More tornadoes from global warming? Nobody knows

Science News

An American flag blows in the wind at sunrise atop the rubble of a destroyed home a day after a tornado moved through Moore, Okla., Tuesday, May 21, 2013. The monstrous tornado roared through the Oklahoma City suburb Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods and destroying an elementary school with a direct blow as children and teachers huddled against winds up to 200 mph. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

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More tornadoes f... An American flag blows in the wind at sunrise atop the rubble of a destroyed home a day after a tornado moved through Moore, Okla., Tuesday, May 21, 2013. The monstrous tornado roared through the Oklahoma City suburb Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods and destroying an elementary school with a direct blow as children and teachers huddled against winds up to 200 mph. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
Study: Most ship... This May, 14, 1942, U. S. Army Air Corps photograph, provided by the National Archives, College Park, Md., shows the burning tanker Potrero del Llano, a Mexican ship heading to New York that was sunk on May 14, 1942 by a German U-boat, about 15 miles southeast of Miami’s Biscayne Bay. It carried about 1.8 million gallons of oil aboard. A new government report details 87 shipwrecks that could pollute U.S. waters with oil. Most were sunk during World War II. The potential for pollution is less than scientists had expected. They estimate that far less oil will leak into the ocean than the BP oil spill of 2010, which spewed roughly 200 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico alone. However, six leaks are considered potentially significant coastal pollution problems. Study author Lisa Symons said Monday those six keep her up at night. Five are off the Florida coast, one just 15 miles from shore. (AP Photo/National Archives, College Park, Md)
Oklahoma twister... This combination of Associated Press photos shows left, a neighborhood in Moore, Okla., in ruins on Tuesday, May 4, 1999, after a tornado flattened many houses and buildings in central Oklahoma, and right, flattened houses in Moore on Monday, May 20, 2013. Monday's powerful tornado in suburban Oklahoma City loosely followed the path of a killer twister that slammed the region in May 1999. (AP Photo)
Alaska volcano's... FILE - In this Friday, May 17, 2013 file photo provided by the Alaskan Volcano Observatory, the Pavlof Volcano erupts as it's seen from the air near Cold Bay, Alaska. The volcano's eruption is prompting regional airlines to cancel flights to nearby communities, including a town that reported traces of fallen ash, according to reports Monday, May 20, 2013. (AP Photo/Alaskan Volcano Observatory, Theo Chesley, File)
Honeybees traine... In this Wednesday, May 15, 2013 photo, a scientist inspects bees during a scientific experiment at the Faculty of Agriculture at Zagreb University. Croatian researches, working on a unique method to find unexploded mines that are littering their country and the rest of the Balkans, are confident they can use bees for detecting land mines. (AP Photo/Darko Bandic)
Slow pokes: Acup... Acupuncturist Claire McManus watches a pair of sea turtles, who are recovering from a stranding, as they swim at the New England Aquarium's animal care center in Quincy, Mass., Monday, May 20, 2013. McManus treated two other sea turtles who were injured after getting stranded on Cape Cod during a prolonged exposure to cold weather. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi)
Encroaching sea ... In this April 22, 2013 photo, fisherman Desmond Augustin stands on a breakwater of old tires and driftwood that local residents fashioned to try and protect their fishing village in Telegraph, Grenada. The people along this vulnerable stretch of eastern Grenada have been watching the sea eat away at their shoreline in recent decades, a result of destructive practices such as sand mining and a ferocious storm surge made worse by climate change, according to researchers with the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy, who have helped locals map the extent of coastal erosion. (AP Photo/David McFadden)
Report: Feds' wa... FILE - In this Oct. 30, 2012 file photo, a parking lot full of yellow cabs is flooded as a result of Superstorm Sandy in Hoboken, NJ. An internal review says federal weather forecasts for Superstorm Sandy were exceptionally accurately last fall. But the warnings themselves were confusing. The gigantic October storm lost tropical characteristics hours before landfall in New Jersey, so the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dropped the hurricane warnings. Instead it shifted to flooding and high wind warnings. NOAA's self-assessment said that led to confusion by the public and the media, a complaint made by independent meteorologists. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes, File)
East about to be... This photo provided by the University of Connecticut shows a cicada in Pipestem State Park in West Virginia on May 27, 2003. Any day now, cicadas with bulging red eyes will creep out of the ground after 17 years and overrun the East Coast with the awesome power of numbers. Big numbers. Billions. Maybe even a trillion. For a few buggy weeks, residents from North Carolina to Connecticut will be outnumbered by 600 to 1. Maybe more. And the invaders will be loud. A chorus of buzzing male cicadas can rival a jet engine. (AP Photo/University of Connecticut, Chirs Simon)
London Zoo seeks... This is an undated image made available Friday, May 10, 2013, by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) of a male Mangarahara cichlid. Aquarists at the ZSL, London Zoo, are launching an urgent worldwide appeal to find a female mate for the last remaining males of a critically endangered fish species. The Mangarahara cichlid (Ptychochromis insolitus) is believed to be extinct in the wild, due to the introduction of dams drying up its habitat of the Mangarahara River in Madagascar, and two of the last known individuals are residing in ZSL London Zoo’s aquarium. (AP Photo/ZSL)
NASA craft's pla... This artist rendition provided by NASA shows the Kepler space telescope. The spacecraft lost the second of four wheels that control the telescope’s orientation in space, NASA said Wednesday, May 15, 2013. If engineers can’t find a fix, the failure means the telescope won’t be able to look for planets outside our solar system anymore. (AP Photo/NASA)
NASA: New pump r... In this Saturday, May 11, 2013 photo made available by NASA, astronaut Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn, not pictured, perform a space walk to inspect and replace a pump controller box on the International Space Station after an ammonia coolant leak was discovered. (AP Photo/NASA)
Experts: CO2 rec... In this Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012 photo, a flock of Geese fly past the smokestacks at the Jeffrey Energy Center coal power plant as the suns sets near Emmett, Kan. Worldwide levels of the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming have hit a milestone, reaching an amount never before encountered by humans, federal scientists said Friday, May 10, 2013. Carbon dioxide was measured at 400 parts per million at the oldest monitoring station in Hawaii which sets the global benchmark. The last time the worldwide carbon level was probably that high was about 2 million years ago, said Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Solar-powered pl... The Solar Impulse aircraft takes off from Moffett Field to begin the first leg of its 2013 Across America Mission in Mountain Vi
Alexander Graham... A wax-covered cardboard disc is seen in this undated Smithsonian National Museum of American History image
Campaigners call... A robot is pictured in front of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey as part of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots in
Virgin's passeng... File photo of entrepreneur Branson waving a model of the LauncherOne cargo spacecraft from a window of an actual size model of S
Why does anythin... The LHC tunnel is pictured during a visit at the CERN in Meyrin, near Geneva
Big drugmakers t... Graduate student Giulia Agliardi, from Milan, Italy, studies cancer cells in the Nanomedicine Lab at UCL's School of Pharmacy in
Space telescope ... Artist's rendition of relative sizes of Kepler habitable zone planets discovered
Gene data show C... Employees dispose uninfected dead birds at a treatment plant as part of preventive measures against the H7N9 bird flu in Guangzh