Though no one knows where and when mean global temperature occurs or what it might mean (if anything), Bill Nye the Science Guy says it fueled the Oklahoma tornado.
The Blaze reports:
Nye said climate change has to be considered after a catastrophic weather event like the devastating tornado in Oklahoma. He also claimed 10 of the last 12 years are the “warmest years recorded.”
“Thunderstorms are driven by heat and a tornado is a super thunderstorm — result of a super thunderstorm. So you’ve got to figure that if there’s more heat driving the storm then there’s going to be more tornadoes. Now this is the kind of thing that is worth investigating,” he added.
I taught high school science for a third of a century. The students’ favorite extra credit assignment was to watch a Bill Nye videotape on a science subject and make a list of his scientific errors.
So, Death Valley can expect to see even more tornadoes?
I wouldn’t hold your breath. Nye did release a pithy rebuttal to Watt’s in-depth critique of his fraudulent CO2 experiment. However, it was less than a single screen and presented no actual information, just vague claims that they did it wrong with nonsensical explanations (glass was too thick, etc). It was obvious that he either did not read, or simply ignored all the actual claims by Anthony. I doubt that he will take time away from his champagne and lucrative lecture circuit to read a smaller blog.
You might get his undersecretary though.
Bill Nye doesn’t seem to understand basic meteorology. Tornadoes, hurricanes, and other violent storms are created by large temperature DIFFERENCES and they’re behavior is best understood by meteorologists not climatologists. If the global atmosphere and oceans warm relatively uniformly as is assumed, there will be no difference in the strength of these violent storms.
Should Nye read this: You are an intellectually vacant and dishonest, morally bankrupt, politicized so-and-so who either never knew or rejected the scientific method.
By your words, you belong to those who originally perpetrated the CAGW hoax and continue to do so, damaging countries’ economies, dividing the citizens of such countries and irreparably harming the trust due honest, real scientists and engineers.
>I would hate to have to withdraw my membership because Mr Nye cannot behave as an ethical scientist.
did you just find this out?
In the small possibility that Bill Nye reads this, I’ll say the following.
The actual data shows that warmer average temperatures correlates with fewer damaging tornados. Keep in mind that there were very few weather radars around to count all the tornados back at the start of the timeframe of the dataset. So it seems likely that the number biasses upwards as instrumentation gets better with time. Which makes the recent low counts even starker.
In other words global warming causes fewer tornados.
I say this as a scientist and long term member of the Planetary Society which Mr Nye heads. That society does good work. I would hate to have to withdraw my membership because Mr Nye cannot behave as an ethical scientist.
Last year NOVA had a program on tornados. Except for the obligatory reference to climate change at the very end, the folks who study tornados pretty much acknowledged that even with all of the high tech instruments, they still cannot explain how tornados develop – i.e. what causes them.
Perhaps they should be talking to Bill Nye, seeing as he knows the answer.
Bill Nye knows that before global warming there were no tornados and everything was beautiful and “natural”.
Tornadoes occur primarily in “continental” climate areas: prairies with sharp contrasts between winter and summer and places where cold air and hot air come together sharply. They occur in Asia and in Australia, although North America is their primary area. Lucky us.
Equatorial areas, of course, rarely see the combination of cold and warm air that produces tornadoes.
If Bill Nye is correct why are there not more tornados in Brazil, or Congo, or well you get the idea.
Sentinel events versus trends. Katrina was a sentinel storm — it was of moderately great power but it also hit a densely populated area and its surge overwhelmed weak levees. Its significance lies not in it being a common event but because we know such events do happen and we should prepare for them. You know, like moving the city’s buses out of the flood plain and maybe using them to remove citizens from the path of danger.
Sandy was the same kind of thing. Storms of the same kind have hit the Northeast before; Bloomie’s been so worried about stuff that isn’t his business that he forgot what was his business. Sandy was a sentinel event: it will recur, though we don’t know when or where.
Landfalls by hurricanes are trend events; they happen repeatedly over time and with an element of predictability. They have trended low over the last ten years, coinciding with a standstill or slight retreat of what we call average temperatures. The same is true of tornadoes; for all that we continue to have some huge hits in populated areas, tornado reports are trending low.
The tragedy in Moore is a sentinel event. It was a very powerful tornado in a highly populated area, something we’ve seen now and then since recorded history in the Plains.
From what I’ve heard, the local governments had learned from previous events and had taken about all the reasonable precautions they could. Most of the children who were killed were apparently in one school and it was hit directly. Global warming or cooling can’t direct the tornado onto a school.
But this is exactly what enthusiasts of any kind use. A big and sad story, a link to a favored cause that sounds plausible, then try to gain support and action. It occurs quite naturally across the range of human interests.
Now that’s putting the junk into science. Climate alarmism is not dying. It’s not even slowing down. First a weak hurricane in a low hurricane summer in New York and now a tornado in Oklahoma – oh my!! It’s picking up speed.
Nothing new here. Nye has been an idiot and a tool for a long time.
http://ecologic.typepad.com/shaws_ecologic/2009/04/bill-nye-the-science-fraud.html
Bill Nye also says that children understand climatology better than grownups. He’s messed up.