Texas Freezing and Global Warming

 

A few days ago, my husband and I were chatting about the freezing weather in Texas and the resulting blackouts. My daughter got grumpy when she heard us and said, “So you don’t believe in global warming?”

“Not necessarily. If you want to convince me, answer my questions,” my husband said. “First, is it true that we have global warming? See how cold Texas gets and how much snow we are getting.”

“Scientists said these are caused by global warming! I can find out,” said my daughter.

“OK. Second, if global warming is true, is it caused by carbon dioxide or by human activities? Third, would it help if the United States and Europe stopped emitting carbon dioxide while China can do whatever it wants? You know, the emissions from China are more than those from the United States and Europe combined.”

“Global warming is an interesting topic for my writing, I guess,” I interjected.

“No! You can write about anything but global warming!” my daughter yelled.

“Why?”

“Because it’s stupid!”

“Why is it stupid? I am going to research it.”

“The scientists… the United Nations… NASA said global warming is true! If you doubt it, it is like you are saying the earth is flat!”

“Well, I don’t think the earth is flat, and I will do some research on global warming,” I said.

“But what you write is about socialism stuff. That’s politics. Global warming is SCIENCE!”

“OK, if it is a science, people should be allowed to debate about it based on evidence and data, right? Why are you so upset? I am just curious to find answers to your dad’s questions. I don’t think you would be upset if I wrote about whales and sea turtles, and checked which of them swims faster.”

At that point, I made up my mind to do the research and find out why my daughter was so nervous about this topic.

Explaining Texas Freezing as a Symptom of Global Warming

Since my daughter mentioned NASA, I researched NASA first. They’ve published a video showing the global surface temperature changes from 1880 to 2020. It looks like the global surface temperatures are getting higher, especially since 2005. The temperature increase at the North Pole is most obvious.

But why is Texas, in the Sunshine Belt, getting so cold? According to mainstream media, like the New York Times, a warmer Arctic Sea and thinner Arctic sea ice is the reason for colder continents in lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere. This is because the warmth weakens the circulating “jet stream” holding the cold polar air, so the frigid air escapes to the lower latitude areas.

Although this is the media’s standard answer, in scientific circles it is still considered a hypothesis and has been challenged by prominent climate scientists:

“It’s an interesting idea, but alternative observational analyses and simulations with climate models have not confirmed the hypothesis, and we do not view the theoretical arguments underlying it as compelling.

 … Coincidence does not in itself constitute a strong case for causality. Cold air outbreaks even more severe than occurred this winter affected the United States in the early 1960s, the late 1970s (most notably 1977), and in 1983, back when the Arctic sea ice was thicker and more extensive than it is today.”

—John Wallace, Isaac Held, David Thompson, Kevin Trenberth, and John Walsh, in a 2014 letter published in Science.

 “Over the past six or so years, there has been a surge of modelling studies ­­suggesting only a weak influence of Arctic warming on mid-latitudes. The magnitudes of the simulated responses are consistently weaker than observations might imply, for reasons that are uncertain and contentious.”

—Russell Blackport and James A. Screen, in a 2020 letter published in Nature.

Apparently, scientists haven’t found a compelling explanation for the extreme winter chill in Texas in the context of global warming. That is quite inconvenient for climate apocalypse advocates.

Global warming has been held as the culprit for all kinds of miseries, like hurricanes, droughts, flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, malaria, and rising sea levels. Therefore, extreme winter cold has to be caused by global warming somehow, right? Just as Liz Sherwood-Randall, President Biden’s homeland security adviser, told reporters on Feb. 18, “The extreme weather events that we’re experiencing this week … do yet again demonstrate to us that climate change is real and it’s happening now, and we’re not adequately prepared for it.”

Global Warming vs. Hurricanes

“Hurricanes have been depicted as the literal poster-child of the harmful impacts of global warming.”

—Christopher Landsea, American meteorologist

Thanks to Chapter Sixteen (Parts I and II) of The Epoch Times book “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World,” I was shown a gateway to an ocean of knowledge about climate change.

EPOCH TIMES