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At least 100 feared dead after tornadoes devastate six US states:
US President Joe Biden has pledged support to states affected by a swarm of devastating tornadoes that demolished homes, levelled businesses and left at least 100 people feared dead.
Describing the tornadoes as likely "one of the largest" storm outbreaks in history, Biden on Saturday approved an emergency disaster declaration for the worst-hit state of Kentucky, where at least 22 people have been confirmed dead.
"It's a tragedy," said a shaken Biden. "And we still don't know how many lives are lost and the full extent of the damage."
He added, "I promise you, whatever is needed – whatever is needed – the federal government is going to find a way to provide it."
The powerful twisters, which weather forecasters say are unusual in cooler months, destroyed a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, ripped through a nursing home in neighbouring Arkansas, and killed at least six workers at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said the collection of tornadoes was the most destructive in the state's history. He said about 40 workers had been rescued at the candle factory, which had about 110 people inside when it was reduced to a pile of rubble.
[...] Mayfield Fire Chief Jeremy Creason, whose own station was destroyed, said the candle factory was diminished to a "pile of bent metal and steel and machinery" and that responders had to at times "crawl over casualties to get to live victims".
[...] The tornado outbreak was triggered by a series of overnight thunderstorms, including a supercell storm that formed in northeast Arkansas. That storm moved from Arkansas and Missouri and into Tennessee and Kentucky.
Unusually high temperatures and humidity created the environment for such an extreme weather event at this time of year, said Victor Gensini, a professor in geographic and atmospheric sciences at Northern Illinois University.
"This is an historic, if not generational event," Gensini said.
If early reports are confirmed, the twister may have touched down for nearly 250 miles (400km), he said, a path length longer than the longest tornado on record, which tracked for about 220 miles (355 km) through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana in March 1925.
[...] The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center said it received 36 reports of tornadoes touching down in Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
[...] In Edwardsville, Illinois, Fire Chief James Whiteford said at least six people were killed when an Amazon warehouse collapsed. Some 45 people survived.
[...] In Monette, Arkansas, one person was killed and five seriously injured when a tornado tore through a nursing home with 90 beds.
Also at phys.org, CNET, and CNN
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @04:18AM (23 children)
Let's hear all the excuses why this is NOT about climate change. Please khallow, enlighten us how the consequences of our actions are, ummmm, what now. Just some bad luck seems to keep happening year after year?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @04:33AM (1 child)
Enlighten us about how climate change also caused the 1974 super outbreak. I'll be awaiting your explanation.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @05:01AM
Climate change is so powerful that it can cause back-propagating timewise eddies in the space-time continuum. Is that Eddie's chesterfield sofa?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Sunday December 12 2021, @05:18AM (3 children)
The weather patterns have already changed. Look at the path the tornadoes took this time and how long they stayed on the ground. More heat equals more water and energy into the storms. Furthermore, the areas that do get water are getting more of it:
So these rain events in the US and Canada over recent years are a small taste of what is yet to come if the crisis is not managed immediately.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @12:33PM (2 children)
FTFY. Past the point of no return.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @03:03PM (1 child)
Nah. If there were the will to take drastic measures and think longer term than a year or two, we could drastically change the climate intentionally and benefit from it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @05:24PM
I don't own a sea front resort in Florida. I don't give a shit about preserving the current status quo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday December 12 2021, @05:31AM (2 children)
Well, since nobody is going cut back on emissions, maybe the best thing to do is to up our building standards and codes to be more wind/flood resistant, fire too, while we're at it. Buy your Arizona beachfront properties before the prices jump.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Sunday December 12 2021, @08:33AM (1 child)
Adaption is going to be so much more expensive than mitigation would have been.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday December 12 2021, @06:49PM
Doesn't matter now, adapting is what we have to do. Now is a good time to start.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2021, @03:54PM (1 child)
Was it also climate change in the 19th Century? https://www.axios.com/extreme-weather-worst-tornado-outbreak-89dbf8f6-5c63-4593-8890-0cf944513350.html [axios.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 14 2021, @02:18AM
It doesn't bother you at all that all your examples are in spring or early summer, but that we now get that weather in December?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 12 2021, @05:59PM (9 children)
Sounds like you just answered your own question. As I've noted before, extreme weather harm is mostly due to non-climate factors like idiots building in harm's way and poor emergency preparedness. Here, bad luck indeed seems the best explanation not ambiguous climate change.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday December 12 2021, @06:40PM (8 children)
Seems to me we've had a decade or more of "bad luck", Mr. Ostrich.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday December 12 2021, @11:29PM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday December 14 2021, @07:29PM (6 children)
Yes, just like the species that caused the first mass extinction by exhaling a gas that was toxic to them, oxygen, we are making our own environment uninhabitable to our own species. Unlike them, we can do something about it unless we all have our heads in the sand (or up our asses). The fact that WE are causing this unprecedented climate change is the difference between past climates.
We could become another Venus, you know. Is that what you're hoping for?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 14 2021, @08:15PM (5 children)
How? I can't help but notice that the "species" that caused the first mass extinction (which incidentally probably was far from the first mass extinction!) is still around to soak up the problems that are allegedly making our own environment uninhabitable. I think such hyperbole poorly suits you.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 18 2021, @08:47PM (4 children)
Oxygen was toxic to the first species that exhaled it. When a similar species later appeared, the oxygen was here. Not all species die in any mass extinction, and that's when you have the biggest leaps of evolution.
And there were no previous extinctions than the one caused by oxygen, they've looked back as far as life has existed here. The first billion years of life on Earth is called "the boring billion" because there was no evolution at all for that first billion. 750 million years later and here we are, half a dozen mass extinctions later. Were it not for the one 65 million years ago, we would not be here.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 19 2021, @08:41AM (3 children)
I strongly doubt that. What happened to all those organisms without cell walls, for example?
Or rather, there's no fossil record about which to describe that evolution. The cell wall and much of the internal biochemical processes came from somewhere.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday December 19 2021, @06:08PM (2 children)
What happened to all those organisms without cell walls, for example?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/tiny-vampires-fossils-life-evolution-earth-science/ [nationalgeographic.com]
Or rather, there's no fossil record about which to describe that evolution/I>.
RTFA.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 19 2021, @09:18PM (1 child)
The Great Oxygenation was thought to have started 2 to 2.4 billion years ago. So you're speaking of a period of time afterwards (the "Boring Billion" seems crudely to be the span of time 1 to 2 billion years ago - and I remain in strong doubt that they have enough information to know that period of time was boring in the evolutionary sense). And I'm speaking of extinctions that would happen well before the Great Oxygenation event.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 22 2021, @09:14PM
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday December 13 2021, @06:31AM (1 child)
That's not me, but I'll bite. As always, "weather is not climate", unless it fits an agenda and this applies to *both* sides. Super-violent F4 and F5 tornado outbreaks have always been rare, but they've always happened. The fatality profile of an outbreak will additionally correlate to population, construction quality, and random chance.
For example, let's compare this outbreak to the Great Natchez Tornado of 1840 [wikipedia.org], which struck at a time when the population of the US was considerably lower and the Earth colder, but it looks like the fact that it struck flat-boats on a river had a lot to do with the high fatality figures.
So. This outbreak doesn't prove climate change; but it also doesn't disprove it. A lot of people either can't or don't want to understand events in a statistically sound way.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dalek on Tuesday December 14 2021, @04:55AM
I understand the sentiment of your post, but there is at least some merit to discussing a link with climate change.
There's a downward trend overall in tornado events in the Plains, the area historically known as Tornado Alley. Tornado frequency seems to be increasing in the Southeast, so there seems to be an eastward shift in tornado activity.
There's also some evidence that cool season tornado events are increasing in frequency, even if there isn't a similar upward trend in the warm season. The vertical wind shear (change in wind speed and/or direction with height) was on the very high end of what would be expected in the cool season, but I don't see a clear link with climate change. That said, dewpoints were in the upper 60s in parts of Kentucky and Tennessee. You typically need a dewpoint at a minimum in the low 60s to be favorable for strong to violent tornadoes like these, and that's on the low end. One of the predictions associated with climate change is an increase in the moisture content in the atmosphere. It's highly unusual to have dewpoints in the upper 60s in that area at this time of year, but it happened. There's often abundant shear during the cool season, but moisture and instability are generally limiting factors. If there's an increase in the moisture content of the atmosphere, it might very well mean that the humidity and the instability needed for tornado outbreaks will be present more often during the cool season.
I have a hard time attributing a single event like this to climate change. There is the precedent of the tri-state tornado, which occurred in March, and not far from where this event occurred. I don't know the return period for this type of event, but for the sake of discussion, let's say it was a once-in-a-century event. The limiting factor is that the atmospheric conditions needed for a tornado outbreak like this just don't occur very often at all. However, if climate change causes those conditions to occur more frequently, it might no longer be a once-in-a-century event.
These trends definitely matter because there are more tornado deaths in the Southeast than in the Plains. In a place like Oklahoma City, the preparedness (e.g., building codes, systems for disseminating warnings, emergency plans at public places, etc...) and societal attitudes are different than in the Southeast. Although there's no way to be certain, I suspect that if the same storms moved through areas like Oklahoma City and Wichita at the same time of year and the same time of night, there probably would have been much less loss of life. If strong and violent tornadoes are going to become more frequent in the Southeast, the issues that already lead to more tornado deaths in the Southeast would be exacerbated. There are very important policy considerations if events like this are going to become more frequent in the Southeast.
THIS ACCOUNT IS PERMANENTLY CLOSED