Climate Expert James Hansen Talks About the Brooklyn Tornado

From Wired News:

NASA scientist and Columbia University professor James Hansen is widely acknowledged as the godfather of global warming science, so it made sense to ask him whether climate change caused yesterday's tornado in Brooklyn. Responded Hansen,

No, you cannot blame individual events like that on climate change, as it was possible for them to occur even without the human-made changes to the atmosphere. However, it is fair to ask whether the human changes have altered the likelihood of such events. There the answer seems to be yes. Storms driven largely by latent heat, and that includes thunderstorms, are expected to become stronger as the air becomes warmer and contains more moisture. Global warming does cause just such a tendency.

Which is, roughly speaking, akin to what I said in my post, only less incendiary and much more scientifically informed.

In June, Hansen said a global warming tipping point is just a decade away. My fellow WiSci wordslave Steven Edwards wrote about that here. Hansen also comes up in this Wired News q-and-a with Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker correspondent who two years ago wrote this soup-to-nuts series on climate change.