Was Texas Storm Yet Another Product of Climate Change?

Winter Storm Uri, which delivered the lowest temperatures North Texas has seen in 72 years, proves it once and for all: Global warming is a hoax!

Actually, climate science is more complicated. And there is no consensus yet that the extreme cold that invaded the South is a result, in whole or in part, of climate change. 

But a number of scientists believe that climate change is playing a significant role. 

“There is evidence that climate change can weaken the polar vortex, which allows more chances for frigid Arctic air to ooze into the Lower 48,” University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd told USA Today.

While the vortex is a natural phenomenon, and polar vortex breakdowns happen naturally, there is likely an element of climate change at work, USA Today’s Doyle Rice wrote.

Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis, who has published a study on the phenomenon, said in 2019 that "warm temperatures in the Arctic cause the jet stream to take these wild swings, and when it swings farther south, that causes cold air to reach farther south."

The jet stream is the river of air up in the atmosphere that steers weather around. A study in 2015 in the journal Science reported that the rapid warming of the Arctic makes for a wavier jet stream, with waves that move more slowly across the globe. When that happens, cold Arctic air sometimes pours down over the U.S.

In an email to Vox, Francis said that the bitter chill is a sign of what’s to come. “The large, persistent, southward dip in the jet stream responsible for this cold invasion is likely to happen more frequently in a warming climate, as are the warmer-than-normal spells that sit alongside this dip,” Francis said.

Both extreme heat and extreme cold can happen side by side, with the meandering jet stream acting as a barrier in between, wrote Vox’s Umair Irfan. 

“The current conditions in Texas are historical, certainly generational,” said Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “But this can’t be hand-waved away as if it’s entirely natural,” he told The Guardian. “This is happening not in spite of climate change; it’s in part due to climate change.”

Last year, Cohen co-authored a paper that found a strong uptick in winter storms in the Northeast in the decade leading up to 2018. This, Cohen and some other scientists argue, is a symptom of heating in the Arctic, occurring at a rate more than twice the global average, that is disrupting long-established climatic systems.

The crisis sounded an alarm for power systems throughout the country, Brad Plumer wrote in The New York Times. Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions — as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure. It is clear, he wrote, that global warming poses a barrage of additional threats to power systems nationwide, including fiercer heat waves and water shortages.

“It’s essentially a question of how much insurance you want to buy,” Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University, told The Times. “What makes this problem even harder is that we’re now in a world where, especially with climate change, the past is no longer a good guide to the future. We have to get much better at preparing for the unexpected.”

Adapting to those risks could carry a hefty price tag, Plumer noted, citing a recent study that found that the Southeast alone may need 35 percent more electric capacity by 2050 simply to deal with the known hazards of climate change.

Will we build that capacity with fossil fuels or clean energy? Every kilowatt hour we produce with fossil fuels will worsen climate change. To speed the transition to renewables, we should rely on the tool that most economists say will be the quickest, simplest, and most efficient: an honest price on carbon. Congress needs to face that reality and take action.