Deadly Global Warming-South Central Texas

Good luck, Texas! (And everyone else affected by this wave of Arctic cold.)

I remember reading the last time Texas got unexpectedly whacked by unusual, Arctic cold, that the price of electricity is unregulated in Texas, that it fluctuates according to demand, and that accordingly electric bills got crazy high for some folks.

Is that a problem for most folks in Texas, or is it just an unusual problem that affects relatively few Texans?

Most people have fixed rate contracts for their electricity. That can't be changed. There are some, though, who chose to not have a fixed rate plan for whatever reason - perhaps they don't want to commit to a contract, or whatever. Those are the people who have to be concerned about things like that. Well, there's also those who want to renew a contract that happens to be ending during a spike in prices, but they can usually wait a few days for prices to come back down.
 
So True

I refuse to stick my head in the sand. The patterns have changed for whatever reason.

So true, but the real question is why climate has changed, not weather. The Houston Chronicle has proclaimed with profound certainty that the polar vortex is able to wreak havoc on Texas because manmade climate change has deflected the jet stream southward. Never mind El Nino.

Why spew such patent nonsense misinformation that's it all our fault for driving big cars? Could it possibly be to sell more newspapers, more view clicks, or bigger research grants? 10,000 years ago North America was under an ice sheet a couple of miles thick in some places. One third of Europe starved to death in the 15th century drought and heat wave prompting Queen Isabella to send Columbus westward searching for more arable land in the New World.

Did mankind cause the Milankovitch cycles, wobbling the earth askew in its orbit?

"What you got ain't nothin' new. This country's hard on people. You can't stop what's comin'. It ain't all about you. That's vanity."
 
Up here in the PNW it's going to be down in the 20s and teens for a few days. Most of the US is in the freezer.
 
People seem to confuse the changes in the weather with the predictions of global warming. They are not the same thing people. Global warming is real and inevitable.

I would note they changed the theme song from "Global Warming" to Climate Change when global warming data fell apart.

Pollution, waste, and poisoning the air and water are bad things and should be controlled. They bring great dangers. However silly solutions that that do not consider the whole are putting money in somebody's pockets. For instance, If you run cars on natural gas it is far more efficient than converting natural gas to electrical power, transmitting the electrical power great distances (think about how much heat those wires generate) then converting that power to chemical energy in a solid state battery before feeding it to the electric motors
The earth has been warming and cooling on difficult to predict cycles for billions of years. We are not in the warmest cycle now,

This is of the NOAA website, to borrow from Al Gore, an inconvenient truth

A Smithsonian Institution project has tried to reconstruct temperatures for the Phanerozoic Eon, or roughly the last half a billion years. Preliminary results released in 2019 showed warm temperatures dominating most of that time, with global temperatures repeatedly rising above 80°F and even 90°F—much too warm for ice sheets or perennial sea ice. About 250 million years ago, around the equator of the supercontinent Pangea, it was even too hot for peat swamps!

Preliminary results from a Smithsonian Institution project led by Scott Wing and Paul Huber, showing Earth's average surface temperature over the past 500 million years.  For most of the time, global temperatures appear to have been too warm (red portions of line) for persistent polar ice caps. The most recent 50 million years are an exception. Image adapted from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Geologists and paleontologists have found that, in the last 100 million years, global temperatures have peaked twice. One spike was the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse roughly 92 million years ago, about 25 million years before Earth's last dinosaurs went extinct. Widespread volcanic activity may have boosted atmospheric carbon dioxide. Temperatures were so high that champsosaurs (crocodile-like reptiles) lived as far north as the Canadian Arctic, and warm-temperature forests thrived near the South Pole.
Another hothouse period was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 55-56 million years ago. Though not quite as hot as the Cretaceous hothouse, the PETM brought rapidly rising temperatures. During much of the Paleocene and early Eocene, the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle.
 
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Big lies:

> The moon landing was staged in Hollywood.

> The CIA was behind the world trade center attack.

> Elvis is alive.

> Global warming isn't real.

About the last one: Global warming is an indisputable FACT. For every credible person you can present who claims otherwise, there are 1000 credible persons who will say they are wrong. What is up for speculation is it's cause. Could it be natural? I don't know. Could it be man made? I don't know. Could it be cow farts? I don't know. What I do know however, is it is happening.

I'm gonna go with cow farts.
 
Or, Josh Allen Sunday afternoon.

Tua: born in Hawaii, college in Alabama, NFL in S Florida. His idea of cold is probably anything below 60 degrees.

Josh: Born in Cali. College in Wyoming and NFL in Buffalo

See the difference? I like Tua very much, but Josh Allen is better suited for ridiculously cold weather play.

Now Najee: Born in Cali., College in Bama, NFL in Pitt. Should we ask him too? He'll spend much of the game on his back on the cold turf of Highmark.
 
Tua: born in Hawaii, college in Alabama, NFL in S Florida. His idea of cold is probably anything below 60 degrees.

Josh: Born in Cali. College in Wyoming and NFL in Buffalo

See the difference? I like Tua very much, but Josh Allen is better suited for ridiculously cold weather play.

Now Najee: Born in Cali., College in Bama, NFL in Pitt. Should we ask him too? He'll spend much of the game on his back on the cold turf of Highmark.

Someone needs to tell Tua to dress in layers, lots of them, and breathe that clean fresh air.
 
I'm gonna go with cow farts.

Y'all know it's not actually farts but belches right? Methane is generated in the ruminant stomach and belched out - it doesn't make it through the digestive tract to the poo chute for the most part. It's hard because apparently methane does make it all the through for most of us on the forum. But you lack a multi chambered ruminant digestive system.

I really try to keep up on the trends and, in my opinion, climate change, or more variability, is evident but I'm not convinced it indicates a warming trend of long significance. I'm old enough to remember snow at Thanksgiving where I grew up near St. Louis and that doesn't happen much anymore. But my lifetime experience is so incredibly small in the scheme of climate change it can scarcely mean much.

We seem to be experiencing wider and more frequent swings but, as stated in some posts above, there is actually some credible evidence that we're in a cooling phase rather than a warming phase. It's all happened before we just weren't here to witness it or to calculate the political capital it might represent.

Bryan
 
Good luck, Texas! (And everyone else affected by this wave of Arctic cold.)

I remember reading the last time Texas got unexpectedly whacked by unusual, Arctic cold, that the price of electricity is unregulated in Texas, that it fluctuates according to demand, and that accordingly electric bills got crazy high for some folks.

Is that a problem for most folks in Texas, or is it just an unusual problem that affects relatively few Texans?

Relatively few. There were some variable price plans that gave you much better rates...most of the time. But it was tied to the spot price so when the market went dysfunctional due to the complete lack of supply they ended up with $15,000 power bills. I think those are dead now. The State stepped in and nobody got stuck with those bills as I recall.

The market is regulated. "De-regulated" is the term they use. They split the market into producers (they own the generation), distributors (TDSP), and marketers (REP). The producers sell to the marketers in an open competitive market. The marketers work with the distributors to deliver it. Keeps anybody from having a monopoly.
 
Our lucky star has a finite life. It WILL eventually start to run out of fuel. Not in our lifetimes but eventually. When that happens it will consume it's closest offspring. The future of the human species on earth is extinction. I would think every one knows this by now. Earth's population is exploding exponentially. For how long?
 

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