I sat mesmerized this morning by some of the video of the tornadoes that pummeled so much of the nation’s south and nearby regions this week. A fabulous and terrifying collection of mostly-amateur and local TV show videos is at Al.com, apparently the website for the Birmingham News, that Christine Kneidinger compiled. Sit down, watch, be glad you were not in any of these movies.

Aside from direct disaster stories, a number of outlets looked hard for signs from authorities that they know why so many, now. Well, global warming. Or maybe it’s the jet contrails. Or the clearing of forests. Actually were any of those different historically than they were, we’d be in a different weather parade. The bigger question is whether chances for tornado outbreaks are up or down or what. Nobody really knows.

Here are how two major outlets handled the inevitable question and its corollaries: is this climate change?

• NYTimes – Kirk Johnson: Predicting Tornadoes: It’s Still a Guessing Game ;
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid, Kristi Eaton: Killer twisters likely among largest, strongest ; While the G.W. question is unanswerable and ambiguous at best, they do declare something dramatic: This last batch as the hed says may have included the most powerful tornadoes, ever, as in EVER, recorded.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2011 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.