Biden wants EPA to probe link between the climate crisis and deadly tornadoes

President Joe Biden directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate how the climate crisis influenced the deadly and devastating tornadoes that moved across several southern and central states, killing possibly hundreds of Americans in Kentucky and several other states this weekend.

Asked if the storms and the intensity have to do with climate change, Biden replied, “Well, all that I know is that the intensity of the weather across the board has some impact as a consequence of the warming of the planet and the climate change.”

“The specific impact on these specific storms, I can’t say at this point. I’m going to be asking the EPA and others to take a look at that,” said Biden. “But the fact is that we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming — everything. And, obviously, it has some impact here, but I can’t give you a — a quantitative read on that.”

While the link between global warming and disasters like wildfires and flooding are more definitive, experts say, warmer temperatures could intensify cool-season thunderstorms and tornadoes in the future.

Since tornadoes with great intensity are rare during colder seasonal weather late in the year, Friday night’s storms included one tornado that cut a path of more than 225 miles across Kentucky, the impending climate crisis appears to be a factor.

Climate analysts have long studied links between a rise in global temperatures and the increasing intensity of unseasonal severe weather events around the world, including more powerful hurricanes over longer seasonal spans, heatwaves and stronger and more widespread flooding and wildfires.

Studies suggest an increase in tornado swarms and possible shifts in storm tracks, but what about global warming connections? Here’s what scientists had to say.

There is growing evidence that “a warming atmosphere, with more moisture and turbulent energy, favors increasingly large outbreaks of tornadoes, like the outbreak we’ve witnessed in the last few days,” said Penn State University climate researcher Michael Mann.

“There is also some evidence that we might be seeing an eastward shift in the regions of tornado genesis—again, consistent with what we are seeing,” he added.

Tornadoes are complex, dynamic, short-lived and small, which makes them hard to study. But the deadly 2011 outbreak, which included the tornado that tore through Joplin, Missouri, spurred a new wave of studies that help explain how global warming affects tornado activity, said Harold Brooks, a senior scientist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.

“What we do know for the U.S. is that we see no evidence for a change in intensity of any kind,” Brooks said. Some statistics suggest changes in certain categories of tornadoes, but that’s likely based on changes in tornado reporting since the 1970s, he added.

“What has changed is we have fewer days per year with at least one tornado, but many more days with many tornadoes, up to 20 or 30. Situations that can produce a lot of tornadoes are happening more often, big days have gotten bigger. That’s something we have pretty good confidence has occurred,” he said.

In September, Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at University of Reading, and lead author of an alarming report by the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), the world’s leading authority on climate science, warned that each fraction of a degree of warming was crucial.

“You are promoting moderate extreme weather events to the premier league of extreme events [with further temperature rises],” he said.

“A lot of people are waking up today and seeing this damage and saying, ‘Is this the new normal?’ ” said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University, adding that key questions still remain when it comes to tornadoes because so many factors come into play. “It’ll be some time before we can say for certain what kind of role climate change played in an event like yesterday.”

Still, he said the warm December air mass in much of the country and La Niña conditions created ideal conditions for a turbulent event. Thunderstorms — the raw material for tornadoes — happen when there is warm, moist air close to the ground and cooler, drier air above, creating a path for humidity to travel upward.

The tornadic thunderstorm carved a 250-mile path of destruction through northeast Arkansas, southeast Missouri, northwest Tennessee and western Kentucky, hurling debris into the sky for more than three straight hours. At times, the wreckage reached an altitude of 30,000 feet. As the twister blasted through Mayfield, Ky., it sheared entire homes off their foundations, indicating its top-tier intensity.

Whether or not scientists can pin down a link between this week’s horrific storms and climate change, Gensini said there’s no doubt that the tornadoes will go down as “one of the most devastating long-track tornadoes” in U.S. history — probably the worst since the Tri-State Tornado of 1925, which tore across three states over several hours and killed hundreds of people.