

“On May 27, 1896 St. Louis was largely destroyed by a tornado - which killed more than 100 people.”

The simple lie that weather is becoming more severe is simply disproven by history. In 1900 the city of Galveston, TX was destroyed by a hurricane. It was the worst natural disaster in US history, with more than 8,000 lives lost on Galveston Island alone, and many more killed on the mainland. Not even 21 months later, the town of Goliad, TX was flattened by a monster tornado, with more than 100 lives lost in that small town. If that sequence of natural disasters were to happen now, the climatistas would claim these events were scientific proof that Texas must cease all oil and gas production.

The belief that bad weather is caused by sinners among us is perhaps the most primitive of religious beliefs. Sadly, our ruling class and media are enthusiastic believers in The Sustainable Organic Church of the Carbon Apocalypse. As upsetting as we may find their push for global communism to “save” us from their imaginary eco-doom, it is downright despicable how we “climate deniers” are smeared by the elites as being responsible for tornadoes and hurricanes because we refuse to surrender our freedom to the climate cult.

If the day came that there was never another carbon molecule burned for fuel, and if every human life were extinguished from the Earth to save the planet, there would still be on average just as many tornadoes and hurricanes as before, as they moved through their various cycles of frequency and strength.

The only “records” being set for tornadoes and other natural disasters is record media coverage and record hysteria.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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