Sorry, Texas Tribune, Texas is not subject to extreme weather because of climate change – Are you excited about that?
Via Linnea Lueken
A Google news search for the term “climate change” found an article in Texas Tribune in which the writer, Erin Douglas, repeats the tiresome claim that scientists agree that man-made climate change is causing an increase in extreme weather. This statement is doubly wrong. First, there is no tendency for increased hurricane strength, drought, or warmer climates to cause colder winters. Second, there is no consensus among scientists that climate change will necessarily make the weather worse.
inside Texas Tribune article, titled “A year after the grid failed, Texas focuses on reliability, not climate change”, its author rightly points out that there are problems with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, due to their dependence on weather and therefore being unreliable. Despite these limitations, Douglas maintains that greater reliance on these sources is needed due to anthropogenic climate change and its impact on extreme weather events.
Douglas wrote:
If climate change does not slow down, scientists agree that extreme weather that already stresses the Texas power grid is likely to get worse: Climate scientists project increased frequency and severity of droughts, stronger hurricanes, and overall temperature increases, among other effects in Texas.
Emerging science also shows that climate change could send cold air much farther south than in the past, contributing to severe and prolonged cold spells like last winter’s storm.
In fact, the data shows no trend toward an increase in hurricane frequency or intensity, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico. UN The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said is “only low confidence in the distribution of any detectable change in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic effects.” The IPCC’s acceptance is confirmed by the storm data shown in the figure below.
Figure 1: Graph showing the frequency of global storms since 1970
Climate alerters often argue that modest warming of the oceans will “intensify” hurricanes in the Gulf, but they ignore the impact of increased wind shear also associated with increased wind shear. Warming. As discussed in Climate at a glance: Storm, scientists already know that global warming is likely to cause more shear winds where storms form and strengthen. Wind shear tends to dissipate and disrupt the formation and continuation of tropical cyclones.
Contrary to Douglas’ assertion, the IPCC clearly states that scientists disagree that droughts have been and will be increased by climate change. In its most recent Climate Assessment Report, AR6, IPCC distinguishes four types of drought: hydrological, meteorological, ecological and agricultural. According to the IPCC, there is limited evidence that climate change has increased the number, duration or intensity of hydrological and meteorological droughts, and it only believes it has “contributed to these changes in agricultural and ecological drought and has resulted in an increase in the overall area of affected land. ”
For ecological and agricultural drought, the data is a mixed bag. The IPCC divides the world into 47 distinct study regions when analyzing drought trends, and the organization’s data shows that ecological and agricultural drought may have increased during periods of modest warming. in 12 of those 47 regions. In just two of those regions, however, does the IPCC even have “average confidence” for any human role in the observed increase. As for the remaining areas where drought is likely to increase, the IPCC is not confident that human activities have had any discernible impact.
Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also refutes claims that climate change is causing cold air to drop further south, causing record cold. NOAA keeps track of temperature records by state, and data for Texas does not show a real short-term upward trend as suggested by vibration-resistant computer models.
Word picture https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/tx/
Debate continues over the effects of moderate warming on weather patterns, but the available data clearly show that there are no strong trends in increasing extreme weather that require a waiver. The trusted natural gas network dominates in Texas. Indeed, if extreme weather were to increase, making the grid more dependent on predictable and consistent weather, as Douglas confirmed, would almost certainly lead to frequent outages and lasting longer, like the Texans experienced last winter, instead of less power outages. The best way to ensure the safety of any electrical grid is to reduce the likelihood of weather affecting it. That means maintaining existing reliable sources of electricity such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear facilities, and building more of those sources to ensure that the state’s population is sufficiently powered. the more increasing.
Linking extreme weather events to climate change is fear, stalking people’s natural and rational fears about the power and devastation these events exhibit. In contrast, the data shows that people are less vulnerable to extreme climates than ever before. Let’s not reverse course now, by allowing uncontrolled weather to potentially have a greater impact on our energy and transportation systems.
https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/linnea-lueken
Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy. As a Heartland Institute intern in 2018, she co-authored the Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Drawling Four Persistent Myths of Hydraulic Fracture.”
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