NY Times Climate Reporting Misleads Readers About Tornadoes

The December 18, 2024 issue of The New York Times included a large multimedia feature story by Marco Hernandez, under the headline 2024 Was the Most Intense Year for in a Decade. From the standpoint of utilizing online media for storytelling, it is impressive. Aerial views of the aftermath along a tornado’s path are vivid demonstrations of the destructive power of these storms.

A casual reader might be left with the impression that strong tornadoes in the United States are increasing, and that the increase is largely the result of industrial carbon dioxide changing our climate. There can be little doubt that was the intent of the feature. There can also be little doubt that the opposite is true.

Drawing on data from the Storm Prediction Center at NOAA, the article contains references to vast amounts of data on the number, location, strength, and cost of tornadoes in the United States. The numbers are big, and without context, potentially frightening. As of November 2024, there were 1762 tornadoes according to preliminary data, which killed at least 53 people across 17 states. They report estimated damage of $14 billion from just four outbreaks in the southeast in April and May alone. Yikes!

Here we can see that in terms of raw numbers of tornadoes, 2024 has the most since 2011:

Ref: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/#torgraph

A Closer Look at the Data...

But what are the data really telling us? Is the high tornado count in 2024 part of a trend? Have tornado numbers been rising, falling, or hovering around a steady average? Is the tornado count number biased by increased detection using radar networks, and the armies of people with cell phones who fill my Facebook feed with storm chaser twister videos? Is the rising cost of damage caused by more storms, stronger storms, rising investment in affected areas, or building less resilient infrastructure?

The author acknowledges the effect of detection bias in the data: 

“Tornado detection systems have improved, especially since the 1990s, allowing scientists to count tornadoes that might have gone undetected in previous years, said John Allen, a climate scientist focused on historic climatology and analysis of risk at Central Michigan University. That plays a role in the historical trend showing more tornadoes in recent decades.”

This is reference to the NEXRAD network that forms the backbone of our severe weather observation capability. The first installation was completed in 1992, and by 1997, all 159 stations were completed. Since then there have been upgrades giving the radars even higher resolution and more sensitivity to detect even the smallest tornadoes. In 2008 “super resolution” was added to the system. Between 2010 and 2013, dual polarization radar was deployed to better distinguish different types of reflected signals, from rain, snow, ice, hail, birds, bugs, leaves, or other lofted debris. Additional upgrades are in the works, allowing the radar to sweep different elevations and angles with ever better resolution and discrimination.

source: Wikipedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NEXRAD_map.jpg

The Obligatory Implied Culprit: Climate Change

The introductory section of the article closes with:

“But 2024 could end with not only the most tornadoes in the last decade, but one of the highest counts since data collection began in 1950. Researchers suggest that the increase may be linked to climate change, although tornadoes are influenced by many factors, so different patterns cannot be attributed to a single cause.” (emphasis added)

Woven into the narrative of the story is the assumption that tornadoes are getting not only more frequent, but also more intense. Prof. Tyler Fricker of the University of Lousiana Monroe is quoted saying, “When you combine more intense tornadoes on average with more vulnerable people on average, you get these high levels of impact — casualties or property loss.”


Social Determinants of Tornado Outcomes

Importantly, Dr. Fricker also acknowledges that more and more lives and assets are in harms way, and that people in poorer areas, like rural Louisiana, have fewer resources to harden their homes and businesses against severe storms. Economic development and weather-resistant infrastructure go hand-in-hand. The same storm hitting the same population in a wealthy area will endanger fewer people who will recover quicker than a poor area which may not rebuild for years, if ever. There are many social determinants of the impact of tornadoes and other severe weather that go beyond the mere strength and number of storms. The difference between the map of where the tornadoes are, and where the tornado-related fatalities are makes this clear.

It is important to keep in mind the human impact of tornadoes. These are not just numbers. People and communities can be devastated by a tornado outbreak. But the numbers can and should help guide public policy to make sure people get the protection they need, and we are not misled by biased information. There have always been tornadoes, and there always will be. We should be prepared.

Painting with an Orange Brush

Much of the story focuses less on the number of storms and more on their location. The centerpiece of the data presented in the article is a county-by-county map of the 48 contiguous states that shows how the number of tornadoes in each county from 2002-2022 compares with 1981-2001. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas figure prominently with disproportionate numbers of counties in shades of orange, indicating more storms. This is based on the NOAA data of every verified tornado in the United States from 1950-2023. [REF: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/data/1950-2023_all_tornadoes.csv ] 

Source: Hernandez, Marco. "2024 Was the Most Intense Year for in a Decade." New York Times, December 18, 2024.

The baseline period of 1981-2001 is a problem because we know it is affected by the improved detection of small tornadoes over that time. Even though the article acknowledges detection bias as an issue, when it comes to presenting data to the reader visually, nothing is done to correct for that bias. The vast majority of counties show an increase in the number of tornadoes from 2002-2022 relative to that artificially low baseline.

Quantifying the Bias in the Data

We are able to quantify the bias by looking at historical trends in the detection of tornadoes of different strengths. Like many destructive natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, asteroid strikes, or avalanches, tornadoes follow an approximate power-law distribution. This has been studied by Elsner et al. [Ref: J B Elsner et al 2014 Environ. Res. Lett. 9 024018 ] The power-law, also called the “1/f law”, states that the frequency of an event is inversely proportional to its power. Stated simply, a tornado that is 10 times as powerful will occur 1/10th as often. For this reason, there are roughly 2 times more EF0 than EF1 tornadoes, 3 times more EF1 than EF2, 3.5 times more EF2 than EF3, 4 times more EF3 than EF4, and 11 times more EF4 than EF5.

This chart shows the recorded tornadoes by EF category. You can see that the upward trend is driven by weaker storms. Relative to EF0-2 storms, EF3-5 are barely visible at the top margin, but they are responsible for most of the harm to life and property.

If we look at the frequency of EF3+ tornadoes as a share of the total, we immediately see the problem. It starts at around 10-15% in the 1950s, and shrinks to around 2-3% after 2000.

Unless you believe there has been a change in the power-law distribution of tornadoes causing tornadoes to trend weaker over time, you have to accept that the data for EF0-2 tornadoes is contaminated by detection bias. One way to correct for this bias is to focus on EF3 and stronger tornadoes. They are far less likely to have been missed in the 1980s, and they are responsible for the vast majority of human impact. If we focus on just the most destructive tornadoes with EF3 and above, we see the trend towards more tornadoes goes away, and actually reverses.

A Clearer Picture Emerges

When you compare the yearly rate of EF3+ tornadoes to the yearly tornado-related fatalities, it becomes clear that these are the tornadoes that are almost entirely responsible for the loss of life. Notable in the data is the tragic 2011 "super outbreak" in the vulnerable states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennesee which made that the worst year for tornado related fatalities in over 60 years.

Tornado track length biases the data further. Prior to the NEXRAD network, the path length of a tornado was measured largely by ground observations. With sensitive radar instruments, it is much easier to track a tornado through multiple rural counties, increasing the county count, without increasing the number of tornadoes. This is not speculation. We can see a rise in the average reported track lengths of EF3+ tornadoes in the data.

This graph requires a little explanation. The blue line is the average track length for all reported and measured tornadoes from 1950-2023. The green line is average of just the EF3+ tornadoes. Since weaker tornadoes have shorter tracks, the detection bias over time for weak tornadoes drives the average down. But looking at just the EF3+ tornadoes, the average length rises after 2000. This is due to improved tracking of stronger tornadoes as they travel and pass into the weaker phase of their life cycle.

No Increase in Tornadoes, But Is Their Location Shifting?
The NOAA data convincingly demonstrates that there is no sign of tornadoes getting stronger or more frequent, and to the extent there is a trend, it is towards fewer of the most destructive tornadoes. However, there is some reason to believe that the center of tornado activity has moved a little south and east. The table below aggregates the county data used in the orange map above into states. Then it accounts for bias by counting only EF3, 4, and 5 tornadoes. There are a few surprises. Florida, goes from a major decrease to a significant increase, while Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Oklahoma go from big increases to big decreases. This reinforces the hypothesis that tornadoes are trending southeast. The unbiased accounting shows a trend towards increased strong tornadoes in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, and fewer in the more northwestern hotspots of Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Minnesota, and South Dakota. 

If tornadoes really are trending more to the south and east over time, due to changes in atmospheric patterns, this should have some policy implications. The infrastructure in these areas is not as hardened against severe weather than in places where severe weather has historically been more common. Also, these are some of the most economically disadvantaged regions of our country.

Building for Resilience

The first and most obvious policy conclusion is that the energy and transportation infrastructure in these areas, especially the electric grid, should not be dependent on the weather for power. To the extent that the electric grids in these areas use weather-dependent solar and wind energy, they become both unreliable and more vulnerable to storms, which can shatter solar photovoltaic panels with hail, and uproot them with strong winds. Wind turbine blades can become deadly projectiles, in addition to being destroyed. Mission critical vehicles should not be dependent on the electric grid to refuel. Building out nuclear baseload capacity and natural gas power supply for peak demand will go a long way towards making energy reliable and affordable in all weather. Even 100% reliable and dispatchable power generation can not reach the people who need it if the transmission lines are down. But a downed transmission line can be repaired much more quickly and cheaply than a wrecked wind farm or solar array.

Jacksboro, TX 3/25/2022
Source: @LiveStormsMedia

The good news is that there is no reason to believe that tornadoes in the United States are getting more frequent or stronger. The bad news is that regions of the country that should be making their infrastructure more resilient to the kinds of weather that will always come around eventually are instead making their energy infrastructure, and people, more vulnerable. This is the story that The New York Times could have told their readers. Instead, they left their readers with the impression that tornadoes are getting worse, and that solar panels and wind turbines could make them safer, when the exact opposite is true.

***

On Vaccine Passports

This week, NBC reported that “Gov. Charlie Baker said Massachusetts may "soon" deploy a digital COVID-19 vaccine passport similar to those in use in other states, he stressed that he remains opposed to requiring that businesses screen customers for proof of vaccination.

"I've never supported or agreed to any sort of statewide vaccine mandate program," Baker said Tuesday. "We just want to make sure that people have the ability, if they've been vaccinated and want to have proof that they've been vaccinated, that they can easily download it onto their phone and use it whenever they need to."

Vaccination has proven to be extremely effective at preventing serious illness and death from COVID-19. The data show that the mRNA vaccines in particular are among the safest and most effective vaccines in history, but that protection is limited. New variants like Delta and Omicron are able to cause illness in vaccinated people, especially those who have not received vaccines in the last 6-9 months. COVID-19 can also be transmitted through vaccinated people, though not as virulently as through the unvaccinated.

The data also show that prior infection and recovery from COVID-19 is at least as effective as vaccination, although far more risky.

Businesses, especially health-related ones, like hospitals, physical and massage therapists, etc., or schools, and performance or conference venues that bring large numbers of people together in a central indoor location, have a right to protect themselves and their customers with measures like a requirement of vaccination. States overstep their bounds and hurt us when they substitute their judgement for the decision making of countless people making their own individualized risk/benefit assessments, whether it be through a vaccine mandate, or through a mandate not to allow vaccine requirements.

It is up to each individual and business owner to decide if vaccination and vaccination requirements are right for their goals and values.

A vaccine passport system that allows people to certify their vaccination status to those who choose to require it, so long as it is voluntary, should not be considered a violation of anyone’s rights. But, that does not mean it is a good idea.

The most obvious problem is that people who have recovered from a COVID-19 infection are at least as “vaccinated” as those who have had two mRNA vaccinations. A widespread vaccine passport system that makes second-class citizens of people recovered from infections is irrational and socially corrosive.

The second most obvious problem is that both vaccination and prior infection have a “shelf-life” that decays over time. This is both because the immunity itself wanes, and because new variants have emerged that break through the partial immunity conferred by both vaccination and prior infection.

A ham-fisted vaccine passport system that depends only on vaccine status, and doesn't fully account for both the immunity conferred by prior infection, and for waning immunity over time in the face of new variants, is likely to do more harm than good. It will both provide a false sense of security that lets new variants run rampant through waning immunity, and unfairly exclude people with recovered infections from full social participation.

The lesson of masks should have taught us something. Masks work very well at preventing the spread of COVID-19 (and other respiratory viruses), but mask mandates do not. The reason for this is that mask mandates create an incentive to comply in the least effective way possible, with flimsy pieces of cloth improperly worn, rather than a properly worn surgical mask. We can expect a vaccine passport to suffer the same problem. If someone with a single J&J vaccine in February is cleared by the passport system, and an unvaccinated person who recovered from a Delta infection in October is not, then it is worthless.

Remembering 9/11/2001, twenty years later.

The morning of September 11, 2001 was one of those crystal clear, cool, dry, early September days that let you know Autumn in coming. It was my second day of classes in medical school at Boston University. As a 41 year old first-month medical student, it represented a new beginning for me. After 20 years as a computer programmer, engineer, and mathematician, I was starting a new career in medicine, with a rough plan to become an oncologist. The front of the main medical school entrance faces southeast, on the flight path of the planes departing from Logan Airport. They roared past, high over Albany Street, left to right. I remember regarding the weather with the term pilots sometimes use, “Severe Clear.”

September 2001 was a time of both personal and general optimism. The Cold War was over. The markets were booming, near all-time highs. I was aware of what Francis Fukuyama had called, “the end of history,” to describe the ascendancy of liberal democracy across the globe, and the waning of the ideologies and conflicts that had described much of history through the Twentieth Century. Into this unprecedented time of optimism, prosperity, and peace, I was starting a new career in medicine. Liberty, civil rights, international cooperation, and free markets, were advancing across the globe. Poverty, war, and nationalism were in rapid retreat. The internet was connecting people everywhere with a promise of unlimited access to knowledge, connection, and mutual understanding.

Nowhere was this more evident than in medicine, which has always been a very international community, with an ethos that transcended national, cultural, and linguistic borders. My new friends in medical school were from everywhere, Libya, Lebanon, Romania, Afghanistan, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, India, Taiwan, and more. My chosen field of oncology seemed poised in particular for rapid advancement. A rough draft of the complete human genome had recently been announced, and could be accessed almost instantly by researchers globally.

I was in the cafe in the basement of the medical school when the television in the corner of the room showed a live broadcast of a smoking World Trade Center in New York, after a passenger jet from Boston had hit one of the towers. Had I just watched that jet roar by earlier in the morning? A crowd had gathered in the room. There was much discussion about how such a thing could happen. We were watching the live broadcast when the second passenger jet hit the South tower. My breakfast rose in my throat, realizing I had just watched hundreds of lives instantly and horribly snuffed out in a ball of fire. This was a terrorist attack. Everything had changed. It did not seem important to go to the next class, which was Psychiatry.

When the South Tower collapsed, about an hour later, the basement of the medical school suddenly felt suffocating. I went out into the courtyard, under that cool, blue sky. I sat on a bench, covered my face, and sobbed into my hands. At that moment, I saw the end of all that optimism. I saw our opening up to the world being coming to and end, and being replaced by a new war. I saw civil rights being curtailed, and a return of all the ugliness that Fukuyama’s “history” had to offer. I sat there for a long time under that deep blue sky, thinking about how the world had just changed, and thinking about thousands of lives so violently and malevolently taken.

I would later learn that my sister's husband, a Manhattan real estate broker, had an early morning meeting in the WTC rescheduled to later in the day at the last minute. This probably saved his life. My stepsister's husband was also called away at the last minute, after organizing a conference for dozens of his colleagues in finance at the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the North Tower. None of them survived.

Now, twenty years later, I am an oncologist at Boston Medical Center, and on the faculty of BU. The scientific optimism of 2001 has proven to be justified, and continues to be, with advances in oncology coming so fast that it is a struggle to keep up. It continues to be a privilege for me to work with colleagues from a huge diversity of backgrounds.

However, we are still digging ourselves out of the cultural rubble that has given us several wars, a surveillance state, a closing of international doors, poisonous political polarization, legislative and executive branches of government both run amok, an opioid epidemic, and civil liberties in retreat. Much healing remains to be done.

It still hurts to see those pictures.

Murray at Middlebury, when the walls fell.

Of all the stories of campus speakers being shouted down, censored, or attacked by protesters, the one that should give libertarians the most pause is the faculty and student led riot that prevented Charles Murray from speaking at Middlebury College. It is important that libertarians understand that event for what it was, because it creates an opportunity for libertarians to favorably distinguish ourselves from both the Left and Right.

Dr. Charles Murray
(photo credit: wikimedia)

Charles Murray is a political scientist, sociologist, and author with a doctorate from MIT in political science, and an undergraduate degree in history from Harvard. He is most widely known for three books, Losing Ground (1984), The Bell Curve (1994), and Coming Apart (2012). In these books he critiques United States social policy, discusses the troubling segregation of the "cognitive elite" from larger society, discusses the potential heritable and environmental causes of individual and group differences in cognitive abilities, and the problem of increasing insularity of a highly educated, wealthy, and privileged minority from society in general.

These are controversial and "hot button" topics. Even though we almost universally accept the variability and heritability of many qualities, with expressions like "the apple never falls far from the tree," the rigorous scientific exploration of what exactly that means raises the specter of eugenics, and "scientific racism," from darker times past. Unlike many in the field, Murray is willing to follow the data wherever it leads, even if the questions are uncomfortable. They are particularly uncomfortable for those who believe axiomatically that the only source of inequality between groups is social injustice.

Murray became most identified with the libertarian movement with the publication of In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government (1988), in which he described principles of government most likely to produce a happy society. Not surprisingly, these were largely, though not entirely, libertarian principles, including among other things, giving parents control over their children's education, removing all constraints on who schools can hire, radical decentralization of planning, and generally lowering the barriers faced by individuals and groups who are trying to improve their condition in life. This made him very unpopular with those who favor centrally-planned, government solutions to organizing society.

One of the anti-intellectual practices of the Left is to label their opponents as being "discredited," or having been "refuted." Sometimes this is in reference to writings by someone who has denounced their opponent, with or without substantive refutation. This becomes a piously repeated shibboleth, "X has been discredited." Which leads to, "We don't have to listen to X because he is discredited," and finally, "X should not be permitted to speak because he has been discredited." When asked what, exactly X got wrong, they are helpless to answer.

Vice Magazine interviewed some of the student organizers of the Middlebury protest against Dr. Murray. One of them was Aliza Cohen who said, "...[A]ll of these attacks on affirmative action are rooted in his ideas––that racism is connected with IQ, and that students of color don't belong in institutions of higher learning. So I actually think the point of shutting it down is saying, "These ideas aren't what we're engaging with, they're discredited."  Another student, Hana Gebremariam said, "Another part of the frustration for students is that Charles Murray is painted as a scholar, even though his work has been refuted many times, and we know that his work cannot stand any kind of criticism for any kind of academic standards." (emphasis added).

Anyone familiar with Murray's work would conclude from this that Ms. Cohen and Ms. Gebremariam have not read any of his books, and furthermore believe that it would be wrong to do so, because he has been "discredited." Ms. Gebremariam refers to the received wisdom of Murray's refutations and lack of scholarship, which again is risible to anyone who has read his work which, because of its controversial topics, is far more carefully researched than most social science.

Protesters at Middlebury also whipped up mob sentiments by shouting him down with chants of "Racist, sexist, anti-gay. Charles Murray go away!" This is nonsensical, as he has long been on record as supporting gay marriage and equal legal rights for all people, as one would expect of a libertarian. He also supports legal abortion, further separating himself from mainline conservatives. Middlebury protesters, including Ms. Cohen, made the over-the-top accusation that Murray was a "white nationalist," which no reading of his work could support. Having whipped themselves into a frenzy of hatred against an imagined version of Charles Murray that did not exist, events went downhill from there.

When it became clear that the mob would not let the event go on in the hall, the College moved the event to a different building where it could be live-streamed on video, with questions taken via Twitter. The mob followed, tripping building fire alarms to further prevent Murray's thoughts from being presented or challenged.

Prof. Allison Stanger, is a prominent liberal professor of political science who interviewed Murray with the intent to challenge some of his ideas. She was injured trying to escort Murray to safety when a rioter pulled her hair and wrenched her neck. Stanger described the event as, "The saddest day of my life." She wrote:

Prof. Allison Stanger
(photo credit: Middlebury faculty web site)

"I want you to know what it feels like to look out at a sea of students yelling obscenities at other members of my beloved community. There were students and faculty who wanted to hear the exchange but were unable to do so, either because of the screaming and chanting and chair pounding in the room, or because their seats were occupied by those who refused to listen and they were stranded outside the doors. I saw some of my faculty colleagues who had publicly acknowledged that they had not read anything Dr. Murray had written join the effort to shut down the lecture. All of this was deeply unsettling to me. What alarmed me most, however, was what I saw in student eyes from up on that stage. Those who wanted the event to take place made eye contact with me. Those intent on disrupting it steadfastly refused to do so. It was clear to me that they had effectively dehumanized me. They couldn’t look me in the eye, because if they had, they would have seen another human being. There is a lot to be angry about in America today, but nothing good ever comes from demonizing our brothers and sisters." (emphasis added)


Prof. Stanger is correct that the protest was an exercise in demonizing others. Tribalism works in large part by uniting around a common enemy who is dehumanized. For Prof. Stanger's colleagues to protest against Murray's lecture having not read anything he had written, without forming an independent judgement of his work, makes no sense in the setting of an academic truth-seeking institution. However, from the standpoint of a ritual display of tribal loyalty, it makes perfect sense. Ignorance of Murray's work only enhances the loyalty ritual. If your participation in a ritual group bonding event is contingent on your independent judgement of its rightness, that makes you an unreliable ally. Ritual demonstration of gang loyalty is most convincing when the member does something that would be wrong in normal circumstances.

Faster than anyone could have predicted, both Left and Right are regressing into warring, unreasoning tribes seeking enemies to demonize and cult leaders to follow. With the Right newly engaged in economic nationalism, and the demonization of immigrants and religious minorities, and the Left doubling down on all the regressive excesses that in part gave rise to Trump, and offering up a steady stream of local and national protests that highlight their censoriousness, over-the-top accusations, and overweening political correctness, we libertarians have an opportunity to distinguish ourselves as something much better.

People are becoming increasingly disgusted with the regressive politics of both legacy parties. Libertarians are the allies of all the people, without regard to race, gender, class. We reject both violence, and its incitement. We are the only clear and consistent advocates for removing the roadblocks that prevent every person from reaching their potential. We encourage your independent judgement. We embrace reasoned debate, and free expression.

I think libertarians are partly to blame for what has taken place on college campuses, by not having enough campus outreach. A larger libertarian presence among student organizations could easily have provided the missing voices of reason, tolerance, and fair play. If there ever were a call to action to improve our campus outreach, this is it.

Torture of Tornado Data in the United States is Increasing

In the October 17, 2014 issue of Science, Brooks et al publish the claim that tornadoes, while not increasing in frequency, are increasingly “concentrated” among fewer, more intense days. [Ref: H.E. Brooks, G.W. Carbin, P.T.Marsh. Science, 346, 349-352 (2014).] This claim is based on analysis of EF1 or greater tornadoes in the NOAA Severe Weather Database files [Ref: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/#data ] for the 60 years 1954 - 2013.

It is well known that increased population and improved doppler weather radar systems has allowed weaker and more remote tornadoes that previously would have gone undetected to be counted. It is also well known that strong EF3+ tornadoes have been declining over this period. So, I suspected that this report of increasingly “concentrated” tornado days, much like the reports of increased rainfall intensity, in the absence of increasing precipitation overall, was an exercise in data torture and failure to recognize biased data. As you will see, I was not disappointed.

Let's begin with the last 60 years of tornado data, collected by year and by intensity on the enhancedFujita scale of EF0-EF5: 

Figure 1: Annual count of US tornadoes by enhanced Fujita scale classification reveals a sharp rise in the detection of weak tornadoes after 1990.

It is immediately evident that the annual number of recorded US tornadoes is rising, and that this increase appears to be driven by EF0 tornadoes, after 1990. This is not surprising, because 1990-1997 were the years that the national NEXRAD doppler radar network was deployed. [Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEXRAD#Deployment] To the eye, the EF1 and EF2 numbers do not appear to be biased by a similar sharp increase. But, let's look a little closer. First, we know that weaker tornadoes occur more frequently than stronger tornadoes, but we assume that the ratio of weak to strong tornado frequencies should not change very much over time. This is consistent with the theoretical and observed power law, or 1/f law, governing the relative frequencies of storms of different energies. [Ref: J B Elsner et al 2014 Environ. Res. Lett. 9 024018 http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/2/024018/article ] Therefore we can examine how much more frequently EF0, EF1, and EF2 tornadoes are observed relative to EF3+ tornadoes. While it is very difficult to quantify exactly how much detection bias contaminates the tornado frequency data, we can approximate it by assuming that EF3, 4 and 5 tornadoes are unlikely to have been missed in any of the last six decades.

Figure 2: Frequency of EF0-2 tornadoes in the US relative to EF3+ tornadoes, 1954 – 2013.

Viewed in this way, the contamination of both EF0 and EF1 frequency data by detection bias is clear. In the 1960s and 1970s, EF1 tornadoes were recorded 4-5 times as frequently as EF3+ tornadoes, but since 2000, they have been detected about 8 times as frequently. There is no physical basis for this to be the case, which violates the approximate power law behavior of tornadoes [Ref: J B Elsner et al 2014 Environ. Res. Lett. 9 024018]. It is also clear that the EF2 data is not similarly biased, maintaining a flat frequency that is about 3 times that of the EF3+ tornadoes for the last 60 years, which is consistent with value of 2.8 taken from the observations of Elsner et al.

Brooks et al produced this figure, showing the number of days with EF1+ tornadoes, along with the number of days with over 30 EF1+ tornadoes:

Figure 3: (Brooks et al 2014 Fig. 4) used to claim that EF1+ tornadoes are increasingly clustered.

Using the NOAA source data and the OpenOffice spreadsheet program, I was able to reproduce essentially the same figure:

Figure 4: The number of days with observed EF1+ tornadoes is trending down, but the number of days per year with more than 30 observed EF1+ tornadoes (right side scale) has increased.

If the method of Brooks et al is applied in the same way to EF2+ tornadoes, while accounting for the fact that EF2+ tornadoes are about one-third as frequent, and adjusting the clustering threshold to >10 EF2+ tornadoes per day, figure 5 is obtained:

Figure 5: The number of days per year with observed EF2+ tornadoes is decreasing, but the number of those days with more than 10 observed EF2+ tornadoes (right side scale) remains flat at about 2.7 days per year.

Finally, if we restrict ourselves to the most destructive tornadoes, those of EF3 or greater, it is obvious that the frequency of EF3+ tornadoes in the United States is decreasing, and that there is no increased “clustering” of days with more than three:

Figure 6: Declining frequency of EF3+ tornadoes 1954 – 2013, and number of days with more than three (right side scale).

I was disappointed to see this misleading abuse of statistics reported so uncritically in Science. It is unfortunate that the Science reviewers were not able to see what someone with an undergraduate understanding of statistics should readily see. As demonstrated in the above figures, there is no reason to believe the perceived increase in days with large numbers of tornadoes claimed by Brooks et al is anything other than another artifact of detection bias, because it only applies to weak tornadoes that could have escaped detection in the past, and disappears when restricted to EF2+ or EF3+ tornadoes. This seems to be part of a trend towards credulity by reviewers, and lack of rigor by authors of papers that support public concern about climate change. One never sees this in the medical literature on new cancer treatments, although 30 or 40 years ago, one did.

I understand the frustration of global warming activists who want to be able to claim that destructive weather phenomena, like tornadoes, are becoming worse in some way, when the data says the opposite. Rather than following the data wherever it leads, Brooks et al have chosen to torture the data until it confesses. As the Scottish poet, Andrew Lang said in 1910, "He uses statistics in the same way that a drunk uses a lamp post, for support rather than illumination."

Anyone who calls carbon dioxide "carbon pollution" is trying to fool you. Part I.

People who use the term "carbon pollution" are dishonest, and deserve your contempt, just as anyone who is trying to deceive you earns your contempt. Ordinary people know what carbon pollution is. It is soot, the black stuff in smoke, or the exhaust of an old diesel engine. It is dirty, and full of cancer-causing polyaromatic hydrocarbons. Responsible producers of energy work hard to minimize the emission of pollution. Since the passage of the Clean Air Act, enormous progress has been made in doing so. Carbon dioxide is none of those things. It is clean, invisible, and essential for life.

Carbon dioxide is the gas we exhale in exchange for oxygen. It is what all plants need to grow. Carbon dioxide is the main raw material that living things use to produce all of our food, our clothing, and even homes, if they are made of wood (cellulose) or cement (limestone). The fact that plants can breathe this trace gas, and use it to grow, despite it being only 0.03 - 0.04% of our atmosphere is nothing short of a miracle. To accomplish this miracle, plants use the energy of the sun to separate the carbon from the oxygen, and build large molecules with it, like cellulose and oils. Animals harvest this energy by recombining the carbon in these large molecules with oxygen to make carbon dioxide.

Fossil fuel is the fossilized remains of plants. So, in a sense, it is fossilized solar energy. When we burn fossil fuels, we release that energy, and return the carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If we are responsible, we do our best to minimize the dirty parts of burning fuel, like soot, and sulphates, and release mostly clean, odorless, colorless carbon dioxide.

You are by necessity very familiar with the feedback mechanism that keeps the right amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in your body. It is called breathing. If you breathe too slowly, or hold your breath, dissolved carbon dioxide builds up in your body. That creates the urge to breathe. Breathing blows out carbon dioxide. If you intentionally hyperventilate, then your body loses too much carbon dioxide, the pH of your blood gets too high, your urge to breathe decreases, you feel numbness and tingly around your lips, hands, and feet, lightheaded, and you might even pass out. The speed of your breathing is constantly regulating the amount of carbon dioxide in your body, through negative feedback, so that it stays close to the right amount, not too much, not too little. To stay healthy, you need about 1,400 times as much carbon dioxide dissolved in your body as there is in the same volume of air around you. Even though oxygen is the main thing we need to get from the air, it is little more than a bystander in the process of regulating our breathing under ordinary conditions.

The fact that we need a fair amount of carbon dioxide in our bodies to survive is a clue that it is not pollution, any more than water is pollution. Sure, you can have too much of it, just as you can drown in too much water, but it can't be called pollution.

Yet, the political newspeak of our time has adopted the term "carbon pollution" to refer to carbon dioxide. This debasement of language is intended to muddy your understanding of carbon dioxide, and make you think of it as something dirty. As readers of George Orwell's 1984 know, it is the job of politics to debase the language. That's how the people get fooled, and harmful policies that benefit only a select few get passed. If language loses its meaning, we lose our ability to communicate and evaluate ideas. It is your job to see through that debasement, and push back.

They want you to believe that a global catastrophe will result from carbon dioxide rising much beyond its current level. When you ask them why, they talk about climate models. When you ask them how well the climate models have done prospectively modeling the climate, they will tell you, not very well, but since we are very unsure of the future, we should be cautious and not raise carbon dioxide much above recent levels. The term "carbon pollution" is also a kind of social signaling among those who would like to force a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. It is one of their gang signs.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent the outgassing of warming seas recovering from the Little Ice Age, have caused carbon dioxide to be returned to the atmosphere faster than it is absorbed from it.

There are legitimate questions to be asked about the effects of rising carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The best and most well known record of atmospheric carbon dioxide comes from the observatory at Mauna Loa, called the Keeling curve, after the late Prof. Charles David Keeling, of UCSD, who supervised the initial work of the observatory in 1958. In March 1958, the level was 316 ppm, and in March 2014 it was 400 ppm, a 26.6% increase. That is a significant amount, and potentially a cause for concern. People with a sincere interest in addressing this concern do not debase the meaning of words, because that undermines the clarity needed for serious investigation.

(to be continued in Part II)

The new Captain America movie is an allegory for our time.

I saw the new Captain America movie with my daughter last night. I liked it much more than I expected, in part because it explores themes that are currently in the headlines, and in my social media feed. I had feared the movie would be an exercise in jingoistic flag-waving as the super-human embodiment of American values and virtues battles evil alien forces. Instead, it is a thoughtful exploration of the eternal questions of liberty versus security, trust versus suspicion, and obedience versus resistance. Also, Scarlett Johanssen gets lots of screen time. (Caution: moderate spoilers ahead.) The movie centers on a plan to impose peace and order on the world through an algorithm that analyzes a person's propensity to cause problems for society, or for the government, by processing the entirety of the world's digital traffic, public and private. Those people are then killed using a new technology that there is no need to reveal here. It is calculated that by eliminating just 20 million people, life for the remaining 7 billion will be orderly and peaceful. The phrase "final solution" might come to mind.

Meanwhile, in the headlines, we read the ongoing revelations from Edward Snowden's whistleblowing of the NSA, the utilization of the IRS to target politically unfavored groups for "special scrutiny", the latest Supreme Court decision (McCutcheon v FEC) overturning the aggregate limits on contributions to multiple campaigns, and most recently, the forcing out of Mozilla's CEO.

Brendan Eich, the Mozilla co-founder, and inventor of Javascript, was forced out of his recent CEO appointment because of a $1,000 contribution he made on behalf of California's 2008 Proposition 8, opposing same-sex marriage. As far as we know, Mr. Eich did not say or do anything in any of his roles at Mozilla, including CEO, that could be construed as anti-gay. He affirmed his support of Mozilla's very liberal health benefits for same-sex partners, and expressed no interest in treating LGBT people any differently with respect to hiring, promotions, or benefits. Outside of this one campaign donation in 2008, he seemed the very model of a modern liberal CEO.

(Ironically, in 2008, presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, gave far more support to California's Proposition 8 than did Mr. Eich, directly by making his opposition to same-sex marriage part of his presidential campaign, and indirectly by organizing a very effective get-out-the-vote campaign in communities that were far more hostile to gay marriage than was the average Californian. I have yet to see an organized campaign from the opponents of Proposition 8 to hound him out of office for it.)

Furthermore, Proposition 8 was dead, and rightfully so. After winning in California's election booths in 2008 by 52% to 48%, the law was ruled unconstitutional in a California court in 2010, and the United States Supreme Court chose to let that ruling stand in 2013. Nevertheless, somebody saw fit to comb the records of that now dead campaign, discover Brendan Eich's contribution there, and target him to be purged. In light of this, the campaign to oust Eich seems much more like a vindictive exercise of power than a defense of civil rights too long denied.

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, one of the villians attempts to stop Natasha Romanov by asking her if she is prepared to have her dark past exposed on the Internet.

This new algorithm for analyzing the digital record, using it to identify "problem people", and targeting them to be purged from their jobs, their careers, their schools, or their homes, should have us all concerned. You will increasingly be judged by your life's worst moments, or the moments that can be cast in the most negative light. Everyone is now subject to career-ending character assassination at all times. Even if the accusations are false, it does not matter. Mark Twain's lie that once got halfway around the world while the truth was pulling on its shoes, now goes around the world thousands of times, spawns memes, reaction vlog videos, and outraged articles in the Huffington Post, in the same time.

At the same time that our lives are increasingly exposed to digital inspection, the explosion of the regulatory state means that we are all guilty of some violation, or as Harvey Silverglate writes, we commit on average "Three Felonies a Day." The job of law enforcement is less one of bringing justice to those who break the law, and more one of selecting whom to prosecute. Those with unpopular opinions, or unpopular occupations, of course. The prosecutions that will get you elected mayor, or governor. Right, Mr. Guliani? Right, Mr. Spitzer?

In reference to the Mozilla affair, a friend of mine who immigrated to the US from the Soviet Union recently observed, "There is no freedom of speech, except for those with nothing to lose." If that is true, then free, democratic society is doomed. It is the precise opposite of the principle of "skin in the game," advocated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as a guiding ethical heuristic to reduce catastrophic outcomes. If the only voices we empower are the ones who pay no price for being wrong, we are sure to go wrong very quickly.

What will life be like under this new constant threat of being purged? Should we accept it as the new normal? Will there be a mechanism to purchase indulgences that protect you from being targeted? Can the American values that worked in the pre-digital age survive Total Information Awareness?

A free, tolerant, pluralistic, democratic republic can only survive if we can live and work side-by-side with people who have very different ideas than we do about how to live. Live and let live is the rule of a civil society. People who fancy themselves as champions of "diversity" might imagine that a generalization of draconian campus speech codes to society at large will promote harmony. However, it is becoming more plain that what it promotes is witch hunts.

Our culture is changing. People have so much choice in their sources of information, entertainment, and recreation that they consciously or unconsciously silo themselves in comfortable echo chambers of like-minded people. It does not help that the recent economic downturn also makes people feel squeezed and insecure. Opinions are hardened and people more socially retrenched. Decreasingly able or willing to engage with challenging views, we become more tribal. Our gang signs are the things we "like", the words we use.

In this new culture, the first approach to disagreement is to silence the opposing view. Social media facilitates this, while at the same time being a gain medium for comforting lies and half-truths that are shared at internet speed, and that serve to further polarize opinion. Why try to understand why someone seems to harbor such horrible opinions when it is easier to "unfriend" them?

It will take an ever-increasing amount of effort to find and engage people of divergent views with humility and respect, but it might be the most import social activity there is. Charles Murray, in "Coming Apart", has written eloquently about how small minority of people who make the major political, economic, and cultural decisions in our society are becoming more and more isolated from the vast majority of people who have to live with the consequence of those decisions. They have less and less "skin in the game". This is a trend that can only end in catastrophe.

The theme of the Avengers movies is that each super hero has their own special abilities, but also bears the physical and psychological scars of their past. None of us are perfect, and all of us are a little broken. The guy that invented Javascript also voted against marriage equality. If we judge each other by our worst moments, we will never get the good stuff.