This January has unquestionably been the strangest one I can remember, and I”ve experienced fifty-one of them. The month opened with a bang, with a tornado outbreak on the seventh. That was followed by a period of blizzards and bitter cold. Come tomorrow, another round of mid-forties temps and thunderstorms will be staring us in the hairy eyeball, with yet another blast of mid-teens Arctic air chasing hard on its heels. What a thermal roller-coaster!
Global warming, you say? Well, could be. But the problem with making such a quick assumption is, it ignores the fact that climate is simply a broad-scale averaging of anomalies. Extremes in the weather are, in a sense, the norm, and the uncommon isn”t all that unusual.
The twentieth century closed with the highest tornadic wind speeds ever recorded, clocked at over 300 miles per hour in the nightmare that rolled through Oklahoma City on May 3, 1999. And that tornado was just one in a devastating central Okalahoma outbreak.
n”Well, there you go,” you say. “More storms and stronger storms. Global warming.”
Not so fast, hoss.
The worst recorded tornado outbreak in modern history–the notorious Super Outbreak of April 3-4, 1974–was twenty-five years prior, long before global warming had been invented. With 148 tornadoes affecting thirteen states, and with an unmatched six tornadoes receiving an F5 rating, that event far outstrips the 1999 Oklahoma outbreak.
Okay, right–that”s still relatively recent history. Let”s go back considerably farther. On March 18, 1925, the Great Tri-State Tornado claimed 695 lives during its three-and-a-half-hour, 219-mile blitzkrieg across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. In terms of fatalities, longevity, and path length, as well as size, intensity, and forward speed, the Tri-State was a phenomenon among phenomena.
But can you draw inferences from such a storm regarding climate change? No more, I think, than you can from a 100-year flood. Such things simply happen.
Am I suggesting that global warming isn”t a real and present concern? Of course not; I think it”s pretty well established that we”ve got a problem on our hands. What I am saying is, a lot of factors go into creating weather events of any kind. Moreover, we are far more aware of whatever weather is occurring at any given time and location today than we were thirty years ago. Our warning technology has vastly improved. And our population has grown, meaning there are simply a whole lot more people around to notice the weather and feel its impact. The fact that your house got washed away by a storm surge doesn”t necessarily mean hurricanes have gotten worse; it means you built your house in a vulnerable location, just as multiplied thousands of people have been doing these past few decades, and the inevitable finally caught up with you.
I”m all for making balanced connections between storms and global temperature increases. But I”m not much of a fan for drawing snap, simplistic conclusions. Weather extremes of one sort or another occur just about every year. They”re not all that unusual. They”re just extremes. They were happening long before the polar ice cap went into meltdown. They”ll continue to happen. They are what they are–something to consider as parts of a much bigger picture. The picture is indeed an alarming one, but an alarmist perspective on isolated events neither explains nor solves anything.
