If you look at the red vs blue divide nationally, this is quite literally the perfect storm for blue team to yell at red team "I told ya so". Intense weather due to climate change which red team denies, loving the idea of an independent grid that cuts you off from other states, being against federal regulations but asking for federal aid, and having one of your senators fly to Cancun in the middle of it. I could go on, but all of this happened right after talk of succession was trending on social media.
I also believe a lot of online activists are hoping to capture the energy and anger over this event to "turn Texas blue" as they have been wanting to do.
Consider that Texans have a well-earned reputation for talking about secession from the union, Don't Mess with Texas, etc. In some ways the dynamic between Texas and not-Texas reminds me of the dynamic between USA and not-USA.
> turn Texas blue
People have to realize that there is not really red states and blue states. It's urban-vs-rural, and whether a state turns red or blue has everything to do with the growth of metropolitan areas, not some shift in political values.
Don't Mess with Texas was simply a highly effective ad campaign from the '80s aimed at reducing littering on Texas roadways by the Texas Department of Transportation.
I laugh at both color-teams, and heartily encourage Texas and any other states who so choose to secede, but it's still difficult for me to imagine that a giant continent-wide blizzard is a sign of global warming. How much deeper would the snow have to be, and how much further below zero would the temperature have to be, before we could call it "weather" rather than "proof of global warming"? In general I think "intense weather" is supposed to signify hurricanes.
Of course no individual event is "proof of global warming", but this is entirely consistent with it.
This points out the huge failure in communication about climate change, but this is in fact exactly the sort of thing you would expect (and why "global warming" is such an easy term to misunderstand).
Short story is there is more energy in the atmosphere (i.e. heat) and it has to go somewhere. One of the places it goes is into higher variability in weather patterns, more energetic storms, changes is stable weather patterns. So that absolutely includes lower winter lows, as well as higher summer highs. Most of the modelling shows events like this winter storm growing in both intensity and frequency.
So far from the contradiction you (seem to?) see, it's pretty much what is expected.
But one might just as easily say that this event is entirely consistent with "proof of no global warming" also.
I woke up to a snow on Feb 15 is "just" weather. If I live in Austin, it was pretty weird. If I live in Anchorage, pretty normal. The difference between those two statements is not about weather, but about climate.
One lesson of climate change is that our past experiences of weather in a place are often going to become poorer and poorer predictors of next months weather. The fact that change involves a global warming phenomena tells us that both the weather and the changes in it are likely to get more intense.
Californian with family in the Midwest - lots of folks are too dense to realize there are people on the other side of natural disasters when these horrible situations are happening. That prejudice happens to some degree, I've lived it =/
Regardless of politics, best of luck to you and your own.
meaning it would've been fair if didn't have democratic voters?
Which really isn't fair since Texas has a massive number of democratic voters. We have multiple large metropolitan areas but we also have massive rural regions that tend to outweigh when it comes time to vote.