The freshman New York lawmaker shared a video on Instagram that showed heavy rains drenching the region and prompted a rare tornado warning inside the Beltway, Fox News reported. “There’s people stuck outside. We need to get them out,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “This is crazy.”
The Green New Deal champion then shared a story published by PBS in March that questioned whether climate change made tornadoes worse and put emphasis on a quote from the report. “Rather than lie squarely in the Great Plains, America’s tornadoes appear to be sliding into the Midwest and Southeast,” the report said.
“Tornadoes are challenging to link to climate change links due to their nature (geographically, limited, acute patterns, how they form, etc.),” Ocasio-Cortez told her followers as she reviewed the article.
“But we DO know that tornadoes HAVE been changing. They are no longer being limited to the Great Plains, and are shifting to other regions of the country.” “The climate crisis is real y’all … guess we’re at casual tornadoes in growing regions of the country,” she later wrote on Instagram.
But meteorologist Ryan Maue, who works for the conservative Cato Institute and is a critic of arguments that climate change has led to more extreme weather events, argued that she was confusing climate change with “weather” in the capital region.
“The Congresswoman @AOC does not know the difference between weather and climate,” Maue tweeted. “Let’s try an easy analogy: Weather is what outfit you wear heading out the door. Climate is your closet wardrobe.”
