Tornadoes: What a Difference a Couple Years Makes

As long as I just posted my first item on this blog about Global Warming, I might as well follow it with the second. A few days ago, I saw this item about a blessedly quiet tornado season in the US:

The USA in the past 12 months has seen the fewest number of tornadoes since at least 1954, and the death tolls from the dangerous storms have dropped dramatically since 2011. 

Just two years after a ferocious series of tornado outbreaks killed hundreds of Americans, the USA so far this year is enjoying one of the calmest years on record for twisters. Through Thursday, tornadoes have killed only three Americans in 2013; by the end of May 2011, 543 Americans had died. 

The seven people killed from May 2012 to April 2013 is the fewest in a 12-month period since five people died in September 1899-August 1900, according to Harold Brooks, research meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla.

Great news. As the article mentions, just a couple years ago, 2011, there was a terrible series of tornadoes (an especially bad one in Joplin, Missouri) that killed hundreds.

What isn’t mentioned in the article is that the Warmists used those tornadoes and those deaths to advance their cause.  Here's an egregious example from "a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont." It's too stupid to quote, but you can read it for yourself. And the leftist website Think Progress had this:

In an email interview with ThinkProgress, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s top climate scientists, who has been exploring for years how greenhouse pollution influences extreme weather, said he believes that it is “irresponsible not to mention climate change” in the context of these extreme tornadoes.

Two years later, the silence of the Warmists is deafening. But I guess they’re too busy burning books.

(NOTE: I don't think one year of exceptionally low tornado activity is proof of anything. But the scientists who promote Global Warming should have likewise known better than to claim in 2011 that one year of exceptionally high activity was proof of their viewpoint. It's too bad they are so willing to cast their scientific training aside when it is convenient to do so to advance their political agenda.)