I have already discussed that I believe the answer is "no." That posting also cites Dr. Judy Curry's belief the answer is no. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concurs and says,
So far, we have not been able to link any of the major causes of the tornado outbreak to global warming. Barring a detection of change, a claim of attribution (to human impacts) is thus problematic...
But, still, the question persists.
So, I would like to cite some preliminary work done by Drs. Roger Pielke, Jr., Kevin Simmons, and Daniel Sutter comparing the tornado season of 2011 to records since 1950 when the Weather Bureau (now National Weather Service) began to keep comprehensive records of tornado occurrences.
The graph below is from Simmons and Sutter and it shows the year to year levels of tornado damage, adjusted for inflation, to December 31, 2010. You see spikes in 1953 (the season I have compared 2011's to), 1966 (Palm Sunday tornado outbreak) and 1974 ("Superoutbreak").
|click to enlarge|
If global temperatures were correlated to tornadoes, you would see a spike in the graph at 1998 and the last decade would be much higher than the high level of damages in the 1966-1978 period when world temperatures were much cooler.
|World temperatures (click to enlarge) from 1950 to 2010 to match the period of the|
tornado graph. From Hadley Climate Research Unit, Great Britain
However, Dr. Pielke wondered how 2011's horrible tornado season would look, if added. Roger went on to say,
The Simmons/Sutter dataset provides one means to answer this question. Regular readers will know that it is not enough to look at disaster data over time, even if it has been adjusted for inflation, for the simple reason that society is always changing. The exact same weather extreme occurring years apart will cause more damage if people build more property and accumulate more wealth in the area affected. Simmons figure shown above has no such “normalization” applied to it.
What Roger means is that inflation does not tell the whole story. For example, a tornado in 1974 could not possibly have destroyed a "home theatre" because such a thing did not exist. Roger often normalizes damage figures for hurricanes and other storms to gross national product and other measures. So, he did a back of the envelope calculation for 1950 and 2011 to date represented in the figure below:
|click to enlarge|
Interestingly, the downward tornado trend since about 1980 is even more pronounced until this year.
While this data is very much preliminary, it pretty well puts the metaphoric nail in the coffin of the hypothesis "tornadoes are getting worse due to global warming."