ESSAY
Yes, This is Climate Change
Cold snaps do happen on a warming globe
I am writing this on Tuesday evening, February 16, 2021. At this time, millions of Texans are without electrical power. Authorities are asking us to set our thermostats down to 60–65 F, to conserve natural gas. Some areas have a “boil water” order in place, because water from the tap is unsafe because many residents dripped their faucets to prevent frozen pipes. All of this is the result of a historic cold air outbreak that hit on Sunday.
Whenever it gets cold outside, certain voices take the opportunity to joke (or worse) about how it’s clear that there is no global warming happening. If it gets unusually cold, that outcry becomes more strident. In some years, a U.S. Senator has even appeared on the floor of the Senate, snowball in hand, to demand that we get rid of this notion that the earth is warming.
The Science
Intuitively, we expect a warming climate to have less frequent cold air outbreaks that challenge utility planners. But it isn’t that simple.
Climate change is not a uniform warming, but a radical change in global circulation patterns. We generally think of the polar vortex as a large circle of wind flowing around the pole, west to east. The picture at the top of this essay is…
