Texas’s Dangerous Week in the Dark is a wake-up call for the country’s infrastructure

And the changes people have made to the climate mean that the weather patterns we have experienced in the past will have less of an impact on the kinds of conditions we can expect in the future.

“The more we force the climate away from what it has been like for the past 10,000 years, the more likely we are to have surprises,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, an California neighborhood. think scrum.

The experts believe that preparing for the climate change curve will be difficult and expensive.

But there are important lessons they say we need to learn from Texas so that we are better prepared for the next disaster.

Is this freezing related to climate change? The jury is still out

There is abundant scientific evidence that climate change is causing heat waves worldwide to be warmer and longer lasting.

But is global warming also increasing the chances that icy air masses – such as those sweeping most of the United States this week – could escape from the Arctic and settle over the lower latitudes?

Scientists are not yet sure about this question.

Around the region is a jet stream, a wind strip that blows west to east and provides a barrier between cold, arctic air and the warmer mid-latitudes.

However, the jet stream does not just blow in a perfect circle around the top of the planet – it bends up and down for various reasons, so that cold air can occasionally dip south.

That seems to have happened this week, albeit a very extreme version, said Tim Woollings, a professor of climate science at the University of Oxford, whose research over time has changed the jet stream.

But Woollings says we just don’t have enough data yet to know if these kinds of events will become more common in the future.

That doesn’t mean we’ll still have occasional cold snaps – not even as extreme as these. But as more people warm up the planet, it is likely to become scarce.

“These are certainly interesting theories, but at the moment there is not much evidence for them,” he said.

Prepare for ‘unknown territory’

However, there is ample evidence that climate change increases the threats of a variety of extreme events, which will highlight critical systems in ways not previously tested.

“Without adaptation, climate change will continue to weaken the performance of infrastructure for the rest of the century, with the potential for consequences threatening the economy, national security, essential services and health and well-being,” the report warned.

How do we prepare complex systems – such as our energy networks – to deal with them?

Scientists say it will require a fine balancing process – both ensuring that systems can withstand current conditions, while also planning for extreme weather conditions beyond the limits of what we have experienced before.

“We are really in unprecedented areas and need to focus much more on resilience going forward to respond to new and perhaps unprecedented extremes,” Hausfather said.

Texas’ power grid – at least so far – has shown it’s equipped to handle the chilling demands of a scorching summer in Texas, when millions of air-conditioning units hum to make life indoors bearable.

But as temperatures dropped this week, demands for heating and electricity skyrocketed. At the same time, demand rose, electricity supply was weakened by freezing natural gas and coal plants.

The solution to preventing another situation like this is not necessarily to harness one energy source or abandon another, said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University, who studies energy systems and policy. , said.

In general, diverse energy systems that use multiple sources are more resilient, Jenkins said.

Instead, we need to design our existing systems to function in more extreme weather. This includes both weather stations and wind turbines, but also the insulation of our homes to improve efficiency, so that in the first place it requires less energy to stay warm or cool.

This is not the first time the weakness in Texas’ electricity system has been exposed.

This storm and its aftermath have claimed dozens of lives, and the death toll is expected to rise.

It will take time before the full extent of property destruction caused by the North Pole explosion, but it is likely to have caused multi-billion dollar damages, said Steve Bowen, head of disaster insight at Aon.

“The impact that winter weather has on the infrastructure network and disruption of business in the state of Texas is comparable to what has historically been seen with hurricane attacks in the state,” Bowen said.

Will the state hereafter be willing to pay the bill to keep the lights on in the next freeze? And are parts of the country accustomed to the cold willing to make the investments needed to withstand the next record-breaking heatwave?

Surrounding these systems would not be cheap, Jenkins said. But as this episode has shown, people will somehow pay for it.

“(This extreme cold) was beyond the scope of the conditions planned for, or considered so infrequent, that it was not worth the extra cost to weather different types of infrastructure and buildings,” Jenkins said. “I think we will see at the end of this when the damage is compensated – and hopefully not too many lives are lost – whether the calculus was accurate or not.”