How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos by David Pogue

Author:David Pogue [Pogue, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Tornadoes and Climate Change

You might imagine that climate change means more tornadoes, because there’s more wet, warm air at ground level. And indeed, the U.S. 2019 tornado season was the worst in a decade; at one point, 500 tornadoes struck within 30 days.

But you might also imagine that climate change means fewer tornadoes, because there’s less cold air up high. If that upper air is warmer, there are fewer forces to begin that horizontal rolling pin of air.

So which is it: more tornadoes or fewer?

The answer is neither. The number of tornadoes hasn’t seemed to increase over the last few decades, and scientists haven’t yet proved or disproved a link between climate change and the number of tornadoes. Of course, it’s incredibly difficult to count tornadoes, given their relatively small size, their brief life span, and the huge number of variables that affect them (time, season, major weather patterns).

What does seem to be happening, though, is that:

The tornadoes are becoming more powerful. As with hurricanes, it’s not the quantity that’s going up, it’s the quality. And that quality is “more devastating”; tornadoes are becoming about 5.5% more destructive every year.

The tornado zones are shifting. The United States gets more tornadoes than any other country: about 1,200 a year. They’ve been known to form in all 50 states and in every season. But traditionally, most of them arise in Tornado Alley (Figure 12-6), and mostly between March and early June. In recent decades, however, they’ve been creeping eastward, into the Midwest and Southeast. The traditional Tornado Alley has seen a decline in tornado numbers, but the states to the east have been getting significantly more.

“The leading theory is a reduction in soil moisture and precipitation across the Great Plains, due to climate change,” says Vittorio Gensini, coauthor of the study that revealed the shift.

That drift means some good news for Tornado Alley: somewhat fewer tornadoes. But it means bad news overall, because tornadoes are far deadlier and more destructive in the Midwestern and Southeastern states. Just ask the victims of the 2019 tornado that struck Alabama and Georgia, produced 170-mph winds, and killed 23 people, or the March 2020 tornadoes that killed 25 people in Tennessee.

Gensini calculates that a tornado in Mississippi or Alabama is about eight times more likely to kill somebody than one in Texas or Oklahoma.

The reason: The Southeast is far more densely populated than the Tornado Alley states. Meanwhile, more than 60% of the residents live in mobile homes and weakly built buildings. “No mobile home is a match for even an EF-0 tornado,” Gensini says.

Figure 12-6. The old Tornado Alley, the darker blob, is giving way to an even larger, Eastern tornado zone, covering more states—and more populous ones.

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