Yesterday I didn’t post because it was almost sixty degrees and gorgeous out. Who can stay inside then? Meanwhile, much of the country is under some kind of blizzard. And the new administration seems to have stirred up the right-wing trolls on social media.
(To be clear, not all right-wingers are trolls, and not all trolls are right wingers. These just happen to be both)
The seasons, they are a-changing.
What’s With the Weather?
For anybody who’s been out of touch lately, here’s the deal; a huge intrusion of unusual coldness has parked itself across the United States, bringing snow and ice to surprising places. On maps, the thing appears U-shaped, or even V-shaped, with Texas at the bottom. I’m off to the side, not under the U, which is why it’s sunny and gorgeous here–yesterday was unseasonably warm, and while today is not, it’s not oddly cold, either. But my friend Bridgette, who has weathered quite a lot of bad weather over the years, has no power just when she needs it the most. Without power, she has no heat.
There are two stories, here. There’s the story about the weather, and there’s the story about infrastructure. Both involve climate.
A Familiar Story, But Colder
Why is nobody calling our current spate of cold weather a “polar vortex”? That phrase was all over the news a few years ago when similar cold snaps and blizzards descended on the US. Now the term seems to be “arctic outbreak,” but even that is not achieving buzzword status. Is there an actual technical distinction here, or only changing terminology?
Whether there is a distinction or not, the temperature map still looks like an extreme versions of the ones I saw when “polar vortex” was on everybody’s lips.
Dan Satterfield, our local weatherman and supergeek, posted a current temperature anomaly map recently to his Facebook page, saying:
“Is the Northern Hemisphere warmer or colder than normal today? The answer is Warmer! Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves.”
The map accompanying his post is quite striking–I’m not attempting to include it here because I don’t know who owns the image or whether it is freely available, but I suggest following the link above to go look at it. It shows temperature anomalies across the globe. Indeed, there is a large, violet and blue blob over the central and southern United States, plus a few other large blue blobs in other places, notably Europe and Asia–but most of the big blobs are orange and red.
To be clear, it’s not necessarily colder in Texas than in Greenland at the moment (though it could be–I haven’t looked that up). Anomalously warm for Greenland in February is still pretty cold. But Texas is much colder than it normally is, whereas Greenland and much of the rest of the Arctic are warmer than they normally are.
The important point here is that now, like many instances when the United States has a severe cold snap, it’s not because there’s more coldness than normal–it’s because coldness has moved. Texas is cold because some other place is unusually warm. And it’s warm because of climate change.
Many news sources and commentators acknowledge that climate change is involved, but I’ve been having a hard time finding an explanation as to why. But, as I said, the map Mr. Satterfield posted looked familiar. So I looked back to the post I wrote about the polar vortex seven years ago:
It’s easy to think the word means a swirling storm of unusually cold air, and some people are starting to use it to refer to any cold snap. But that isn’t what it means.
The polar vortex is actually a persistent weather pattern that forms around the north or south pole and acts to keep cold air concentrated near the pole during winter. What happened earlier this month was not that a polar vortex occurred or that the polar vortex was stronger than normal, but rather that the polar vortex was weaker than normal and it leaked.
And…
The polar vortex that normally keeps the coldest air confined to the poles is ringed by the jet stream, a current in the upper atmosphere that is in turn created by the contrast in temperature between polar and tropical air. That is, the difference in temperature exacerbates itself by creating a wind pattern that keeps the two air masses largely separate. Since the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet is, climate change could involve a weakening of the jet stream. That would allow the polar vortex to leak more often, producing a warmer world overall, but more frequent cold snaps in unexpected places.
Here is an article I found back then explaining that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the country, possibly because of the melting of polar ice, and explaining the connection between that warming and the frequently-leaky polar vortex. The author also reports on a study that found a connection between “sudden stratospheric warming events” and the melting ice.
The stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere above the part where weather happens. Fourteen years later, the connection between the stratosphere and actual weather is still poorly understood–but there is a connection. One of those connections is that sudden stratospheric warming events are usually (not always) followed a few weeks later by one of these polar vortex breakdowns. An unusually intense sudden stratospheric warming event occurred just a few weeks ago, in early January.
So, there you have it.
The Human Element
My friend, Bridgette, who has been such a useful source of news in past Texan disasters (such as here and here), is once again in the thick of it, intermittently without power or heat, building blanket forts in her house in an attempt to survive. When she can, she posts to Facebook.
I’m not going to quote her because I have not had opportunity to ask her permission, but I doubt she’d object to my paraphrasing, since she makes a very important point; though the low temperatures she’s experiencing would not seem so odd in, say, New England, houses in Texas are not built the same way New England houses are. They’re not designed to retain heat.
Generally, Texas is not prepared for this type of cold. I’m left to imagine the details, but I’m thinking of all the things that my New England friends have, or even that I have, that might not apply in a place where it never gets seriously cold–warm clothes, snow shovels, snow tires, heavy blankets, the know-how to drive in snow or to get heavy snow off the roof–and what they’re going through is just not comparable to what we Northerners think of when we hear about low temperatures.
That lack of preparedness by individuals is unfortunate but understandable. But the same problem has manifested in the state’s infrastructure, especially its power grid–and when state leadership is unprepared it’s less understandable and less forgivable because people die. Huge numbers of people are without power, or with power only intermittently, tonight because there just isn’t enough power in the grid. Pipes have burst, causing indoor flooding and leaving many people without water. Many people who do have water must boil it (which they can’t if their stoves are electric) because water treatment plants have failed in the cold. People on oxygen can’t power their machines. There is little to no food left on grocery store shelves. As of a few hours ago as I write this (on the night of February 17), 24 people had died of this storm, either from the cold directly or from carbon monoxide poisoning or house fires as people tried to keep warm by unsafe means. More will likely die in the coming weeks who otherwise would not have, because COVID vaccine distribution has temporarily been suspended.
The news just keeps getting worse the more I read about it–and most of it is completely unnecessary.
One state official reportedly claimed that the problem was that the wind turbines couldn’t handle the cold, as if renewable energy were at fault. Let’s clear this one up right away: first, wind turbines only supply about a quarter of the Texas grid’s power in the winter, and while wind generation has indeed been compromised by the weather, it’s actually done better than expected under the circumstances; second, there’s no reason wind turbines can’t be winterized, they just aren’t in Texas.
Rachel Maddow made this second point very well tonight (the relevant episode of her show, 2/17/21, should be available here within a day or so), explaining that the entire energy infrastructure in Texas has not been winterized, despite similar disasters in years past. The current storm may be unprecedented in its severity, but Texas tends to freeze about once a decade, and when it does the power grid fails, triggering rolling blackouts and associated human misery. The relevant experts advise winterizing the power grid, it doesn’t happen, and ten years later Texas freezes again.
And because most of Texas is on a state power grid unconnected to the grids of other states, no outside agency can force the state to winterize, nor is there any simple way for other states to feed power into Texas. It’s not an accident–apparently, Texans don’t like being told what to do, and their political leadership has isolated the state power grid in order to ensure nobody can make them do anything, even keep their people from dying in a cold snap.
Here’s the climate connection:
Texas would not be having this problem if its leadership acknowledged the reality of climate change, which includes an increased risk of severe weather of all kinds, including unusual freezes. Climate sanity includes a resilient power grid, and it also includes both building codes and community development plans that do not leave people to die when the grid fails, as even the most resilient power grids will occasionally. For example, a well-insulated, energy-efficient building doesn’t just cost less to heat and cool when things are going well–it’s also less likely to turn into an ice-box or an oven when heating or cooling stops.
Not to pick on Texas. It’s the one being hit at the moment, but most other parts of the United States (and other countries) have their own versions of the same problem.
What to Do, What to Do….
Remember those trolls I mentioned at the beginning? So far they are mostly posting blatant untruths about either the COVID-19 pandemic or the new administration, but there are some attacks on Greta Thunberg, too. I’m surprised to see them, for although my professional social media accounts are open to anyone regardless of political stripe, I hadn’t been seeing this much vitriol before–there was no one I would have pegged as a troll, only people who happen to be wrong on a topic that isn’t a matter of opinion. Now, there are some extra people getting just plain getting mean. I have to assume that some folks are coming out of the woodwork in a specific effort to push back against the new administration. And even when the specific posts have nothing to do with climate, the ugliness that has lodged within the right wing (and to label these things ugly is not partisanship) has a climate dimension.
As I’ve argued before, most of the tenets of this ugliness (racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-immigrant extremism, science denial) benefit nobody. They appeal to certain people because they tap into real fears and real pain, but hurting others in these ways will not resolve the real sources of any problem–except climate denial, where preventing meaningful climate action does earn certain individuals boatloads of money. Some of those individuals actively funded and encouraged the movement that elected Donald Trump. I have to conclude that climate denial is the real central point of that movement, and everything else is simply there to make it more appealing to its supporters. That movement is not dead, and it must be fought on a climate basis–the heart of the hydra must be countered, not simply its many distracting and dangerous heads.
Last week, I forget which day, Rachel Maddow suggested that because of economic woes triggered by the pandemic, the fossil fuel industry is weak and those interested in meaningful climate action actually have a chance of succeeding right now. I hope she’s right. We’re going to have to push hard, though, and we’re going to have to push against these trolls.
We have to do it because people in Texas are dying right now, and more people will die in similar ways if we do not succeed.
The Climate in Emergency 