Was it just another tornado? Or is it climate change? We hear questions like this – and wonder about questions like this – every time there is a terrible outbreak of twisters, a horrible flood, a raging, racing wildfire.
We’re right to wonder, as climatologists are increasingly agreeing.
“Hotter, faster, stronger: That isn’t a tagline for the next blockbuster superhero movie. This is what climate change is doing to many extreme weather events,” wrote atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe and Environmental Change Institute associate director Friederike Otto last August in an opinion essay in The New York Times.
“As the planet warms, heat waves are getting hotter, wildfires are moving faster and burning larger areas, and storms and floods are becoming stronger,” their essay continued. “These effects are no longer a future or distant concern: They are affecting us – all of us – here and now. We are already living in a world that is two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. That means that every weather event is already superimposed over the background of a changed climate.”
Now, less than a week after Friday night’s so-called quad-state tornado carved a 128-mile continuous path as part of an outbreak that covered 250 miles across Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky, another scientist, tornado climatologist and Florida State University professor James Elsner, has sounded a similar alarm in the opinion pages of the Times.