Is Climate Change Making Texas Winters Colder?
February 18, 2021
By Paul Homewood
It has not taken long for the climate morons to blame the current Texas cold weather on climate change:
While we obviously don’t have the data for this month yet, it is clear from NOAA’s database that extreme cold in Texas used to be much more common than in recent years:
Climate at a Glance | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) (noaa.gov)
Of course, I must make my usual caveat; these graphs are derived from heavily adjusted and homogenised temperature data.
Are Texas winters getting colder, or are the NOAA figures correct?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
a realistic CNBC news heading would have been “Renewable energy makes grid more vulnerable to weather
Absolutely. I expect there are good reasons for the 67% increase in major power outages since 2000 referred to in the third point – and none of them are global warming! No prizes for guessing any of them.
The Texas Blackouts show how stupid it is to rely on Green
EnergyLethargy.If they had replaced “climate change” for “weather” in the headline it would have been more accurate.
Interesting to note that the BBC Six O’clock news on Wednesday, a day when a dozen people died and there were widespread blackouts in Texas, made no mention of the extreme conditions or lack of electricity. Harrabin on holiday perhaps?
‘Research group Climate Central’.
LOL.
They’re a major climate activist outfit, hell-bent on promoting hysteria wherever they can find (or create) it.
https://www.climatecentral.org/
The current scam started with them calling it Global Warming, since this was patently nonsense theyve wriggled out of it by moving the goalposts to a catch all ‘ Climate Change’ Maybe we should hold them to their original scare label
I quite agree! The alarmists should be honest and state at what point, and why, did they change from “Global Warming” to “Climate Change”?
Correct
Caveat emptor? Paul I wonder what the unadjusted and unhomogenised data and graphs would look like if said data still exists.
Yes James the data still exists in the form of the old monthly US Weather Bureau Climatological tables…
This is just one example…
ftp://ftp.library.noaa.gov/docs.lib/htdocs/rescue/mwr/062/mwr-062-05-0173.pdf
The extremes for any state can be found. NOAA, NCDC however has adjusted all of them, lowering most of them and seasonly so.
Greentards, time to hang them. 30 dead of cold in Texas.
I think it may prove interesting to look at the excess winter deaths when they have had time to register them. I suspect the numbers will be much higher.
Power outages were caused by assuming that recent events of prolonged cold weather with ice storms and snow were not a risk worth providing for. The outages in gas (and oil) production have been due to weather, just as the icing of wind turbines. There have been feedback effects from loss of power on energy production.
Global warming projections that suggested these risks were no longer worth insuring against with physical protection must bear a large chunk of responsibility. Just as the gay assumptions that renewables aren’t really intermittent on longer timescales (I.e., intermittency can be solved with only short term storage, not inter year storage, or proper backup alternatives) will produce even worse scenes in the future.
Paul: it means the February figures are crucial. The data you have presented shows no temperature below freezing ever. Either the figures are grossly incorrect or we are witnessing a dramatic chage in southern US state weather. The BBC (Christian Frazer) has the answer – they didn’t winterise their windmills. And what’s all that about the gas supplies freezing? I don’t think for one minute that they have gas grids supplying individual homes in Texas so if its just to power generators where does the freezing occur? How does Russia manage?
For extreme weather in the US Southwest up to 1934
https://journals.ametsoc.org/search?q1=Meteorological+extremes+of+the+southwest
Click on Download PDF… View the extremes in Texas, hot and cold.
I can understand weather fueling climate change, faster solar coronal hole streams drive positive Arctic Oscillation conditions, and colder ocean phases. But climate change fueling more frequent weather extremes is anti-science. OK, rising CO2 forcing may project onto natural variability, but only as a positive bias, it has nothing to do with weather variability and weather events. And by default, it cannot exacerbate negative Arctic Oscillation events like this particular cold event.
Follow the science they say, well it says that rising CO2 forcing increases positive Arctic Oscillation states.
https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html
Ulric… ” OK, rising CO2 forcing may project onto natural variability, but only as a positive bias..”
There is no correlation between Mauna Loa CO2 and the ENSO. Natural variability took over from 1938 to 1975 as CO2 rose steadily and temperatures dropped.
Well here’s the rub, increased positive NAO/AO should drive a colder AMO and ENSO. Natural variability took over from 1995 too, with weaker solar wind states increasing negative NAO/AO conditions, which drove a warmer AMO and increased El Nino conditions.
off topic, but saw the Amazon tv advert again this morning linking houses burning during US forest fires directly to climate change and CO2. Have reported it to ASA
Just saw this… “In fact, extreme weather like the winter storm that swept across the country in recent days will become more likely as climate change worsens, Gates told Yahoo Finance, advocating instead for an expansion of renewable energy as part of his call for the U.S. to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.”
It is sad that someone as smart as Bill Gates could be so easily led to believe what adjusted climate models say, and then not understand that renewable energies cannot lower the CO2 in the atmosphere on a permanent basis. NET-Zero emissions is the job of industrial CCS technology and it is woefully inadequate. There is no way that Net-zero can be achieved by 2050 when there is not even a numerical goal that could make a difference to the climate.
Interesting comment in The Scotsman that the Vortex is getting colder in Texas when describing the problems endure by the Oil State. Time will show if the combinaton of low sun spots, La Nina, reversal of Atlantic Decadel Oscillation will combine to gradually cool globe and provide a start to the next Maunder type minimum. Here is Scotland we will soon be able to enjoy the pleasure of looking at 260m high on shore wind turbines. I was thinking of the ice closing the Queensferry Crossing and wondering if such a wind turbine could withstand the elements. Sounds as a candidate for icing up if the weather turns into a climatic decline in temperatures. I sense we are at a 50/50 point and it can go either way.
I anticipate riots if renewable subsidies keep going up and temperatures down with an ample supply of outages.
Flashback – another BBC prediction of climate doom fails the reality test.
Remember the bread wheat scare story and the price of bread after the relatively poor UK wheat harvest last year?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53921121
Reality, scarcely a blip since the story.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/czog/
Fossil fuel assisted food production and global distribution means that if somewhere has a bad year, it’s odds on it will be good somewhere else, and all is good.
And Oz wheat harvest bounces back after drought:-
https://www.thegwpf.com/reality-check-australian-farmers-harvest-record-wheat-crop/
The USA has periods when deep cold intrusions appear to become more common – Florida citrus farming was destroyed at the turn of the 19th/20th century and again in the 1980s.
I just went on-line to the NOAA website, “Climate at a Glance”. The minimum January temperature for Texas was 24.1°F in 1918. That’s one year after the coldest year in the whole US, 1917. So, it is always possible to argue that it’s climate change when it’s extremely hot as it is when it is extremely cold. A win-win for climate alarmists?
Interesting that the Sun has been very quiet for years and a NASA research group studying vibrations related to Sun magnetic activity are forecasting the start of a possible ice age beginning in 2030. Wonder if that’s figured into the green energy mania. Seems anything that history tells us about the Earth’s past climate is lost on the genius alarmists.
‘Is Climate Change Making Texas Winters Colder?’
ABSOLUTELY! And it is making them hotter. And dryer. And wetter.
Amazing stuff, this ‘climate change.’