Tornadoes And Storms Increase As Part Of Odd Climate Swerve And Purification

By Michael H. Brown

Two stories

First story

The F-5 tornado that struck Maryland is another reminder that we're in a time of extraordinary storms and that the purification is taking a turn toward natural disasters. An F-5, officially designated as an "incredible" tornado, is the highest on what is known as the Fujita Scale  (although, due to the enhanced power of storms in recent years, they are creating a sixth category for what meteorologists describe as an "inconceivable" tornado).

And so here we are in exactly what was foreseen long ago: heightened storms and tornadoes -- massive tornadoes -- in unusual places.

We had predicted that tornadoes would strike out of their accustomed zones and one day drill into a major city -- as the tornado in Maryland was but 20 miles from Washington and barely missed a nuclear reactor. 

It was one more in a chain of such events: In recent years, tornadoes have been spotted in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles while San Francisco was hit by what was called its greatest display of lightning ever. 

In Texas hail has come crashing through windows while all the way over in Africa 11 members of a Congo soccer team were killed by the same bolt of lightning.

"Why all the Crazy Weather?" asked Reader's Digest, while a headline in The New York Times said simply, "Experts Are Baffled by Violent Weather."

In Scotland a full-scale emergency had been declared when fierce gusts knocked out a nuclear station. 

In Europe winds from the southwest are picking up while back in Texas one tornado was so potent it ripped the lungs out of cattle.

There is a profusion of atmospheric warmth and that means there is all the more opportunity for motion. 

Air is rising and as it rises -- as it reacts with cool air aloft -- clouds form. There is jostling. There is condensation. 

This causes more switching and a pull of air that leads to wind, hail, and tornadoes.

From 1991 to 1996 the number of severe storms in the United States jumped from 6,500 to 9,200 and the incidents of large hail in the same general time more than tripled. A record was set with 1,297 twisters in 1992 -- and then broken in 1998 with 1,424 as annual incidence remained way above 1,000 throughout the decade (where before in previous decades it had been 800).

It was the fruit of a warm and raucous time, and we recall the prophecy at LaSalette -- where the Virgin predicted thunder that "will shake entire cities."

Expect this pattern to continue.

Many tornadoes find a special target in Xenia, Ohio -- which the Shawnee Indians knew as "the place of the devil wind"!

Unusually warm patterns of weather are bringing moist air from the Gulf and allowing it to combine with strong westerly flows. Periods of calm -- abnormally low incidence -- are ending with alarming outbreaks, and it looks, as in Maryland, like the storms might expand beyond tornado alley and move with greater frequency east and north. 

Illinois. Ohio. Pennsylvania. 

It is a matter of time before one attacks the urban core of a major city. 

On May 3, 1999, during an outbreak in the Oklahoma City area, nearly sixty twisters rose with a suddenness that shocked forecasters and aimed right for this area of 630,000 people. 

While most were small, a couple reached F-5 status and one had winds of 318 miles an hour -- the highest ever measured.

It was what meteorologists at NOAA called "an outbreak of historic proportions."

It had been a long time if ever since such a violent storm moved through such a large population, and it hit in the evening -- blowing away ceilings and closet walls.

"We had a good thirty-minute warning that it was coming," recalled Barbara Redman, a receptionist at First Baptist Church in Moore when we interviewed her. "When I heard it I was probably a mile from it and it was just a constant roar. I've heard stories from people who say they could feel themselves being sucked out of their homes, they could see themselves going around and around and around in front of a bathroom mirror, spinning around. It was like a monster coming. A monster. We at the church were like a command center and I can tell you a lot of stories of people who were thrown out of their homes. I remember one story of a man who put his two daughters in a bathtub and he himself was thrown out probably 150 yards from his house and when he got back into his house the girls were not in the bathtub but just hanging onto the toilet. The bathtub was gone. We had one school that was totally, totally destroyed. Then one of our high schools was very, very badly damaged and in the parking lot at this school cars -- you cannot believe how the cars were. I saw a van that was about two feet tall. Totally squashed. Many, many, many cars destroyed and right in the middle was a dead horse. There was part of an airplane that came many miles and we had people here in the church whose family pictures were found a hundred miles away. It was incredible the amount of stuff that was in the air, absolutely incredible. Homes were just totally, totally destroyed. They set their big floodlights to shine up on the cross on top of our church and all they could do was just tell people to come to the cross. People began coming in and they were in shock. One of our members had a mobile home that was found just totally wrapped around a tree -- I'm not sure how far away -- and we had railroad cars moved and trees without a solitary leaf and no bark. Stripped absolutely clean. Devastation as far as you could see."

At the very edge of Oklahoma City, under the area where the storm hit 318 miles an hour, a family called the Holcombs -- parents and two young children, aged six and one -- huddled in a closet with a mattress over them. Their house sustained a direct strike. "About fifteen minutes before it hit the electricity went off," says Michael Holcomb. "And a couple minutes before, we heard the wind picking up and a little bit of hail. Then it got quiet and we all started praying and heard the shingles and then the roof started lifting off. We were in a closet on the northeast side of the house that had one outside wall and three inside. It sucked the walls up and dumped a bunch of boards and trash from another house on us and that's what probably kept us on the ground. There was nothing left. That we survived was a miracle."

Hopefully, the miracles will continue. 

But the seas are heating, and so, besides tornadoes, floods, droughts, and huge ocean storms -- hurricanes -- are coming...

The tornadic activity of the past two weeks reminds us that weather anomalies will not be confined to hurricanes.

The climate is gyrating, and storms will come with it.

Expect long periods of dry weather to be punctuated by precipitation "events" -- unusually high amounts of rain and snow. When it rains it will pour. At other times, it will seem like drought. Tornadoes will intensify and increase in frequency in the way of larger cyclones such as hurricanes. They will strike in places they don't usually strike, and a big city may suddenly find itself prey to an F-5.

Such will be our lot for years to come.

The key word always has been "extreme": weather will swing between extremes -- of hot and cold, wet and dry.

So extraordinary has been the weather that Time Magazine is considering naming Mother Nature, or perhaps Hurricane Katrina, as its "Person of the Year."

What sets the latest outbreak of tornadoes apart is that, as secular outlets remind us, it quickly followed two others. On November 6 a tornado near Evansville, Indiana, killed 23 people and then on Saturday nine tornadoes raked Iowa and killed a woman. The storm system eventually spawned twisters in Canada. "At least 35 tornadoes struck Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Tennessee on Tuesday night and early Wednesday," noted USA Today -- which like the vast majority of media outlets has now come to accept the era of climate change.

As has the Defense Department.

"A secret report prepared by the Pentagon warns that climate change may lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives and is a far greater risk than terrorism," the British newspaper Observer said last week.

This starts to give us a perspective.

So does the fact that the 562 tornadoes which hit the United States in May was a record -- startlingly higher than the previous monthly peak of 399 in June 1992. How many records have to be broken before the skeptics take note?

Who has eyes to see and ears to hear?

What we hear from those with the "ears" is that it is a special time of marked accents in nature. The moon seems brighter, the sun seem to whirl, there is just a something "different" about the natural, which seems accented in a way that is luminescent.

Have you noticed such signs? There is also evil. The tornado photo above, left, seems to grant a hint of what we must pray away. Let us note that two years ago when an F-5 hit a Maryland town a statue of Mary miraculously survived in front of a devastated school. Prayer works with both the storms outside and inside of ourselves. In fact, the weather is mirroring what we are going through internally at this time of heightened battle and spiritual consternation. Nature is a spiritual reflection.

Jesus said there would be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. That was about His Second Coming. It also seems to pertain -- often in a way that is and will be dramatic -- to times of purification.

From the mailbag:

11/18/05

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