Science 2.0 Links

We are not alone for I see a wave of other former climate change believers are now demanding that politicians and law makers have the leading scientists and especially the unconscionable leading news editors, subjected to criminal charges for knowingly sustaining the criminal exaggerations of the CO2 mistake for the last 25 years. It is now appearing that issuing CO2 death threats to billions of children unnecessarily has not gone unnoticed and unlike Bush getting away with his false war in Iraq, the false war of climate change will sooner or later be dealt with in the courts. Treason charges for leading a country to a false war is one option now being looked at as politicians always need an enemy to blame.
And keep in mind that it was the scientists themselves that made environmental protection necessary in the first place when they supposedly polluted the planet with their evil chemicals and cancer causing pesticides and so how ironic is it that we bowed like fools to our Gods of science for 25 years of “unstoppable warming”?
Scientists are not gods and don’t forget that scientists also produced cruise missiles, cancer causing chemicals, land mine technology, nuclear weapons, germ warfare, cluster bombs, strip mining technology, Y2K, Y2Kyoto, deep sea drilling technology and now climate control. Proof of consensus not being real is the fact that scientists did not march in the streets when IPCC funding was pulled, the EPA was castrated and Obama’s not even mentioning the “crisis” in his state of the union speech. Consensus was a myth because if it were true, the consensus scientists declaring a climate emergency would act like it was an emergency and demand their CO2 mitigation be taken seriously. We believed a handful of lab coat consultants who said we could CONTROL the planet’s temperature and prevent it from boiling. Pure insanity as history will call this modern day witch burning. The new denier is anyone still believing voters will vote YES to taxing the air to make the weather colder. Not going to happen.
REAL planet lovers are happy and relieved a crisis was averted and real planet lovers don't hold scientists as Gods and bow to politicians promising to make colder and lower the seas and scare kids with such doomsday glee.
Stay tuned. Call the courthouse.

There is such a thing as 'loading the dice'. Each weather event now forms in the context of an atmosphere with more energy and capable of holding more water vapour. For example, there was record spring heat ahead of the cold front that brought the tornadoes. It's hardly a surprise when an atmosphere that has trapped extra energy, and is capable of concentrating more water vapour in particular locations, is demonstrating an ability to produce more extreme precipitation events (and floods), droughts, and exceptional temperatures. The visible manifestiation of this climate disruption to individual people? Exceptional weather, more frequently.

Unfortunately it's not just environmentalist marketing that is preparing this meme. The same idea is promoted e.g. by Kevin Trenberth

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/04/are-extra-tornadoes-caused-by-co2.html

who finds it "irresponsible" not to talk about man-made climate change in the context of tornadoes. This fearmongering business has become a domain of lies and fabrications many years ago and it is only up to the personal strength of the stomach how obvious lie a climate activist is ready to spread.

Everyone in the environmentalist movement has a somewhat different threshold how far he's ready to go but the qualitative fact that they're immoral liars and crooks is shared by the whole movement.

The link between Katrina and climate change is well established. Your statement above makes it look like you have some doubt.

Will science ever recover the respect lost from the climate change mistake?

In one sense ALL weather events which we are observing are due to climate change. Think about it. The average temperature of the planet has gone up nearly 1 C over the past 150 years. The climate has changed. Every weather event which takes place does so within the context of that change. It is the 'butterfly effect' on steroids. Basically, I can absolutely guarantee that had the past 150 years of climate change not taken place then the recent outbreak of tornadoes in the United States would not have happened in the same way. There might have been no tornadoes... or even more tornadoes... but the weather we experienced this year would not have been exactly the same.

Yet in another sense the only weather events which can absolutely be attributed to climate change would be those which were outside the bounds of possibility in the previous climate. There have been incidents of similar tornado outbreaks in the past so that could have happened with or without climate change. The Russian heatwave and wildfires last year were unprecedented in recorded history, but we can't rule out that similar events happened without being recorded or COULD have happened but just never hit the right conditions before. On the other hand, the breakup of ice shelves dating back to the last glaciation cycle (e.g. Larsen B) was clearly outside the realm of possibility prior to the recent global warming.

Between those two extreme ways of looking at 'whether XYZ was caused by global warming' there is the somewhat more logical approach of observing that the question is meaningless. No weather event is "caused" by just one thing. Rather, various forces either contribute to or detract from weather events. From what I've read, most scientists (Roy Spencer disagrees, but then he also argues that creationism is more scientifically valid than evolution) think that global warming should result in a net increase to the chances of tornado formation in the United States. The fact that data shows increasing numbers of tornadoes in recent decades would tend to corroborate that.

The counter-argument in the article Hank linked to above, that we simply 'missed' more tornadoes in the past, doesn't seem particularly plausible to me. We've had radar technology for sixty years and satellite tracking for thirty. Neither of those seems at all likely to 'miss' many tornadoes. There was a sharp jump in reported values in the 50s due to radar tracking, but not in the 80s when satellite tracking became available. Yet there has been a gradual increase in the decades since then. To me that reads like an actual increase rather than detection bias.