Jeff Goodell’s book The Heat Will Kill You First is proving to be fascinating. As an Austin resident, he is able to describe global climate change and give recent examples from south and central Texas [ed. note: WLBOTT corporate headquarters is located in Central Texas]. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, crop loss, but perhaps most bizarrely, the February 2021 polar vortex that left corporate headquarters without power for five days.
I remember a few days before the storm Sally the Intern excitedly burst into the corporate executive suite and announced “A wintry mix! A wintry mix!” My thoughts were:
- she’s delusional from an all Ramen/McNugget diet
- a leafy blend is on sale in the produce department of HEB
- get out of my office
Some climate change deniers[1] may argue that this disproves global warming, the the opposite is true. An unusually warm Arctic disrupted the normally stable jet stream, causing it to plunge deep into the continental United States.
As Jeff Goodell explains:
One way to think about atmospheric circulation is as a giant heat transport system, one that is constantly circulating warm air from the tropics up to the poles, and bringing the cooler air from the poles down to the tropics. The main engine of this heat transport system is called the jet stream, which blows west to east in the upper atmosphere. TV weathercasters love to talk about the jet stream, often illustrating it with red (for warm) and blue (for cool) arrows circulating over images of the Earth.
The Heat Will Kill You First / Anatomy of a Crime Scene, page 115
As he told me about this, we were walking among rows of aloe. I started to explain how some scientists hypothesize that the freeze that hit Texas in 2021—which I froze through myself—was one of the consequences of a warming Arctic. I said, “The Arctic is warming four times as fast as the rest of the planet, and as a result, it is pushing the jet stream farther south, allowing the cold arctic air to move down to Texas.”
The Heat Will Kill You First / Magic Valley, page 130
[1] I tried to find a more pejorative term than “climate change deniers”, but The Guardian beat me to the punch.
We all have terms that we use as a shortcut to collectively describe people who exhibit certain behaviours.
For example, I have one for people who drive too close to your bumper on motorways. They’re called tailgaters, although dickheads is also fine.
I’ve witnessed this faux outrage over the term denier many, many times. I’ve been accused of trying to make the inference to Holocaust denial when I’ve used it.
Some climate science misinformers make this Holocaust claim in an effort to persuade their audience that their opponents are nasty and thoughtless.
In my opinion this is, to use a term that few could misunderstand, bollocks. Wemple was more graceful, calling it “specious”.
Guardian Article by Graham Readfearn
From The Austin Chronicle:
Although most of the southern U.S. has been experiencing winter storm conditions and record low temperatures since Sunday night, Texas has been in a uniquely disastrous situation.
This is largely because most of Texas is on a different power grid than the rest of the U.S. The other 47 states are on the Eastern or Western Interconnection, with multiple operators; the Texas grid is operated by the state-chartered nonprofit Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. That grid has been separate from the national grids since the 1930s, and because it doesn’t cross state lines (it does have limited connections to surrounding states and to Mexico), it’s not subject to oversight by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and it can’t import power on a large scale from the other two U.S. grids. Across Texas as of Tuesday morning, 4.5 million people were without power;
Gov. Greg Abbott went on Fox News to lie about the cause of energy blackouts in Texas. The energy catastrophe “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said of the mostly-theoretical green infrastructure program that is not anywhere close to becoming law, let alone the cause of millions of Texans losing power this week.
Early Monday morning between 1am and 2am, generators that power the grid using natural gas (responsible for most of the overload), coal, and nuclear energy went offline due to insufficient weatherization….
Medics responded to a record-shattering 1,435 calls on Monday – double the previous 24-hour record, according to Austin EMS Association president Selena Xie. “It was a total shit show,” Xie told the Chronicle, recalling how numerous ambulances and trucks were stuck on the way to calls – or worse, while transporting patients – and had to be pulled out.
The Austin Chronicle
February 2021 North American Cold Wave
The February 2021 North American cold wave was an extreme weather event that brought record low temperatures to a significant portion of Canada, the United States and parts of northern Mexico during the first two-thirds of February 2021. The cold was caused by a southern migration of the polar vortex, likely caused by a sudden stratospheric warming event that occurred the prior month.
Waco, Texas experienced a record 205 hours of subfreezing temperatures, while Austin experienced a record 164 hours.[2] This put a strain on the state’s power grid, resulting in the Southwest Power Pool and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas both instituting rolling blackouts.
Texas by far was the state worst affected by the cold wave. A record low temperature at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport of −2 °F (−19 °C) on February 16 was the coldest in North Texas in 72 years. Power equipment in Texas was not winterized, leaving it vulnerable to extended periods of cold weather, leading to widespread power outages. Five times as much natural gas as wind power had been lost because of the cold.
[2] I only recall a handful of times when is was below 32° in Austin for over 24 hours. It would be a big local news story of burst pipes and closed schools.
Sally T. Intern: Great Coping Skills
