As CNN describes it, "More than 1.5 million homes and businesses nationally were without power on Christmas Eve morning, thanks to an Arctic blast and winter storm that tore down power lines with destructive winds and heavy snow and dipped temperatures dangerously low — conditions killing at least 22 people."
New York’s Buffalo area experienced more than two feet of snow in places with blinding zero visibility, minus 20o Fahrenheit temperatures, and winds gusting up to 65 mph.
Due to strained capacity, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) — that state’s federally-owned electricity provider — intermittently interrupted power on Saturday morning.
The Nashville Electric Service told customers to expect "rotating intermittent power outages" in about 10-minute increments every 90 minutes to two hours, and the city’s mayor asked the NFL’s Tennessee Titans to delay the start of their scheduled noon home game against the Houston Texans as they explored "every possibility to minimize non-essential power around the stadium."
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the storm became a "bomb cyclone" which left nearly 200 million people, roughly 60% of the country’s population, under some sort of winter weather warning as many governors declared states of emergency and cities opened more warming centers.
Those who stayed home from holiday travel were often the lucky ones as more than 8,000 cancelled flights left would-be travelers stranded in airports for days, and bone-chilling Arctic temperatures and dangerous ice and wind across the Mountain West, Midwest, South, and East Coast also prompted road closures.
But then, some curious observers among us may wonder how — as described by the National Weather Service such a "once in a generation event" — could this happen right smack dab in the middle of an existential global warming crisis.
And yes, let’s all agree that whereas such a rare occasion describes "weather," not a "climate trend," maybe we might apply the same objective protocol to every other extreme meteorological event – hurricane, flood or cyclone – used as proof-positive guilt we and our SUVs are frying the planet.
An example is when just a few days of last July’s U.K. brief heatwave, The Guardian was reporting: "Climate breakdown made U.K. heatwave 10 times more likely, study finds," when a natural explanation for the soaring summer temperature resulted from southern winds being supercharged by an adjacent intense low pressure system.
And after all, didn’t Al Gore warn us in a Dec. 14, 2009 speech at the Copenhagen Climate Conference that "some models suggest" a 75% possibility that the entire north polar Arctic ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years due to man-made global warming?
Nevertheless, based upon reliable recent reports from Santa (who never lies), that Arctic polar ice cap is still there.
Truth be known, the entire climate crisis agenda is based on computer models that can’t possibly be trusted as a basis for establishing draconian energy policies, and which consistently predict planetary warming that is two to three times greater than actually recorded by satellites, weather balloons and surface temperature monitors.
As a matter of fact, NONE of the dire apocalyptic doomsayer predictions have come true, including claims that extreme U.S. weather conditions would become either more severe or frequent.
We are experiencing disastrous economic and social consequences of needless climate-alarm-based energy policies premised upon precautionary "worst case" climate model projections that even leading scientific contributors to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now admit are running far too hot.
As reported in the prestigious journal Nature, the latest round of more than 50 of the newest simulations assessed by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 6 (CMIP6) are based upon myriad complex, poorly understood influences, interrelationships, and rough statistical "garbage in-garbage out" assumptions.
Titled "Climate simulations: recognize the 'hot model' problem," the May article emphasizes: "Earth is a complicated system of interconnected oceans, land, ice and atmosphere, and no computer model could ever simulate every aspect of it exactly."
Since different models vary in their complexity, "each makes different assumptions about and approximations of processes that happen on small scales, such as cloud formation."
As NASA’s current Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Gavin Schmidt told the renowned journal Science in 2021, "It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this admission" that the models can’t be trusted as a policy instrument because "You end up with numbers for even the near‐term that are insanely scary — and wrong."
As former Obama Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy Steve Koonin positively summarized the records: "There have been some changes in temperature extremes across the contiguous United States.
"The annual number of high-temperature records set shows no significant trend over the past century nor over the past forty years, but the annual number of record cold nights has declined since 1895, somewhat more rapidly in the past thirty years."
Okay, so the big freeze over this holiday season slightly made up for a more than century-long trend.
And given the current U.S. administration’s war on fossil energy — natural gas and heating oil very much included along with power generation to recharge those favored electric vehicles — let’s truly pray as we begin a new year that this "once in a generation event" doesn’t become the next climate norm after all.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.