polar vortex freeze

221 texas belated

see cold kills more

mma 8 22

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): The Europeans have discovered that the real threat to human civilization is not global warming, it never was global warming. The real threat to people is global cooling, otherwise known as winter. Far more people freeze to death every year than die of heat. In 2019, for example, four times as many people died of cold as of heat. That's according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. So when temperatures in Europe begin to drop a few months from now, this is a huge problem and that will be obvious to everyone. It's not global warming, it's global cooling. That's what's going to kill your grandmother.

legit src but

https://www.wral.com/study-finds-very-concerning-74-increase-in-deaths-associated-with-extreme-heat-brought-on-by-the-climate-crisis/19834115/?version=amp

cNN — A pair of new studies out Thursday find a "very concerning" rise in the number of climate-related deaths and paint a picture of world where people struggle with regular temperature extremes.

One of the studies finds the number of deaths caused by high temperatures increased by 74% globally between 1980 and 2016. Deaths related to extreme cold increased 31% since 1990, a new report, the first of its kind, finds.

Human-caused climate change -- generated by carbon, methane and other greenhouse gas emissions from industry, transportation, and agriculture -- has led to a "new normal" with more days of extreme temperatures than in recorded history. The studies published Thursday provide more evidence that both hot and cold extremes can be deadly.

...Climate change deniers will tell you that more people die of the cold than heat, so warmer winters will be a good thing. This is deeply misleading. Vulnerable people die of the cold because of poor housing and not being able to afford to heat their homes. Society, not climate, kills them.

This argument is also factually incorrect.In the US, for example, heat-related deaths are four times higher than cold-related ones.This may even be an underestimate as many heat-related deaths are recorded by cause of death such as heart failure, stroke, or respiratory failure, all of which are exacerbated by excessive heat.

https://theconversation.com/the-five-corrupt-pillars-of-climate-change-denial-122893

bastasch

new am "mag" treats as quote to caller, it's not

https://thenewamerican.com/was-huge-weekend-noreaster-actually-caused-by-global-warming/

https://principia-scientific.com/bizarre-theory-linking-global-warming-to-polar-vortexes-resurfaces/

1/19?

The media is once again pushing the narrative that global warming is behind extreme winter cold. However, many scientists disagree with this theory and there’s little evidence to back it up.

Cold waves have lessened over the past 50 years,” said one [unnamed] scientist.

In what’s become an annual affair, the media is pushing articles suggesting bone-chilling temperatures about to hit the U.S. are the product of man-made global warming.

However, many scientists disagreethat global warming is having the bizarre effect of making it colder in winter, despite the media’s narrative.

“The bottom line is that folks claiming that cold waves are increasing in the U.S. are ignoring observations and the peer-reviewed literature that state the opposite,” University of Washington climate scientistCliff Mass told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

As a “polar vortex” bears down on middle America, threatening to break Chicago’s all-time record cold, the Windy City’s iconic newspaper featured one scientist who said, “winters like these could become more common in the future due to climate change.”

"The Arctic is warming twice as fast compared with the rest of the planet, in part because there’s less ice cover,” climate scientist Jennifer Francis told The Chicago Tribune, adding “instead of ice reflecting sunlight away, the water is absorbing this heat.”

Axios echoed that claim Monday evening, reporting that “studies published in the past several years show that polar vortex disruptions may be more likely as the Earth warms and sea ice in the Arctic melts, though this is an active area of research.” The basic idea is that Arctic warming is causing the jet stream to weaken and send cold air south.

“I have argued less sea ice, especially in the Barents-Kara Seas, favors a ridge of high pressure across northwest Eurasia,” Judah Cohen, the top forecaster at AER, told Axios.

Cohen said a chain of events “then connects the effects of newly open ocean with events high in the atmosphere.” Francis and Cohen are regularly featured in news stories alleging a link between melting Arctic sea ice and U.S. cold snaps.

The two scientists published a study last year claiming cold snaps are more likely when the Arctic is abnormally warm, but their work suffered from serious flaws — namely, it did not test any hypothesis nor did it try to establish causality between global warming and cold snaps.

The New York Times also pushed Cohen and Francis’s theory of global warming-induced cold. However, many scientists disagree with that theory and, in fact, there seems to be more evidence it’s just plain wrong.

“Frankly, it is a stretch to make that link,” Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told TheDCNF.

“There is always cold air over the Arctic in the polar night and the question is whether it sits there or breaks out,” Trenberth said. “So all this is in realm of weather. Not climate.”

Other studies have tested the link between Arctic sea ice melt and mid-latitude cold snaps, but couldn’t find one. A study by Climate Central found the opposite, that “[c]old waves like this have decreased in intensity and frequency over the last century.”

The U.S. government’s fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2017, found that while it’s likely mid-latitude temperatures influence the Arctic, “confidence is low regarding whether or by what mechanisms observed arctic warming may have influenced the midlatitude circulation and weather patterns over the continental United States.”

“Cold waves have lessened over the past 50 years,” Mass said. “All one has to do, is to go to official government statistics to see that these claims are not true.”

Read more at beforeitsnews.com

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/texas-freeze/

com dr

New research published Friday suggests that melting Arctic sea ice caused by global heating may be responsible for the deadly deep freeze that devastated much of North America and plunged millions of Texans into darkness in February.

While climate researchers have previously connected the phenomena of polar heating and mid-latitute freezes, a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Scienceis the first to link Arctic warming and February's cold snap. Authorities said the four-day extreme weather event—which left millions of residents trapped in sub-freezing darkness as Texas' largely independent power grid failed. State officials said the freezing temperatures killed more than 150 people in Texas, though others estimate the true death toll was likely much higher.

Polar vortices—large areas of low pressure and cold air swirling around the North and South poles—usually keep icy air contained there. However, research suggests that polar heating and ice melt fueled by the worsening climate emergency is allowing the normally trapped Arctic air to flow far southward.

Reporting on the new study, New Scientist explains:

That link still isn't fully established. However, a group led by Judah Cohen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that vanishing sea ice and greater snowfall in the Arctic over the past 40 years, effects caused by climate change, may be driving cold winter weather in North America and Eurasia via the stratospheric polar vortex, the cold winds high above the pole. The rapid warming in the Arctic appears to be disrupting—that is, stretching—this vortex in a way that has a knock-on effect on atmospheric circulations above North America, generating unusually cold spells in winter.

"If you expected global warming to help you out with preparing for severe winter weather, our paper says the cautionary tale is: don't necessarily expect climate change to solve that problem for you," Cohen told New Scientist. "This is an unexpected impact from climate change that we didn't appreciate 20 years ago."

Continuing a decadeslong pattern of Texas Republicans denying the climate emergency, Gov. Greg Abbott blamed solar and wind power for February's blackouts, while calling the proposed Green New Deal "deadly" as people in his state were actually dying in darkness.

Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, told the Associated Press that "the Texas cold blast of February 2021 is a poster child" for the Arctic link theory. Francis, who was not involved in the new study, said the research "takes this controversial hypothesized linkage and moves it solidly toward accepted science."

"By analyzing both observations and model simulations," Francis told New Scientist, "the conclusions are well supported and help explain how extreme cold spells like the debilitating one in Texas this past February are still likely—and perhaps more so—as the climate crisis unfolds."

Writing in The Conversation, Cohen and Mathew Barlow, two of study's five authors, conclude that "our research reinforces two crucial lessons of climate change: First, the change doesn't have to occur in your backyard to have a big effect on you. Second, the unexpected consequences can be quite severe."

"In this case, large changes in the Arctic are not just a local concern—they also have wide-ranging impacts across North America and parts of Asia," they note. "And those impacts are not always what people are expecting. The results highlight another reason to rapidly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming and at the same time theneed to develop better strategies for managing extreme weather events, both hot and cold."

1b$ ~ Griddy [sic TM] texas freeze 221 class action lawsuit

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/extreme-weather/

salon

The catastrophe that swept Texas last week was 90 years in the making. Its roots lie in a decision during the 1930s to escape federal regulation of power rates under the terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal by forcing all Texas utilities to avoid importing or exporting power across state lines, thereby pretending that Texas electricity was not actually part of the national economy.

As the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, Texas had already set itself up in the business of regulating the global price of oil through the Texas Railroad Commission, which set limits on oil and gas production to keep oil prices artificially high. So going it alone on electricity prices seemed like a logical extension — except that in the case of electricity, Texas business wanted low prices, not high ones.

Implicit in the creation of what Texans call their "power island" was an understanding that cheap electricity was the only significant goal. Reliability came a distant second and clean air wasn't even on the radar screen. When Texas deregulated its electricity sector in 1999, it went further than most states. ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, kept prices low by refusing to pay utilities for keeping standby generation capacity in case of an extreme weather event. Since Texas also remained disconnected from other regions which might have provided backup power in the case of a shortage, the state denied itself any kind of safety net, either in-state or elsewhere.

Extreme heat waves were very much on the Texas radar, because high-demand summer days were frequent — and profitable for generators. So money was made, and summer blackouts were few, for almost 20 years. As the climate spun out of control, however, even in summer Texas barely avoided resorting to rolling blackouts to manage record demand during worsening hot spells. (In fact, in El Paso, on the state's western border, they happened.)

Meanwhile, the pretense that it never gets cold in Texas kept obstructing efforts to make the ERCOT grid winter-hardened. In 1989, federal regulators pointed out that Texas lacked simple weatherization measures common to more northern states.In 2011, winter storms triggered rolling blackouts. In 2014, the term "polar vortex" came into common use as Texas once again lost winter power. In 2018 and 2019, the polar vortex struck two years in a row.

Yet Texas business and political leaders kept insisting that the cost of winterizing the power system was simply not worth it. The state's major industrial power users didn't want to pay their share of the bill. Any conversation about providing backup by connecting the Texas grid to the rest of America remained totally off limits.

This year, of course, disaster became catastrophe. Those who doggedly opposed investments in reliability have had to find a new tune — their favorite being to blame renewable energy, in spite of manifest evidence that this is untrue.

Former Texas governor Rick Perry went to bat for the state's electron isolationism: "Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business." Perry went on to blame the state's reliance on wind power for the crisis, a richly ironic canard. It was Perry himself who led the campaign to create Texas's innovative and wind-power targeted CREZ transmission project, which was largely responsible for the fact that 2020 was the first year in which Texas got more electricity from wind than from coal.

Perry's scapegoating of his own wind revolution for the blackout was echoed by current Gov. Greg Abbott, who said, "Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis." That was a lie. As the chart below shows, most of the collapse in power generation came from natural gas, coal and nuclear, since even in a normal winter Texas gets relatively little of its power from wind and solar. (Although Texas wind turbines lack simple weatherizing technology used by wind farms in other states to its north.) [grf]

as the disasters cascaded — no power, shut-down oil and gas production, no water, unreliable food — voices from urban communities suffering freezing homes flooded by burst pipes began to fire back, blaming the state regulators for their refusal to invest in winter-hardy generation for the state. It was "just horrible to see," said Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. "The power and water outages in Texas have created a situation that's worse than even the early days of the pandemic," warned Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from San Antonio.

But deeply ingrained in the Texas power sector was the governor's belief that hard freezes didn't happen often enough to be worth preparing for. That misguided belief was os deeply ingrained that when the Texas Monthly asked ERCOT CEO Bill Magness if the savings from failing to build resilience were worth it to consumers, he dismissed the question: "I am not aware that we have ever conducted a real cost-benefit analysis on that topic." That wasn't true. ERCOT had analyzed this, and it turned out that the agency's eight-year-old estimate of the daily cost of such a blackout was $2.8 billion — enough to cover a lot of weatherization.The 2020 freeze brought a whole new class of costs to bear. Not only was electricity generation shut down, but as a result so were many oil fields. IHS Markit estimated that the Texas freeze had shut down at least 20% of the nation's oil and gas production, largely in the Permian Basin, which made it harder to get gas-fired electricity back on line.

As more and more voters got more and more upset, a new refrain was heard, even from Abbott: Texas needed to weatherize. The governor called for a special legislative session to get it done, and was suddenly outraged. "Everyone knows how challenging the past few days have been for our fellow Texans," Abbott said. "All of us in the state of Texas believe it is completely unacceptable that you had to endure one minute of the challenge that you faced."

So can we write off the Texas tragedy to Lone Star exceptionalism? A quasi-secessionist electricity island, with inadequate requirements for getting ready for winter, pays the price?

Up close it looks like it. But pull back and include the summer of 2020, and it's clear that what went wrong in Texas has a lot do with the fires that brought California to its knees six months earlier. The summers of 2017 and 2018 had made it clear that California didn't have nearly enough firefighters standing by for an event like the lightning strikes that rained down in August 2020. It was also clear the state had allowed PG&E and its other utilities to invest too little in fire hardening rural power lines. Worse yet, most communities in the fire-hazard areas had failed to adopt or enforce adequate fireproofing measures on homes and businesses. But California's politics are — in the American context — at polar opposites to Texas. (In fact, California's problem is significantly harder to fix than the polar vortex threat to Texas.)

To understand why neither red nor blue America can reliably and safely provide electricity to its population, we need to contrast the American attitude towards natural disasters — they happen, but we recover — with the Dutch approach to flooding, which is more like: We can't prevent the storms, but we can protect ourselves against the damages. Since the Dutch adopted this attitude as national policy 70 years ago, not a single citizen has died in a flood. Prevention has proven cheaper than rescue and repair: Even though a third of the nation lies below sea level, Holland's annual expenditures for flood prevention, at $1.5 billion, are a fraction of American costs for flood recovery, even on a per capita basis.

If President Biden is looking for another issue on which he can unite the country, starting a conversation on the need to massively invest in fire, flood and storm resilience in a climate-stressed world offers a promising opportunity. How about "Build it back safely" as a subset of "Build it back better"?

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES