A Tornado Warning? Here? In Maryland?

There was an era, not so long ago, when I had never heard of a tornado warning here in Maryland. In fact, a tornado touching down anywhere near here was extremely rare.

I guess my illusions were shattered last year in September, while I was traveling to an assignment as school nurse at Shiloh Middle School. As I was driving out of Baltimore County, I heard one of those emergency warning signals on the car radio - you know the kind, the warning blast that causes you to change the station for a few minutes.

Anyway, because I was driving in a new location (and also without GPS), I was trying to note when I needed to make a turn, so did not flip stations and found myself listening to a tornado warning. And guess what? I was driving to the county that was under the warning.



Obviously, it all turned out well, since I never encountered a tornado, but I was looking closely, since there were some pretty dark clouds overhead. Anyway, the experience sort of led to my noting more tornado warnings since then, breaking into my TV viewing. There have been so many, in fact, that I lost count of how many there have been since September.

Two things brought this circumstance to my awareness of late. The other day I was really into this program about invasion of nonindigenous animals into the US, mainly proliferating in Florida, which has provided ideal conditions for their increase in numbers. Anyway, the program kept getting interrupted by tornado warnings for Harford County because of the clash of hot and cold fronts. You remember the triple digit temperatures in Baltimore-DC area? Well, the storm ushered in a drop of about 30 degrees in temperature. Apparently, the US weather services are trying to determine whether a tornado actually did touch down near Belair.

Secondly, I was reading a bit about the Gaia hypothesis, developed by James Lovelock, in which he postulates the earth's surface as being one system. As those of us familiar with Systems Theory know, a change in one part of the system affects the rest of the system. So, it is Mr. Lovelock's conjecture that pollution is overwhelming the earth's system of self-regulation and will tip the balance from the more stable system into a more unstable, hotter one.

Whether one is playing ostrich, like the Republicans, or buys into the fact that pollution is adversely affecting earth's climate, one certainly must take note of such things as unstable weather patterns. I cannot say for certain that hearing tornado warnings more frequently is an indication of climate change or just the scientific knowledge and equipment enabling better warnings of adverse weather, but it certainly prompted me to think about the influence of human activities on our ecosystems.