This weekend and early next week is shaping up to be a severe weather outbreak in the southern plains and midsouth: Tornado and Dixie Alley. While the risk to life and limb is very real, Roger Pielke writes in the WSJ that in the past 60 years, there has been a long-term decline in both property loss and the loss of life.
Overall, however, the good news for residents of the Midwest's "Tornado Alley" and elsewhere is that over the past six decades America has witnessed a long-term decrease in both property damage and loss of life. That's the finding that I and Kevin Simmons and Daniel Sutter, two of the nation's leading tornado experts, have gleaned from studying the data on almost 58,000 tornadoes observed since 1950.