My appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday went much better than my previous appearance, even though my opponent remains excessively long-winded. (She’s a lawyer, so this shouldn’t be a surprise.)

One of the subjects we didn’t get to was U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D–Rhode Island), who chose the exact moment the F5 tornado was hitting Moore, Okla., to claim that Republicans are wrong about global climate change, which is causing storms like the Moore tornado. (Whitehouse later apologized, his spokesman claiming Whitehouse didn’t know the tornado was taking place. If your default position is that politicians lie, you have no problem with Whitehouse’s flack’s statement.)

Had the subject come up, I would have said that the most objectionable part of Whitehouse’s verbal diarrhea was that Whitehouse is flat out wrong. My evidence comes from meteorologist Mike Smith, proprietor of the Meteorological Musings blog.

The first chart shows that there is no trend of increasing numbers of tornadoes since 1954, despite continued improvement in meteorological technology. There are active years (1973 and 2012), but there are also inactive years (including 2012).

I would have also mentioned this: The National Weather Service Milwaukee/Sullivan office handles tornado warnings for four of the counties most frequently visited by tornadoes since 1950 — Dane, Iowa, Dodge and Fond du Lac counties. (I’ve lived in three of those counties, plus Grant County, which is also top five. I have yet to see a tornado.) The NWS Sullivan office has not issued a tornado warning in two years.

The second chart shows, again since 1954, that the trend of tornadoes EF3 or stronger is downward, not upward, since 1954.

Another meteorologist, Joe Bastardi, was a guest on “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News Channel:

Well, there have been major tornadoes before. As a matter of fact, the charts of the major tornadoes show they’ve been decreasing over the years. They reached their peak in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And if you remember, during the 70s, we were in a global cooling scare. I’m not here to demean anybody. I will debunk them with facts, though. This is not the first time we’ve heard this situation, comments made. It’s almost like ambulance chasing after these devastating events that cause misery to people, and then trying to tie an agenda into it. …

About five years ago, I came on your show, Bill, and told you we were going into a time of climatic hardship because of the shift in the cycle in the Pacific to cooler while the Atlantic was still warm. This happened in the 1950s. It’s why the 1950s were so volatile with the tremendous tornado activity. The heat and drought in the center of the country and, of course, the hurricane activity up the Eastern Seaboard where Senator Whitehouse seems to be ignorant of his own state of Rhode Island was hit four times in the 1950s. There were eight major hurricanes that ran the Eastern Seaboard from 1954 to 1960. Just what do you think is going to happen if the same pattern shows up again? …

O’REILLY: Well, this storm that we’re looking at right now, that’s one of the most powerful tornadoes ever to hit the USA, right?

BASTARDI: Yeah, it is, there’s no question, but the 1925 Tri-State tornado had a path of 180 miles from Missouri into Indiana, and was two  miles wide. When you go back and look at the history and the deaths of, the tornado deaths, which have been decreasing in large part to NOAA and the storm chasers who are seeing all these things before they happened.

Smith wrote a column for Sunday’s Washington Post on five tornado myths:

The scene in Moore, Okla., this past week was hauntingly familiar. The images of clean-up crews picking through the wreckage of two elementary schools transported me back to 1957, when an F5 tornado struck my Kansas City neighborhood, destroying my kindergarten and leaving 44 people dead. Thankfully, we’ve learned a lot since then that can help limit tornado casualties. But many misconceptions persist — misconceptions that can encourage bad policy and put lives at risk. I’d like to dispel some of the myths.

1. Meteorologists aren’t any good at forecasting these storms.

How does 99.3 percent sound? In 2011, 553 people lost their lives in tornadoes. For all but four of those victims (99.3 percent), both a tornado watch and a tornado warning were in effect before the storm arrived.

Modern tornado warnings are Nobel Prize-worthy endeavors that combine weather science, social science and technology. As recently as 1990, people in the path of a tornado were lucky to get five minutes’ warning. Now, thanks to advances in radar, computer simulations and research on how tornadoes develop, the average “lead time” is 12 minutes — and more than 15 minutes for major tornadoes. The city of Moore had a stunning 36 minutes of warning.

In addition to the explicit warning to take cover, there was a tornado watch out more than two hours before the tornado arrived in Moore, allowing people to move their valuables into storm shelters or even drive out of the area. There were also tornado “outlooks” four days before the Moore tornado. Those stated, in words and graphics, that central Oklahoma had an elevated risk of major tornadoes Monday.

The one area where weather science needs to improve is false alarms: For every four warnings issued, only about one tornado touches down. Those false alarms can cause people to question the credibility of the warning system. That said, if a significant tornado is headed for your area, the chance of an advance warning is excellent. …

2. Warning systems don’t work.

Since Weather Bureau civilian tornado warnings (as we would think of them today) began in 1957, there has never been a tornado that claimed more than 100 lives — with one notable exception.

On May 22, 2011, an F5 tornado struck Joplin, Mo., population 50,000. This was one of the rare times when almost everything went wrong with the warnings. The National Weather Service misreported the location and direction of the tornado. The sirens were not sounded in a manner consistent with the warnings, leading to confusion. And the tornado was enshrouded in rain, so people couldn’t see it. One hundred sixty-one people died.

On Monday, a tornado of equal strength and larger physical size struck Moore, population 55,000. It was similarly difficult to recognize along its path because of rain and debris. Yet the warnings went out as they were supposed to, and Moore experienced one-seventh the number of deaths in Joplin. …

5. Climate change is producing tornadoes of increasing frequency and intensity.

There have always been F5 tornadoes, and we will continue to experience them regardless of whether the Earth’s temperature rises or falls. National Weather Service figures show, if anything, that violent tornadoes — F3 or greater on the Fujita scale — are becoming less frequent. There is no trend, neither up nor down, in the frequency of all tornadoes.

The Capital Weather Gang’s Ian Livingston tweeted after the Moore tornado: “Climate change people do themselves a huge disservice by running to that after every disaster.”

I heartily concur.