Climate Change & La Nina Don't Explain Record Breaking Tornado Season

We're In Record Tornado Territory By Jennifer Zeppelin, CBS4 Meteorologist

The most recent tornado outbreak has pushed our yearly total of tornadoes into record territory. The 10-year annual trend is 1,270 tornadoes per year; so far this year there has been a total of 1,577 tornadoes reported. The record yearly total occurred in 2004, with a total of 1,717 tornadoes.

Meteorologists Can't Explain Exactly Why So Many Are Forming

"...Right now we're on track to break all previous counts through the end of the year," said warning meteorologist Greg Carbin at the Storm Prediction Center earlier this month.

Global warming cannot really explain what is happening, Carbin said. While higher temperatures could increase the number of thunderstorms, which are needed to trigger tornadoes, they also would tend to push the storm systems too far north to form some twisters, he said.

La Nina, the cooling of parts of the Central Pacific that is the flip side El Nino, was a factor in the increased activity earlier this year -- especially in February, a record month for tornado activity -- but it can't explain what is happening now, according to Carbin.

Editor's note: NASA has long held that the sun, the earth's weakened magnetic field and the weather are interrelated.

In WARNING: The Coming Solar Storm this blog to a look at what NASA has learned about this relationship magnetic relationship between the sun and the earth...

Another NASA website describes the sun's impact on the earth's climate:Everyone is familiar with changes in the weather on Earth. But "weather" also occurs in space. Just as it drives weather on Earth, the Sun is responsible for disturbances in our space environment.

See how NASA is not embarrassed to state the relationship between solar activity and the impact on our climate? J. W. King of the Appleton Laboratory, England penned this 1974 citation, Weather and the Earth's magnetic field in the Nature Journal:

A comparison of meteorological pressures and the strength of the geomagnetic field suggests a possible controlling influence of the field on the longitudinal variation of the average pressure in the troposphere at high latitudes. If so, changes which occur in the pattern of 'permanent' depressions in the troposphere as the magnetic field varies (for example, as the non-dipole component of the field drifts westwards) may be accompanied by climatic changes.

The UK's Guardian makes this reference in 2002:

There is a growing body of evidence that the sun's highly charged particles batter the upper atmosphere so hard that some of the assault filters down into the atmosphere around us, influencing the wind, atmospheric pressure and temperature. (ed. note: layman terms-"weather")