Did global warming cause last week's deadly tornadoes?
By Chris Conway Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
When is a tornado just a tornado? And when is it climate change? These questions have been asked quite a lot in the days following the frightening onslaught of powerful tornadoes that swept across the nation's midsection Friday, leaving behind landscapes that looked like war zones. |
We live in a world being altered in ways obvious and not so obvious by a warming climate fueled by the combustion of fossil fuels. But it is not so easy to tag a specific weather event as being caused by climate change — in other words, that, but for the changing climate, the event would not have happened. Yet scientists increasingly are able to detect the signature of climate change in many weather events. They might not have been caused by climate change per se, but they certainly may have been made worse or more frequent. |
James B. Elsner, a climatologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has spent a good bit of his career studying hurricanes, tornadoes and climate change. In a guest essay this week, he writes that scientists have "started to detect changes in collective tornado activity, including more powerful storms, and are beginning to understand how these changes might be related to global warming." |
But they are still far from the point of being able to say climate change caused a particular storm. |
Still, something seems to be going on out there. He writes that tornado outbreaks have become more common during cooler months in recent years, and are occurring more often across the Southeast compared with the Great Plains. Moreover, there is evidence that tornadoes are becoming more powerful. |
"What is causing these changes in tornado behavior is still unclear," he writes, "but global warming is probably playing a role through changes to the environments" leading to the catastrophic weather conditions that took shape over a wide swath of Middle America last Friday, leaving tragedy in its wake. |
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