Bill Nye the unscience guy

The recent Oklahoma tornado is a top-ranked F5 one, although not as big as a 1999 one (see WUWT post here).

It's a shame to see this happening in the mainstream media, but CNN immediately seized upon the event to talk up the climate change angle.  Within hours of the latest Oklahoma tornado Piers Morgan and Bill Nye were linking it to climate change.

The terms now used are climate change and climate disruption.  The term global warming is apparently completely out of favour.

Tornadoes are a fact of life in this part of North America and have been for millennia. Regrettable as these events may be, there's nothing unprecedented about them.

Bill Nye turns out to be quite the unscience guy.  The first thing he fails to inform viewers of is that there has been no global warming of earth's average temperature for almost two decades, therefore this tornado is not due to conditions that are any different to 17 years ago.

The heat from global warming apparently goes directly from the greenhouse layer to the bottom of the ocean, without warming the earth's surface on the way through, yet somehow still disrupts the climate.

Even if there was warming, all these tenths of a degree wouldn't do anything.  Any way you look at it, there is no climate crisis, and this tornado sure doesn't prove one.

Only the unscientific mind can look at a single data point and say: yup, climate change.  The scientific mind looks at the trend, a trend which doesn't show any correlation to rising carbon dioxide levels at all:

Bill Nye said there's more energy in the atmosphere due to global warming.  Except, that energy hasn't been increasing for 17 years.  But he's right, more temperature does mean more energy.  Problem is this doesn't necessarily translate into worse weather.


More Energy = worse weather events, is simplistic reasoning, as I have pointed out before.

Bad weather, hurricanes and tornadoes are caused by temperature differences, not magnitudes.  Tornadoes are not the result of global warming, but of the difference in temperature between cool dry and warm moist patches of air.

As far as I can tell, the tornado was caused in combination with the southward travel of the jet stream, which is usually further north this time of year.

If anything, this southward displacement of the jet stream is a sign of global cooling, not warming.

The following picture comes from this Yahoo news article concerning viewing the tornado from space:

 From the article: "In the animation, you can also pick out so-called 'jet streaks', where the clouds are being pushed along at upper levels by the jet stream over Oklahoma. This will also add fuel to our storm's fire."

More likely, it seems the earth is in a cool-down phase.

Russian Scientists say period of global cooling ahead due to changes in the sun

What Bill Nye won't tell you is that May has been unusually cold in the US and this is why tornadoes are likely to be stronger.

US Headed For The Coldest Spring On Record

Shocking cold and snow in central U.S., first May snow on record in Arkansas

And cold in other parts of the northern hemisphere:

Why was the start to spring 2013 so cold?

From the above link: "March 2013 was the second coldest March in the UK record since 1910..."

It's been colder than average lately in my part of the southern hemisphere, Brisbane, Australia.

South-east cold continues

Single digit temperatures on the way

And in New Zealand:

Ski fields optimistic after NZ cold snap

The IPCC says that climate change or disruption only occurs as a result of warming.  So, the chain of events is warming --> disruption; not disruption --> maybe some warming down the track.  You clearly need warming to get disruption.  Yet the warming is not occurring.  

CO2 in the atmosphere went to 400ppm recently as was heralded by so much fanfare from the warmist press.  Yet all measures of bad weather show no upward trend.

If anything, this disaster shows that you need a powerful economy, to be able to respond and help those affected.  Measures like the Keystone pipeline should be encouraged, so as to expand jobs and energy independence.

You could spend trillions of dollars to stop carbon dioxide and it still wouldn't make a perceptible difference to the weather, and bad weather events will still happen.  It just means that when tornadoes and the like do strike you will be all the poorer due to environmental restrictions and therefore less prepared for them.

Lord Christopher Monckton has calculated that adaptation strategies to deal with climate change are 50 times more cost effective than mitigating CO2 and other emissions.  (See here or here.)

========================

Update 22/05/2013:  Colder means more tornadoes and warmer means less:

Comparing US Tornado Count to HadCRUT4

From the blog post:

"It is clear that tornado activity was higher during the 1940-1975 cooling period, after which there was an abrupt drop. The following warming period is characterised by a notably lower level of tornado activity." 

Update 2:  I just saw Joe Bastardi say on Fox News O'reilly Factor that the cold Pacific is fueling these tornadoes.