Some years ago, back when I had cable, I woke up in the middle of the night and turned on some remote station of C-Span. It was a hearing on climate change. A scientist was warning of super storms that would be coming soon as a result of global warming. I was struck by how strange it was that one of the most important news stories of my lifetime could receive such limp coverage.
Unfortunately, weather is such a complicated subject, that there will always be room for those who want to deny any causal link between human activity and climate change until it is too late to do anything about it.
The following link will take you to a brief discussion on the tornado that hit Oklahoma recently. It has been described as “the biggest, most destructive tornado in the history of the world.” In the following article, Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research discusses what can and cannot be said about the relationship between that tornado, and climate change.
So, in short, Trenberth seems to suggest that while one cannot directly “blame” climate change itself for any particular storm, the altered weather patterns, thanks to global warming and the increased moisture in the air, increase, fairly radically, the probability of such storms and, in turn, their size and destructive power. -Brad Friedman, Truthout