Tornado Season: A Little Perspective Please

There are certain people who always like to trumpet something as being worse than it is. And we are getting that from some environmentalists who are using the tornado season to once again hype their claims. This year's tornado season has been the "deadliest" on record but, and this is a big one, NOT REALLY. It all depends on how you want to look at the numbers.

The sad death toll this year is 520, the highest confirmed total previously was in 1953 ,when it was 519. Notice the use of the word "confirmed." Records indicate previous years with higher death totals, but in the past numbers were always estimates. For instance, in 1917 they estimated 551 deaths, 540 in 1927, and 552 in 1936. In fact, if those estimates are close, then 2011 was not the deadliest year, but the fourth deadliest year. And even that is not quite accurate.

What people are forgetting is that the population of areas hit by tornadoes is much larger than it was at any time in history. Consider an imaginary town called Tornadoville. In 1953 the town is wiped out and every single resident, within a one square mile area is killed. In 1953 the population might be 100 people. By 2011 that same square mile might have 300 people living there. If another tornado hits the town and kills 150 people it is the "deadliest" year but the death rate went down from 100% to 50%.

The more people there are in area, the greater the likelihood of some deaths, not because the tornadoes are necessarily worse, but because the population density is higher, making it more likely that some people will be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By comparison let us take 1953 and compare it to 2011. The US population in 1953 was 160,184,192. Today, it is estimated to be 307,006,550. That is almost double what it was in 1953. The number of deaths per million in 1953 was almost twice as high as it is today. In reality the number of people killed per year by tornadoes has been declining if you take into account the greater number of people who live in the path of tornadoes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has put together this chart showing the death rates from tornadoes, normalized to take population factors into account.


You can click on it to enlarge it if you wish. Here is how they explain it:

The purple points are the annual death rates, the red line is a simple smoother, the solid black line is a long-term trend in two sections (1875-1925, 1925-2000) and the cyan lines are estimates of the 10th percentile and 90th percentile from 1925-2000. Brooks and Doswell (2002) have an extensive discussion of the record and its possible implications.

But life is always more complicated that it appears on the surface. The death rate can decline simply because we have better houses to protect people, more advanced warning systems, better ability to evacuate an area, faster communication, etc. What about the number of tornadoes? Are they increasing due to evil climate change? Some would want you to think so, and openly claim that is happening. And, once again, on first glance it could look convincing. Consider the chart below, also from NOAA, about the number of tornadoes per year since 1950. It shows a clear increase.



Yet again, life is not so simple. NOAA says: "The number of tornadoes increased dramatically in the 1990s...." Now, some want you to think it was global warming. NOAA, however, finishes the sentence thusly: "....as the modernized National Weather Service installed the Doppler Radar Network." They also "began the Warning Coordination Meteorologist program increasing partnerships with media and Emergency Management across the United States." This included "the training of storm spotters" across the country. NOAA writes, "With more people trained to relay information on storm activity to the Weather Forecast Office and improved communication and digital technology, more tornadoes could be reported."

Consider a tornado in 1900. It might be a very lonely thing, spinning around in the middle of some rural county. Local folks would see it. It might even hit a farmhouse or two. They'd talk about it and the cow that went missing as a result. If the area had a local newspaper it might get mentioned there as well. No one would phone it in and to a central agency. They didn't have phones. Aunt Edith might write her sister about it. But certainly the weather forecaster on the local TV station didn't catch it, there were none. Neither did the radio, it wasn't really around either. Methods for reporting such things were scarce, and that reduced reporting. In some cases a tornado could briefly touch down and no one even realized it. Today, the radar systems pick them up, even if no one actually sees the damn thing.

Joshua Wurman, of the Center for Severe Weather Research admits the frequency of reported tornadoes has increased but says "there's pretty good evidence that it's due to improved reporting efficiency." In the end, since we are using better technology, and have better reporting, we report more tornadoes than our parents, or grandparents did. We don't actually have any evidence that tornadoes are more frequent, only that we are more likely to catch them when they do occur.

But, there is one more fallback for the alarmist: the level of intensity for the tornado. We have a system called the Enhanced Fujita Scale (EFS), which is used to determine storm intensity. And while it tries to include factors like wind speed it also relies heavily on "damage indicators." That means "the type of structure which has been damaged." Since the number and type of buildings damaged, along with the degree of damage, are used to determine the EFS rating, there are some drawbacks. As Wurman noted: "I've seen strong tornadoes going through open fields, and they don't really do a whole lot of damage."

Along with population growth, which increases the raw number of deaths, you get an increase in the number of buildings. More buildings mean more structural damage, which would tend to push up EFS scales. Wurman's tornado in an empty field couldn't easily be rated high on the EFS scale. Two years later a similar tornado, hitting a newly built shopping mall, would register on the scale in ways the previous tornado did not.

Life can be a bitch, a very complicated bitch. It is surely much easier to claim that tornadoes are more frequent, we are all at risk, and global warming is to blame. That at least, will help sell papers and improve broadcast ratings.

The warped inhumanity of faith.

Normally I don't run videos of faith addicts like this one. But watch it, watch the joy on her face as she describes the massive earthquake in Japan. This is just monstrous and contemptible. (It is also very well done satire but it very well done precisely because it so accurately catches the attitudes of many of the people I knew back in the old days.)

The logic doesn't surprise me. On one had she says that the earthquake was an answered prayer to show the world that God loves them. God apparently showed his loved by raining destruction on Japan. She actually takes this a proof that God is love, because he killed all those people.

A man, with multiple children, beats a small child to death. Does that prove his love? What sort of sick masochistic personality would argued that beating children to death is a loving thing? (Oops, I forgot, the Bible certainly endorses beating them, just as long as you stay shy of actually killing them.)

The faith-inflicted reinterpret reality to fit their religion. She prayed that God would show he was loving, thousands of people are killed in a natural disaster, and that is proof that God answered her prayer. It takes a thoroughly demented mind to say that, but it illustrates the length to which believers will go in order to convince themselves that their is proof that their imaginary friend is real.

I'm an atheist, not that you haven't figured that out already. Does this dingbat really think that a god with bloody hands would convince me he existed and was loving? Anyone who would inflict such misery is not loving but a monster. Now, obviously I don't think it was a god who did this. I think it was the forces of nature acting in accordance with physical laws. Plates shift in the earth, they do it all the time. When they do, the ground shakes. Sometimes that causes tsunamis. All too often, people die.

Nature is full of forces which act in ways that are inimical to life. They are not the thoughtful actions of a thinking entity. If they were the actions of a thinking entity then the entity in question can not be reasonably called loving.

The only reason this disaster triggers this sick mental reasoning in this silly woman is that the disaster took place after "Lent" began, when Christians were asking God to prove his love to atheists. The Christchurch earthquake a few weeks earlier apparently was not involved because the Christians weren't on their knees instructing their deity how to behave.

Of all the Christian beliefs prayer, to me, makes the least amount of sense. Why do they need to pray? Can they possibly be telling their God anything he doesn't already allegedly know? How can their actions change his mind? Doesn't he already know precisely everything that will happen? I honestly see a Christians belief in prayer as a way to feel in control of the God they claim to believe in. It is like a belief in magic. It is a means by which impotent people convince themselves that they can direct the universe, or it's creator, to behave in certain ways that are commensurate with their own desires.

And why Japan? How does God, beating up on the Japanese, convince atheists of anything? No answer is giving. She just assumes atheists will look at this horrendous tragedy and think her twisted faith was responsible for it. Surely there are areas of the world where, if God were tapping on the shoulders of atheists, it might be more noticeable. An earthquake in Japan isn't exactly uncommon. It is actually rather anticipated. Now and then they are much bigger than one would expect, but this is no divine sign.

Clearly God is loosing his umph, if anything. If he wanted my attention a fireball dancing across the sky spelling out "repent" might do it. An earthquake in Japan doesn't surprise me, given that the fault lines run through that region of the world. No earthquakes there for decades would be impressive. A god who can't act in a manner inconsistent with what we already know about the nature of reality is not impressive.

And when I think of God sending natural disasters, at least in the United States, he seems to spend more time hitting the God-believing regions of the United States. The most religious area in America is the South followed by the Midwest. The least religious areas are the New England states and the West. So where did God send the worst natural disasters in American history?

• Galveston, Texas, 1900. A hurricane in this part of the Bible-belt killed somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people.

• San Francisco, 1906. Earthquake kills 3,000 to 6,000.

• Florida, 1928. Hurricane hits this Bible belt state killing 2,500.

• Louisiana, 1893. Hurricane hits this Bible belt state killing around 2,000.

• Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, 2005. Hurricane hits Bible belt states killing 1,836.

• Central and Southern US, 1980. Heat wave kills 1,700 in the two prime religious areas of the country.

• Fire, 1870. A huge fire sweeps rural Wisconsin killing somewhere between 1,200 and 2,500 people.

• Heatwave, Chicago region, 1995. Some 739 people die in this Midwestern heatwave.

• Tornadoes, 1925, Midwest and South. Tornadoes hit killing around 700.

• Hurricane, Florida, 1919. Some 600 killed.

• Hurricane, New England, 1938. 600 killed.

I stopped at disasters with over 500 fatalities or more simply because this can go on and on but the pattern does not change significantly. If I look at natural disaster with over 100 deaths and under 500 the regional count still shows God punishing the parts of the country that contain the highest number of Bible-believing Christians. There were 19 such disasters in the Midwest and South and only 3 in New England and the West. Another two straddled both sections of the country.

There are reasons that natural forces cluster such disasters in specific areas. The South gets hurricanes because borders warm ocean waters. The West gets earthquakes because the most active fault lines are there. Blizzards hit the Midwest because it gets cold enough, and moist enough, to cause them. Weather patterns favor tornadoes in the Midwest more than in Oregon or Alaska. Natural, explainable reasons determine where natural disasters strike. A tsunami isn't going to hit Utah -- if it does we're all in trouble and THAT would truly be spectacular but I wouldn't count on it proving God existence anytime soon.

But, if there is an intelligent designer intentionally inflicting these disasters, then the pattern he uses in the US would indicate he isn't the god of Christians. He keeps hitting them the hardest.

The disasters of poverty.

The earthquake in Haiti was a magnitude of 7.0. According to Wikipedia, the 1989 San Francisco quake was either 7.0 or 6.9 depending on which scale one used. In other words, the intensities were fairly similar. Haiti is devastated. If the New York Times is correct, the death toll could be in the tens of thousands, current projections put it around 50,000. The death toll in the 1989 San Francisco quake was 63, if you include indirect deaths due the quake.

The difference is wealth. San Francisco is one of the wealthiest areas in our part of the world and Haiti is the poorest. Poverty makes natural disasters worse. Wealth mitigates natural disasters. You would think that those who worry about the poor of the world would promote policies that increase wealth. Instead they push policies that restrain wealth creation and they do it intentionally, knowing those policies will restrict wealth creation.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation, an affiliate of the German Green Party, wrote a report that referred to wealthy areas, like San Francisco, as being areas populated by “over-consumers.” On the other hand, people in poor areas, like Haiti, were called “under-consumers.” But that is a misnomer since they also say, that in their ideal, centrally-planned paradise, the “under-consumers are not to catch up with the over-consumers.” They make it clear, that in the name of equality, the over-consumers have to have their wealth taken from them. They very explicitly attacked those who would try to help develop the poor nations of the world because such people “work at lifting the threshold—rather than lowering or modifying the roof… Poverty alleviation, in other words, cannot be separated from wealth alleviation.” (Note: In a rather ironic twist I worked for some time in Berlin and the office from which I worked was literally a few feet from the Böll Foundation. Our doors were immediately next to one another.)

The truth is that wealthy people can bear the burdens of the worst Mother Nature throws at us. I know the Greens want us all to live in tune with nature but Mother Nature is a bitch. She has no feelings, no compassion, and is quite happy to turn you into fertilizer. Condemn materialism and wealth all you want, but it saves lives. Sure, if you hate humans, then you won’t care. But, whatever problems the process of wealth creation is claimed to cause, pale in comparison to the problems that accompany poverty.

The disaster in New Orleans was a similar example. When the government-maintained dikes failed, during Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans was flooded. The people who suffered were the poor, especially the poor who relied upon government mass transit for evacuation. The better off of the city fled in their cars. However a huge percentage of citizens didn’t own cars. Randal O’Toole wrote:

We have heard that 60 percent of New Orleans residents are black, but it has been little noted that a third of those black families do not own a car -- nor do 15 percent of white families. It is these people who were left behind when those with cars evacuated.

O’Toole notes that in previous years, when wealth was lower in the country, death rates from hurricanes were higher. When Galveston was hit by a hurricane in 1900, people couldn’t escape in time because autos didn’t exist. Now, major cities can evacuate before a hurricane arrives because people have cars. Even mass transit works better to evacuate people when more people own cars since mass transit is then used to evacuate far more manageable numbers.

The quake in Haiti inflicted massive death because poverty magnifies the evil that comes with natural disasters. The San Francisco quake led to few deaths, even with a similar magnitude, because the area is productive and wealthy. And, as I will show in a follow-up post, most the deaths in the 1989 San Francisco quake were due to government failure.

The point that Bjorn Lömborg has made in regards to threats from any alleged global warming is that the “solutions” offered by the Green left tends to push “wealth alleviation” without being able to do much good. The net result is that the future world is poorer because we destroy wealth in order to reduce any alleged warming the computer models predict. Given all the assumptions of the warming crowd that could mean that we make future generations less able to deal with any problems, not more able. Policies that destroy wealth creation today mean a poorer world tomorrow and poverty, not wealth, exacerbates disaster. Of course, instead of thinking about what he says, his critics just pretend he has said something very different.

Lömborg’s point on global warming is similar to what I am saying about the earthquakes and about hurricanes. Wealth reduces the harm of disasters while poverty exacerbates them. The best way to deal with disasters, I dare say even those that some say humans create, is to make the poor of the world richer, not the make the rich of the world poorer.