Ms. Roberts is not
alone in pressing the case for action on family planning, a greater focus by scientists on clarifying population
trends and their implications and a lot more resources committed to facilitating a smooth transition toward stable populations in places now seeing explosive growth (the «population cluster bombs» I
wrote about early in Dot Earth).
To be sure there's clarity, I'll state for the record that I agree with these tornado researchers (and Muller's comments above) that there's no way at the moment to spot a
trend in either direction, let
alone a relationship to climate change, given the vagaries in the data (as I
wrote in 2008).