The photos of the wreckage from Tuesday night's tornadoes in the southern United States resembled scenes from the fictional global warming film The Day After Tomorrow, so it would be easy to blame yesterday's disaster to climate change. However meteorolgist Harold Brooks claims these types of winter storms aren't all that unusual and have actually been regular occurences in the past decade.

Almost a year ago 20 people were killed with similar storms tore through the area surrounding and including Enterprise, Alabama. The most significant difference between Tuesday's tornadoes and previous storms was a higher number of casualties this time around.

"While this is not a normal event, it's not an incredibly rare event," Brooks, based at the agency's National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, said by telephone.

It's not hugely surprising that a government meterologist needed to clarify the cause (or rather, non-cause) of the storms. In fact my first thought when I woke up to the news this morning was that climate change would be blamed, but it appears that is not the case - not yet anyway.

"Our current physical understanding of how tornadoes work (is that) some of the ingredients that are important to make a tornado will increase in a greenhouse-enhanced world, some of them will decrease and the balance is unknown," Brooks said.

» Reuters