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Tornadoes Are Coming in Bunches. Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why. The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by silence7 to c/climate
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While the timing of this trend lines up with the planet’s rising temperatures, scientists are hesitant to definitively attribute tornadoes’ clustering behavior to human-caused climate change.

“The link between climate change and tornadoes is still pretty tenuous,” Dr. Fricker said. “It’s a really open and difficult question for us.” One difficulty is that tornadoes are too small on a planetary scale, and too ephemeral, to show up in the global mathematical models that scientists use to study climate change.

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[-] silence7 2 points 3 weeks ago

Yes, but it's not at all obvious why that set of things would change the temporal distribution of tornado formation in this way without increasing their quantity.

[-] halcyon 2 points 3 weeks ago

I really don’t get why you argue with every comment on the articles you post, this is at least the third time you’ve gone out of the way to discourage a comment I’ve tried to make, in communities that could really use the engagement.

The article is paywalled and you quoted that block about the tenuous link directly, seeming to imply it was meaningful or warranting discussion.

[-] silence7 1 points 3 weeks ago

Let's start with the beginning here:

  • Tornados are smaller than the minimum feature size distinguishable in climate models, so the obvious tools don't do terribly well at attributing the change we've seen to the warming that's been caused by burning fossil fuels
  • Tornado response to a warmer wold is actually complicated
  • The link is paywall-bypassing for 30 days, so you won't hit the paywall if you have javascript enabled (eg: 99.9% of people)

In short, I think you're jumping to conclusions which might not be warranted.

this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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