I follow a website called Watts Up With That, self-proclaimed as the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change. Anthony Watts is a weatherman, as we used to call them, now formally known as meteorologists. His website is lively and fun, generally offering up ten or more new posts per day. Last I checked, it had accumulated 440,845,347 hits in its lifetime. That kind of traffic makes POM seem like a wart on an elephant.
Most recently, curious about what had transpired in Texas, I went to WUWT to see what Anthony had posted. I came across A Closer Look at What Happened in Texas During the Deep Freeze, a very long and complex piece by Chris Martz, whose blog is his namesake, and which is tagged “Weather and climate for the curious and open-minded.” He is described as an “aspiring meteorologist.” To keep it simple (for my sake!), I am going to focus on two things, how so much cold air made its way to Texas, and what happened and why.
I am going to borrow some graphics from the Martz post, as I think they are public property. I have no way of contacting him, as I do not use either Facebook or Twitter, his only public contacts. I’ll gladly remove anything below that is proprietary.
The first is an illustration (Waugh et al 2017) of what are called the stratospheric and tropospheric solar vortexes. See below.
As I grasp this, the SPV is relatively stable, while the TPV, strongest in winter, can be sometimes erratic. Winds that we call “counterclockwise” can be slowed down, even reversed, by a sudden stratospheric warming event (SSW), which can cause the SPV to split off in two, even three separate vortexes. This happened in January. The fallout generally happens within two weeks, and was predicted by meteorologist Joe Bastardi of WeatherBELL Analytics. But he was not taken seriously because he “rejects climate science,” the rough translation of that – he is an actual climate scientist. Bastardi correctly predicted the “winter equivalent of a CAT 5 hurricane.” Below is a clip from an interview by Pat Robertson of CBN – I’ll take what I can get. Bastardi is emphatic, and the accompanying footage is great.
Anyway, that’s what happened. It’s not the first time Texas has endured a winter blast of this strength, but things are a bit different now than in the past, as shown by the pie chart below.
“Gas CC” is natural gas used to fire a combined cycle plant, which increases the output, so that fully 46% of Texas energy comes from natural gas. Wind power is at 23%, but only due to one factor, subsidy. Over $80 billion has been funneled into corporations and local governments to advance wind power. Otherwise, those ugly bird-killing turbines would not exist except to run wells on dry and poached ranches. All the other energy outputs except solar are self-funded. This is why Texas was not prepared for the polar vortex.
“On Tuesday, February 9, temperatures began to plummet across northern and western Texas, and as the temperature cooled to the dew point at the surface, condensation formed on various surfaces, including the turbine blades. As temperatures continued to drop like a brick, the condensation froze, particularly on the leading edges of the blades, which are specifically designed to direct wind around the blades allowing them to spin. When covered with thick coatings of ice, the blades become significantly heavier and there isn’t enough lift to spin them. Nearly half of Texas’ wind energy supply went offline as a result. This would’ve been much more disastrous if the heavy snow and freezing rain had impacted that part of the state.”
Gas to the rescue. The brown line below is is natural gas energy output, while green is wind power.
In our topsy-turvy world, natural gas is used as a backup when wind and solar fail, rather than a primary source of energy. Generally, natural gas energy is available on demand, while coal depends on supplies available when needed, and wind and solar are erratic.
Natural gas, however, had its own problems, says Martz. “Thanks to the frigid temperatures and snow, the wells closed up and gathering lines froze due to a lack of insulation around them, while the pumps stopped working due to power outages, inhibiting the gas from reaching the Earth’s surface that could then be supplied to the plants by pipeline.” To avoid a full-on blackout, natural gas suppliers initiated rolling blackouts until the situation calmed down.
The situation was avoidable – one, had anyone paid attention to Bastardi, preparations could have been made to mitigate the situation, primarily by assuring adequate coal supplies to back up natural gas. Had Texas not gone whole-hog into wind power, they would have had been able to avoid or mitigate the financial disaster that was caused by reliance on wind power, a political product not justified by engineering. Texas can blame the climate change crowd for much of the billions in losses it suffered.
But, of course, being a climate change alarmist means never admitting error. Here is a sampling of news headlines supplied by Martz:
One would think that a polar vortex like the one just experienced, and which happen with regularity and which have not been either caused or affected by “climate change” would dampen the enthusiasm of climate change alarmists. Perhaps one or two might even admit error, perhaps even confess ignorance.
But that never happens. I the world I live in, lies are common currency traded by everyone with access to the media. I cannot imagine making my way through life by means of lying all day every day. I’ve told my share of lies, but I am not good at it and people easily see through me. Those who do so professionally, the so-called climate warriors, seem unfettered by conscience, living in moral turpitude, feeding on each other and ignoring, even reviling, honest science and scientists. They are slime, and I’ve been around enough to see how when a puddle forms around oil, the slime is on the surface.
Welcome to planet Earth, run by lies and lying liars, where even Diogenes might say “That’s it. I give up. I’m out of here.”
Piece of Mindful 
“Texas can blame the climate change crowd for much of the billions in losses it suffered.” First, isn’t the “climate change crowd” financed by the same capital that’s financing the (fossil fueled industrial manufactured) “heavy metal” wind turbines that generate “wind power?” Doesn’t all this bickering over “climate change” and U.N. “Sustainable Developmant Goals” (SDGs) (See: Agenda 2030) fit neatly between the (newly-painted green) goalpost rebranded “stakeholder capitalism” (latest marketing/repackaging scam to sell the idea behind the product).
Smart bankers have been funding both sided of every war, probably since money was invented. The NGOs with enough money to make a stink about “climate change” are funded by the same “Davos Crowd” that’s forcing the 4th Industrial Revolution and New Green Deal down everyone’s throat. It’s how capitalists are going to save capitalism, one more time, from collapse.
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Speaking of climate, currency, trading, lying, bankers, and capitalism . . . Just as we have learned this past year from Alison McDowell that human capital is the next new commoditized market for the hedge funds and money brokers, climate change has been a gambling/gaming market for many years (publicly since 1997 – read here at https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/weather/files/WEA_intro_to_weather_der.pdf and here at https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/weatherderivative.asp).
As explained here: https://www.legalsportsreport.com/39369/weather-betting-sports-2020/ “According to researcher Hilary Till, the most common type of contract is on future temperatures; think an over/under of the temperature in a specific city on a certain day. But contracts are also available for rain, snowfall, and wind speed. . . Till notes that temperature-related contracts account for 98% of the weather derivatives market.” I am not a betting woman, but my guesstimate is that while billions of dollars in losses were incurred by ordinary Texans from the recent weather event, the weather change “bookies” banked billions for themselves. Who needs pork bellies when you’ve got extreme weather events? The weather derivatives market is BIG business, and I would wager that this event was anything but natural. Funny how the climate change folks never mention geoengineering . . .
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The only planning could have been wrapped in the knowledge of the regularity of such weather events, and the knowledge that wind power would not suffice. That’s more than I can deal with.
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The phenotypical identical “groups” that you have discovered and documented so well are no mystery when one understands that the usual suspects have, for at least a couple of generations, been experimenting and testing what they launched worldwide in early 2020. A careful reading of the following excerpted from Wisebird explains it quite simply. Please study the following:
“The goal of this fraud is to create FEAR and to panic humanity’s masses into accepting inoculation with a specifically prepared concoction. It is NOT an anti-body creating vaccine. It contains mRNA (Messenger RNA), a nucleotide that is templated naturally by one’s own DNA and it direct protein synthesis. In nature, your own genes (your genotype) make you who you are (your phenotype). With the introduction of foreign mRNA, cellular development and resulting adult maturity, including that of one’s reproductive germ cells, is altered and inherited by offspring in future generations. The so-called “vaccine” is admittedly experimental. A “COVID-19” media-driven panic provides its rationale for gullible and terrified masses worldwide. Increasingly, its political mandate is being enforced by the police power of the State.
If you are a member of the US legal profession or part of the US judiciary, seek legal convictions for traitorous sociopathic unelected elites who commissioned and are paying for the biggest panic in history to establish their one-world government, “vaccinating” and SCIENTIFICALLY HOMOGENIZING the human “race” (every human being on earth). Seek legal damages from corporations that require employees to accept it. Seek legal damages from all compromized politicians who continue to support it.”
Thank you for the nice work you and your associates have done. The “groups” and the “twins” are part and parcel of “the new world order”. QED.
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Very good comment. Thank you for chiming in.
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When I was a teenager, I found out there’s nothing in the Bible or any non-canonical texts to suggest that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Pope Gregory I made that shit up in the 6th century and most Christians literally think it’s gospel truth. I asked my dad about it—he was a liberal Protestant minister—and he just smiled and said church leaders liked to spice the Bible up sometimes.
That’s when my eyes opened up to the way liberals feel empowered to lie in order to win people over to their version of the truth. Oh, conservatives do it too—it’s not political—but liberal lies have are wrapped in a particular kind of smug self-delusion. Conservatives and apolitical people lie to win arguments—to protect their egos—which is pretty straightforward. Liberals lie because the6 think it will help people better understand or accept the “truth.” So, in their minds, even their lies are truthful, or are at least, you know, truth-adjacent.
I’m sure even if climate change true-believers learned and accepted the truth of what happened in Texas, they would perpetuate the lie so that all of us would eventually understand the “truth” of climate change reality.
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To offer a perspective from Austin, we didn’t experience “rolling blackouts” or “rotating outages,” but instead had almost no power at all for a full week. Mercifully, my part of the city did get two hours of power, just before dusk, on both Monday and Tuesday, the days the temperature dropped to 10 degrees F, which allowed indoor temperatures to stay just above freezing. But there was no more power for my apartment complex, at least, until the following Saturday. News reports I accessed on my phone at the time were confused and self-contradictory, stating simultaneously that rotating outages were in effect and that there was not enough power to shift away from essential public services (apparently including lighting the new downtown library, which blazed on, particularly conspicuously to many) to perform the rotation.
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Internet outages and Blackouts appear to be next on the Doom list. Maybe this was a trial run. At a glance this Texas outage lasted only 3 days, sad to seethe trouble it caused and how expensive it was if the numbers are correct. Unless the cause was a natural disaster, it seems like most grid failures in the past only lasted a few days and they got the power back on.
They don’t want us to have the information sharing internet as we know it any longer. The possibility of the much talked about Dark winter will be over on March 20th. Have not heard any talk about a Dark Spring.
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It may no longer be prudent to have every structure’s entire electricity supply relying on external power lines that are susceptible to being crippled by unforeseen events, including storms of unprecedented magnitude. And then there are coronal mass ejections to consider, however rare, in which power grids are vulnerable to potentially extensive damage and long-lasting power outages.
I could really appreciate the liberating effect of having my own independently accessed solar-cell power supply (clear skies permitting, of course), especially considering my/our dangerous reliance on electricity. And it will not require huge land-flooding and potentially collapsing water dams, nor constructing towering wind turbine farms.
Each building having its own solar-cell-panel power storage/system — at least as an emergency/backup source of power — makes sense (except, of course, to the various big energy corporation CEOs whose concern is dollars-and-cents profit margin).
Many Texans may now be realizing this.
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You’re not a good reader, just someone with a script looking for an insert point. There are no storms of “unprecedented magnitude,” only cycles. If you’d even skimmed the piece I linked to, you’d know that the reference point was 1899, and a storm just like this one. The difference now is unwise reliance on wind power, bound to fail us.
Next time read before you comment.
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I did read it.
I just tend to think a bit broader than the confines of the stories/articles I read, whether or not they’re deliberate.
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You did not read it.
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Yes, I did. Take it down if it bothers you so much. Don’t whine — it’s unbecoming.
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I’m not talking about my piece, mercifully short. You would have had to follow the link. It’s long and complicated. You blew your cover with “unprecedented magnitude.” Sign off now.
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Has anyone considered that the majority of COMMERCIAL and PUBLIC (GOVERNMENT) buildings have diesel generators for backup so would have no need for “The Grid” in an emergency situation? Pretty sure there is no shortage of diesel fuel in Texas. And it is also worth noting that it is usually the case that the systems are set up so that any excess energy produced by these massive diesel generators, privately owned solar and/or wind turbines, is fed back into The Grid and the Power Company has to buy that energy at or near market rates. Has there been any talk at all about if this was done and if not why it was not done?
BTW, the TV Show ICE ROAD TRUCKERS is about hauling tons of equipment north. Some of that equipment was surely to build the systems that “creates” the “Rapid Heating of the air above the North Pole” which then forces the cold air south.
Before the De more crates took over the Waether Control apparatus, China had been in a deep freeze. After the eloection, RED STATES had to be punished for improper thinking. Everyone talks about Texas but every place north of Texas was colder. It was below zero for 2 weeks in Northern Wisconsin, reaching or exceeding -30 F on multiple days. Wisconsin is one of many RED STATES (2/3 of both STATE HOUSES) are REPUBLICAN, yet one is supposed to believe that PHONY CLEAVERS won the election for GOVERNOR? There are several other STATES with this same unbelievable dynamic, REPUBLICAN CONTROLLED CONGRESSES and a DEMOCRAT GOVERNOR. Scott Walker was going after the black money holes known as GOVERNMENT UNIONS, like The Teachers Union. BIG TECH put 95% of their political contributions behind DEMOCRAT CANIDDATES while WALL STREET TRADERS put 80% of their money behind DEMOCRAT CANIDDATES.
Teachers in Wisconsin graduate COLLEGE at age 22, teach (not like real work) 32 weeks per year (20 weeks off plus lots of paid personal and sick days) for 30 years, retiring as millionaires at age 52. The personal/sick days are filled in by substitute teachers, adding to the expense. Then there are the overpaid ADMINISTRATORS, COUNSELORS, etc. The best part is that they dream up new ways to collect more cash via the REFER-END’M to raise PROPERTY TAXES, which seems to always pass, no matter now many people attempt to vote it down. Sound familiar?
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