February, 2021. Houston was freezing and I was teaching an Energy and Society class, so my students and I did the following analysis. From public weather data, we constructed historical trends. Here’s a snapshot of climate change in one American city.
Why is it so cold in Texas?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/winter-cold-weather.html explained this last winter. If you don't have access, in summary, there are persistent climate features on earth. The polar vortex is a cold circulating region of air usually less than 1000km (620mi) in diameter over the North Pole, stabilized by other persistent currents like the Jet stream. The warming Arctic weakens the jet stream, resulting in cold vortex air coming down. (BTW, tangent note, the jet stream in principle could supply many TW of power -- conceivably all the electricity we need ... or we could further wreck the climate trying. More research is needed in high altitude wind energy.)
How cold is it in Texas? Houston's average February low temperature is 44°F, their low on Feb. 15 was 18°F, high was 27°F. So the temperature is insanely below the average, but how unpredictable was such a deviation? I Googled Houston's temperature history, record low temperatures were set for Feb 1-3 at 15°F, 14°F, and 23° in 1951, on Feb 7 and 8, 1895 it dropped to 11° and 10°; 6° on Feb 12 and 13, 1899; Feb 21-22, 1978 broke records at 21°; Feb 27-8, 2022 at 22° ... So although Feb 15-16, 2021 were record lows for those days (at 16° and 13°), they are framed by even lower record lows of 10° on Feb 14, 1899 and 16° on Feb 17, 1895 -- would you say Houston's weather isn't surprising?
We wanted to see (graph) this data, so I copied the entire table from the National Weather Service and pasted it into Excel, selected the Record Low and Record Low Max columns, changed the hyphen between the temperatures and years into tabs, and pasted this 2-column data into Matlab, and fit and plotted:
A few things stand out to me.
a) 2021 was record cold, but not unforeseeable. 1989 had high temperatures below freezing all day too, and 1899 was even colder, as did 1950 and a couple years in the 1930s.
b) There's a big warming trend! Can't call it global warming (unless it's global), and we're only looking at one city here. How much you want to bet that this is global, that most other city data shows trends like this? And wow, look at the magnitude of the trend: since 1900, the lowest low temperature has gone from 15° to 25°, 10° in 120 years is crazy!! The lowest high temperatures have gone up more slowly, from 32.7° to 36.4°, a difference 3.7°F or 2°C. Part of this rise is likely local warming from asphalt and concrete replacing vegetation, the "urban heat island" effect.
c) I drew the black line on the graph to indicate freezing temperature because that's a non-linear threshold. Ice is ice regardless if whether its 20° or 30°F, but above 32°F, there's no ice (that's not quite true -- I often will find ice on my windshield when the low temperature was above freezing -- that's because radiative cooling of high emissivity materials like glass cools it towards the radiative temperature of the night sky). Freezing in Houston in February is common.
Why is the power (and water) out across Texas?
Or why aren't the power/water systems able to handle this somewhat routine cold weather? There's an obvious answer.
The bigger problem -- right-wing propaganda
Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine (and TED talk) explained how crises like this are opportunities for those in power to implement unpopular, undemocratic changes that are made possible by distracted and weakened opposition. Here she discusses why Texas needs the Green New Deal.
I started writing this page as the disaster was unfolding. Since then, President Biden has declared it a major disaster (allowing Texans to get help from the national government). Several members of the Board of Directors of the Texas Electric Grid have resigned (big punishment!), but the State still refuses to increase oversight and regulation of the corporations who's lack of investment in infrastructure needed during cold spells made this happen.
This complicated story is still unfolding, and there are many questions to answer, for example:
a) What needs to be done to the Texas electric grid to avoid (repeating) fatal catastrophic failures during extreme weather?
b) What consequences will there be for utility corporations that knowingly failed to invest in protecting the public?
c) What consequences will there be for those public figures who lie about the reasons for this fiasco and use the crisis to spread propaganda against green energy?
d) What recourse will Texans have who suffered the most -- lost family members or are price-gouged for tens of thousands of dollars in electric bills?
e) Why did some folks get thousands of dollars of electric bills and others didn't? Is it legal? Can they be forced to pay? Who's making money off of this?
So here we are again …