Vocal Voices

As a suburb of Oklahoma was hammered by an EF4 (or EF5) hurricane which arrived almost without warning.

This is part of the weather becoming more and more unpredictable during climate change. If you look at the statistics for tornado deaths at the bottom of the article, you will see that only Joplin stands out with a high death rate after 1953. This is not because there have been non extreme tornado's since then, but that the US implemented weather radar which would give people sufficient warning to get out of the way of the Tornado.

As with Joplin in 2011, Oklahoma had only minutes of warning. The tornado must have been absolutely horrifying for those caught up in it. My hopes and wishes go out to the families who have been blighted and hope that they rescue all the remaining missing children from the school.

I also hope that the politicians are listening, hard. This is our future on the current emissions track. Just more and more and MORE of it.

I watched this unfold last night on Sky. Shocking!

The touchdown was a mile wide and the funnel two and a half miles wide - 45 mins of Hell! The death toll is surprisingly low given the devastation. However, the system is moving North up to the Great Lakes with, potentially, tens of millions of people in its path! Poor sods! Elusive might be one!

Not many buildings are safe from these things, especially the popular timber framed houses. The first thing I would do if building a home in the alley would be to dig a big hole, line it and cap it with concrete, then put the house on top.... there would, of course, be a tunnel and exit well away from the projected debris zone.

You will probably think me silly, however I believe that all the nuclear tests carried out above and below ground has disturbed the earths axis and we are reaping the results.

This one is simpler Kate. The atmosphere is warmer and it can hold more water. Water is energy and the manifestation of that is the storms we see.

Evidence of climate change directly.

Thanks for that suff, however don't you think that all the weapons tests, drilling etc could have an effect on the weather? we are having a lot more terrible tragedies caused through earthquakes, typhoons, floods (that bit makes sense of your theory suff)

Hi Kate,

The energy from the sun, hitting the planet is similar to thousands of Hiroshima Atomic Bombs being let off, every single day, day in, day out.

If we keep only 1% more of that energy than in the last two centuries, we unbalance the entire climatic balance. The climate of the planet is the equivalent of millions of times the entire nuclear arsenal of the world. OK the balance of that climate is easy to disrupt. However the sheer energy of that climate, as we see in hurricanes and tornado's, is impossible to avoid.

The Atmosphere has warmed, on average all over the globe, by 1C since 1900. This is not in dispute. Nobody disputes it. So, we say, 1C on average, what does that mean?

What that means is this. The atmosphere can now hold 5% more water. Of all the energy absorbed by the sun, 90% goes into the sea and 10% goes into the atmosphere. Which means the seas are warmer. Which means they evaporate more water into the atmosphere. If it could only hold the same amount of water, this would not be an issue as it would just dump it somewhere cooler very quickly.

That 5% more water is the difference between an EF4 and an EF5 Tornado. It is also the difference between a storm forming in hours or seconds. It adds to unpredictability and means more people are caught in these storms because the warnings we have used for the last half century are starting to fail.

Also, just to add fuel to the fire, when the climate warms, both the atmospheric and ocean currents slow down. That means areas of warm or cool air, areas of dry or moist air, stay in the same place. Last year a massive high pressure system sat over Siberia and Northern Russia almost the whole summer. At the same time there was a massive high over the USA causing drought and fires. The storms which normally hit the US were diverted by these High pressure systems and degraded as they came up the cooler waters of the northern Atlantic. They then ran up and over the west of the UK and Scotland finishing in Sweden, dropping their water all the way. Before pushing back down central Europe and back over the Atlantic to pick up more water.

We could exhaust the entire Uranium content of the planet, which is readily available to us and explode it as nuclear bombs and it would not come to a fraction of the energy hitting the planet in one year. Nature and planetary wide systems, are massively more powerful than homo sapiens even with our technological power. However their balance is very fragile. We have gained the power to upset the balance and must endure the consequences of the power of these natural systems when they react. Storms, flooding, drought, sea level rise, more storms, more drought. It depends where you life in the world, but you will see one of these every decade now. The Horn of Africa now sees extreme drought every 18 months instead of every 10 years....

That is the life Climate Change is giving to the humans on our planet. We can protect a smaller population from it (perhaps 2 billion or so). For the other 5 billion? Tough.....