People on both sides of the Climate Change argument get the terms “Climate” and “Weather” mixed up quite a bit but it’s the members of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult that have the most trouble being consistent.

There was a brief twitter exchange that highlights this perfectly:

For those of you not familiar with the people mentioned and topics covered in these tweets it might not be obvious that this twitter exchange proves my point so let me elaborate.

Andrew Revkin is a climate journalist who writes the dot Earth blog and was the originator of the twitter exchange.  Eli Rabett has a pro AGW cult blog called Rabett Run and it’s written as if a certain rabbit is asking questions about the climate.   Michael Mann (who was brought into the twitter conversation and who retweeted the last tweet by Eli) is the inventor of the famed Al Gore ‘hockey stick’ and can be considered one of the AGW cult high priests.

Mr. Revkin starts out by asking a very good question.  Since the number of F1+ tornadoes in 2011 was blamed on Climate Change then what do we make of the drastic drop off in F1+ tornadoes of late?  This question was the subject of a blog post that was linked in the first tweet and the graph in question is show below from an NOAA report.

In the blog post, the author starts out by echoing my concern about how people confuse “Climate” with “Weather” and here are a few quotes from that blog post:

“As informed citizens, we need to be careful about conflating weather, climate change and natural disasters.”

“Weather (i.e. the extreme cold we’re having in Texas this spring) is weather. Climate is the measurement of long-term weather data over broad areas (i.e. global temperatures over a 50 year period). For most people, these are pretty easy distinctions to make.”

Even this pro-AGW blog makes opening statements that I agree with.  Weather is short term and you shouldn’t draw conclusions about climate based on a 1 year event – whether it is a drought in the Midwest, a flood on the Mississippi river or a hurricane in Florida.  It takes decades to determine a trend and that is what we need to focus on when we are hoping to discern trends in the Earth’s climate.

So the issue of the twitter exchange is tornadoes and their relation to climate change and that is where the rest of the twitter exchange shows the double standard of the AGW cult.

Eli cautions Revkin to not worry about the incredibly low number of F1 tornadoes this year but instead to “wait.”  Wait?  Wait for what?

Well, one day after Eli sent the “wait” tweet a string of devastating tornadoes hit the Midwest and that caused Eli to tweet his excitement that he was right!  And Michael Mann couldn’t contain himself either and he retweeted the Eli revelation that Tornadoes are back just like their AGW climate models proved!

You see the problem?

AGW cult members like to dismiss the 15 years we’ve seen global temperature anomalies flat but then they jump for joy when a 2 day tornado event happens!

And go look at that graph above one more time.  If you were to draw a trend line for the past 59 years that line would basically be flat at about 500 per year.  No upward or downward trends which means tornadoes seem to be unaffected by climate change (if you even believe there is such a thing).  And this is no surprise to those who understand climate science and weather as Dr. Roy Spencer pointed out (emphasis mine):

“If there is one weather phenomenon global warming theory does NOT predict more of, it would be severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.”

“Tornadic thunderstorms do not require tropical-type warmth. In fact, tornadoes are almost unheard of in the tropics, despite frequent thunderstorm activity.”

“Instead, tornadoes require strong wind shear (wind speed and direction changing rapidly with height in the lower atmosphere), the kind which develops when cold and warm air masses “collide”. Of course, other elements must be present, such as an unstable airmass and sufficient low-level humidity, but wind shear is the key. Strong warm advection (warm air riding up and over the cooler air mass, which is also what causes the strong wind shear) in advance of a low pressure area riding along the boundary between the two air masses is where these storms form.”

“More tornadoes due to “global warming”, if such a thing happened, would be more tornadoes in Canada, where they don’t usually occur. NOT in Alabama.”

And don’t forget that in 1975 Climate Scientists blamed an increase in tornadoes on Global Cooling.

Tornadoes can’t be used as a proxy to determine the presence or absence of AGW climate change but that won’t stop the AGW cult from using every weather disaster to push their snake oil on an unsuspecting public.  These guys really are awful people and they continue to give Science a bad name.