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MPR News Staff

Can climate change explain the Texas deep freeze and other extreme weather?

People wait in line at a grocery store in the snow.
People line up to enter Costco in Pflugerville, Texas, last month. Anger over Texas' power grid failing in the face of a record winter freeze mounted as millions of residents in the energy capital of the U.S. remained shivering with no assurances that their electricity and heat, out for 36 hours or longer in many homes, would return soon or stay on once it finally does.
Ricardo B. Brazziell | Austin American-Statesman via AP file

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Just two months into 2021, deadly winter temperatures left millions of Texans without water and power. Meanwhile, California is preparing for another year of intense drought, and Wall Street millionaires are moving their remote work to Florida, ground zero for flooding and sea level rise.

“We think about the Earth as a system,” says Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, “so we can't understand climate change unless we understand changes in the Arctic, or in the ocean circulations, or in the biosphere, and so forth.”

But is the current chaos due to a lack of attention to science, a failure of policy, or both?

Katharine Mach is associate professor, Department of Marine Ecosystems and Society, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. As research is focused on resilience and preparedness for the risks of a changing climate, Mach acknowledges that climate science is about more than atmospheric physics and chemistry.

“A lot of the science is actually figuring out what is the status of human response to the changing climate,” says Mach, “and that's stepping far from straight physics all the way through the human experience of the changing climate.”

Shepherd says there are misconceptions about the polar vortex that caused the Texas deep freeze, noting that it’s not an event like a storm or tornado but rather a normal feature of the atmosphere whose dynamics are changing as the planet warms. Those dynamics are complicated, but climate scientists like Shepherd are certain of the implications: more extreme weather. 

“Hope or waiting and seeing is no longer a valid risk mitigation strategy,” says Shepherd, “that just doesn't fly anymore, our weather forecasts are too good.”

Greg Dalton is the host and founder of the Climate One series from the Commonwealth Club of California.

Use the audio player above to listen to the program.