While the timing of this trend lines up with the planet’s rising temperatures, scientists are hesitant to definitively attribute tornadoes’ clustering behavior to human-caused climate change.
“The link between climate change and tornadoes is still pretty tenuous,” Dr. Fricker said. “It’s a really open and difficult question for us.” One difficulty is that tornadoes are too small on a planetary scale, and too ephemeral, to show up in the global mathematical models that scientists use to study climate change.
Yes, but it’s not at all obvious why that set of things would change the temporal distribution of tornado formation in this way without increasing their quantity.