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Don’t think so

More than four million people in Texas have been left without power and two people are dead, as a fearsome winter storm has sent temperatures plummeting to -22C

-22C? In Texas?

Lord knows what the Telegraph has misunderstood there but I don’t think so…..

24 thoughts on “Don’t think so”

  2. Mr Ecks

    Global warming is cockrot. Global cooling? Possibly but too early to say. But the weather is giving the lie to the “you’ll never see snow again” shite.

  4. Bloke in China (Germany province)

    Just had a call with someone whose parents are in Texas. It is indeed that cold there now.

  6. Stonyground

    If the winters do start getting consistently colder, which is quite possible as these things tend to go in cycles, it will be interesting to see the alarmists trying to blame it on the warming effects of CO2.

  7. Kevin B

    According to Ventusky it’s -20C in Dallas at the moment so maybe the groan gets one right.(It’s probably an agency story)

    Did they print the story about all the power cuts in Texas because the wind turbines have frozen up?

  9. Ottokring

    I think that this is also a north wind bringing the weather, so it has passed down a lot of cold land east of the Rockies and across the Texan land-mass. Even Mexico is having snow.

  10. llamas

    The Blue Texas Norther got it’s name for a reason, although that’s not the only phenomenon at play here. My co-worker outside San Antonio told of a temperature of 7° F a night or two back, so -14° C, so I think – 22°C is perfectly possible.

    Hard to fathom, isn’t it?

    llater,

    llamas

  11. Ltw

    I remember getting off a bus in Vail, Colorado, and being told it was two degrees. I thought my normal travel clothes, light jumper, decent shoes would be fine for the short walk to our room.

    Oh, Fahrenheit. Yep, that was cold. Minus 20C sounds pretty reasonable for Texas. If they had said minus 20F, well then I’d be calling bullshit.

  12. Nessimmersion

    Continental temperatures away from the moderating effects of the oceans innit.
    I believe on Tims peninsula that Madrid gets a tad chilly as well.

  14. Nigel Sedgwick

    For Tim and readers, look here: https://darksky.net/forecast/30.2643,-97.7475/ca24/en

    This website of USA weather allows you to display temperatures in both F and C, thus avoiding the personal risk of conversion errors. It also provides selection between actual temperatures and “feels like” temperatures, the latter mainly being, at this time of year, colder through wind chill.

    The displayed coldest place in Texas (on my chosen area setting) is Wichita Falls: at -19C actual temperature and -25C “feels like” temperature.

    Keep safe (especially if you are in the USA and currently lacking mains electricity) and best regards

  15. Dongguan John

    I have a FB friend living in Texas. The power is out too where she is and people have decamped to their cars for warmth.

  16. Dodgy Geezer

    A number of gentlemen (for such I assume that they are) are commenting above that temperature goes in cycles.

    The temperature in Texas at the moment is, of course, a weather phenomenon rather than a climatic one, but it is perfectly true that there seem to be many complex cycles driving our climate. The major one seems to be a 60-80 year cycle of heat/cold, which was at its lowest in the 1960/70s (resulting in fears about a new ice age, and then swung back up again during the 1990/2000s, resulting in the current concern about ‘runaway greenhouse heating’ which has been monetarised into a panic by interested parties.

    For the last 10-20 years temperatures have been flat, and are now trending downwards once again. But you need to look at satellite data to see this, because land data is ‘corrected’ to provide support for the panic.

    The most striking place to see this cyclic variation is in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) – the variation of Atlantic temperature which seems to drive most Northern Hemisphere temperatures. Just google ‘Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation’, look at the Images, and you will see clearly how there is NOTHING unusual about the temperature on century timescales, when the hot/cold panics had set in, and when they will recur in the future…

  18. Diogenes

    Meanwhile I find that I am coping quite easily with a change of 11 degrees from one day to the next – -1 yesterday, 10 today. Oh to be a climate scientist

  19. Rob

    Texas’ power policy has been a catastrophe, for which absolutely no-one will be held accountable and which, in fact, it will be ‘misinformation’ to even mention.

  21. BlokeInTejas

    I live near Austin TX.

    I have a real thermometer affixed to a tree, visible from within the house.

    The temperature during daylight hours has clearly visibly reached 14F, which is 18F below freezing and by my usual rough calculation around -9 or -10. I can’t see the thermometer while sleeping at night, for various reasons, but the predictions were down to around 5F or so, and the predictions got the daytime temps correct. Dallas is 200 miles to the north. Colder there. So, yes, -15 to -20 as a general number is entirely reasonable.

  22. Ed Snack

    Agree with most above, reliable reports do suggest that the quoted temperatures are correct. Very big, deep, polar vortex of very cold air has been pushed down across the mid-west into Texas and even Mexico.

    I do recall being in a place in Colorado once called Crested Butte, and it was -42 degrees. And for once, you don’t have to say F or C, it’s the same number in both.

    And yes, it was COLD ! You could walk 20 metres from one bar to another OK, 50 metres and you noticed that it was really cold; and 200 metres and suddenly it was almost too cold to make it, it was a struggle. Was dressed for cold, but obviously not for COLD. The alcohol probably didn’t help either.

  23. Chris Miller

    Those are the sort of cold temperatures that would have a Geordie putting on a T-shirt over their singlet.

  24. john77

    @ Ed Snack
    Depends on the wind. -35C in Siberia with no wind was a lot easier, for me, than +35C the previous summer

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