Global warming alarmists have frequently attributed extreme weather incidents to manmade global warming, but an NBC Weatherplus.com meteorologist burst “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams’s bubble May 12 when he said recent tornadoes are actually thought to be caused by cooler waters.

“[I] talked to three people, casual conversation today, all of them smart saying, ‘I don't know, we must be doing something to our Earth.’ So, once and for all, what’s going on here?” Williams asked meteorologist Bill Karins in an interview about tornadoes that have ravaged parts of the southern United States.

But Karins didn’t give any manmade reasons behind the increased activity. According to Karins, it was the natural phenomenon called La Niña.

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“Well, there are some correlations that can be made,” Karins said. “Global warming – not quite one of them. La Niña [is] more likely.”

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), La Niña is unusually cold ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific – not warm ocean temperatures, which would be a result of a warming globe. Karins explained that La Niña is what’s causing the larger tornadoes.

“All we can really try to do is try find out what the triggers are and try to get people the most warning possible,” Karins explained. “And, one of the new studies that came out was talking about the connection to La Niña. Now that’s actually cooler water in the Pacific. We just got done with that and what these storms do is they tend to produce larger tornadoes. And, this is kind of like a new theory and thinking that’s come out.”

According to the “Nightly News” report, 858 tornadoes have touched down thus far in 2008. Compared to other years at this point: there were 600 in 2007, 510 in 2006 and 220 in 2005. Fatalities are also up – indicating increased severity of tornadoes – to 96 this year. There were 81 deaths at this point in 2007, 67 deaths in 2006 and 38 deaths in 2005.

In February 2008, former Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) associated storms that killed at least 50 people throughout the Southeastern United States with global warming.

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