An Inconvenient Truth: Tornado Numbers Expose Al Gore’s Lies

In two articles published this past week here at Climate Realism, we showed how Al Gore’s predictions about melting glaciers in Glacier National Park and disappearing snows at Mt. Kilimanjaro have proven spectacularly wrong. Those were the only two concrete predictions Gore made with a definitive timeline prior to today in his book, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore failed on both accounts. But those weren’t Gore’s only spectacular embarrassments.

Let’s take a look at what Gore claimed about tornadoes.

On page 86 in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claimed, “in 2004, the all-time record for tornadoes in the United States was broken.” Worse than his two failed predictions, this one is a flat-out lie. And it was a flat-out lie when Gore asserted it.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been meticulously keeping tornado records going back 65 years, to 1954. As shown in the NOAA graph reproduced below, there were 600 tornadoes in 2004. Prior to 2004, however, there were six different years in which NOAA documented more than 600 tornadoes. Gore’s statement was a lie the second he made it.

Even more embarrassingly for Gore, the NOAA graph likely undercounted tornadoes during the mid-1950s through the late 20^th century. That is because advanced radar in recent years has enabled scientists to identify tornadoes in the middle of nowhere that previously would not have been counted. As a result, it is likely that there were well more than six years between 1954 and 2004 with more tornadoes than Gore’s “all-time record” year of 2004.

Occasionally, somebody will assert to me, ‘OK, but what about strong tornadoes – the ones that really cause a lot of damage. Those are the ones that really matter, and perhaps Gore was talking about those.’

As you can see from this additional NOAA chart below, strong tornadoes (F3 and above) have been in long-term decline, with 2004 (like most recent years) experiencing a well-below-average number of tornadoes.

Any way you cut it, 2004 was not the all-time record year for tornadoes. It wasn’t even close. And tornado activity has been declining for decades.

Yet the establishment media fawns over Gore as a global warming prophet while attacking as “deniers” anybody who points out the facts above.

I place my money on the American people being smart enough to see through the media propaganda.