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Human Events...
The Tornado Year
Struggling to understand an awful tragedy.
by John Hayward
05/24/2011
CNN has an oddly phrased sub-head for today’s story about the unusual
number of killer tornadoes we’ve seen this year:
The tornado that killed 117 people in Missouri this week puts the U.S.
on track for a record-breaking year, despite improved forecasting and
warning systems. [emphasis mine]
“Despite?” Why would “improved forecasting and warning systems”
reduce the number of tornadoes? They don’t control the weather,
they predict it.
One gathers from reading the whole story that they’re talking about a
record-breaking year for tornado fatalities. The Joplin tornado
is the latest in a string of tragedies, which meteorologist Greg Carbin
told ABC News leaves us “approaching 500 fatalities for the year to
date,” when “the average annual death toll from tornadoes has been
around 60 to 70 people.”
“That is something we have not experienced in this country in over 35
years,” Carbin continued, “and it still looks like we’re still around
the number nine as far as the deadliest year on record. So there have
been many years in the past over the past couple of generations in
which we’ve exceeded 500 fatalities in a year, it’s just that they
haven’t occurred recently.”
In fact, overall tornado deaths have been slowly declining over the
past three decades, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of a
growing population. They dipped sharply after the 1970s, most
likely as a result of improved forecasting and construction
technology. They’ve held fairly constant, with a very slight
decline, in each succeeding decade. An article at BrainPosts. Com
provides these totals:
Decade
Total
Deaths
Deaths per Million
1950s
1419
8.6
1960s
942
4.9
1970s
998
4.7
1980s
522
2.2
1990s
579
2.2
2000s
556
1.9
The total for the 2010s, of course, are very high because of the
horrific tragedies over the past couple of months. There’s little
doubt this will go down as the worst decade in a long time, unless
we’re extraordinarily fortunate over the next nine years.
“Fortune” is the key factor in understanding the Joplin disaster.
It was a twist of incredible bad luck that such a powerful tornado
rolled through the middle of a populated area, and chanced to destroy
the local hospital. As a general trend, an increasingly large and
centralized population produces greater odds that a tornado will hit a
heavily developed area.
Also, according to an article in the International Journal of
Epidemiology cited by the BrainPosts essay, one of the primary risk
factors for injury or death in a tornado is “advanced age.”
Medical science has given us an aging population, with more people
enjoying longer lives, and more elderly citizens capable of living on
their own. This could be a factor in paving the way for more
injuries and deaths when a tornado smashes through an area with many
elderly residents.
Of course, you just know another explanation for the killer tornadoes
will be offered. You probably thought of it the moment you began
reading this article. The UK Daily Mail, which once again
collects some of the most remarkable images of the devastation in
Joplin today, asserts that “Many weather experts are blaming global
warming.”
Hilariously, they explain why any such “weather expert” would be a
complete idiot or a deluded fanatic in the very next paragraphs –
because “twisters generally occur when cold air hits warm air and,
because it is almost summer, the air is warm over much of the U.S.,”
while “Unusually cold air is pushing down from the north, contributing
to major storm activity.” So global warming causes cold air?
No, wait, I forgot, it’s “climate change” now, and by definition, that
can produce both cold and warm air. I don’t know why the Daily
Mail used the archaic “global warming” terminology. Do the
fanatics still call it that over in England? If so, they really
should take a cue from their American comrades and start using the more
supple “climate change” formulation.
It is natural for us to try understanding a horrible disaster, and
challenge ourselves to find ways we might prevent the next one.
Much good has come from human ingenuity rising to meet that
challenge. We nevertheless find ourselves rendered humble and
speechless by the ruins of Joplin, and the knowledge that fate defeated
science with a pillar of howling wind last Sunday night.
Update: Oh, for crying out loud. Looks like Al Roker is on the
“global warming causes tornadoes” bandwagon.
“We have had these tornadoes and earlier this week we had a tornado in
Philadelphia. And so, you know our weather, or climate change is such
now that we are seeing this kind of weather not just in rural parts of
our country, but in urban centers as well.”
Read it at Human Events
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