Texas’s dangerous week in the dark is a wake-up call to the country’s infrastructure

And the changes that humans have inflicted on the climate mean that the weather patterns we have experienced in the past will have less influence on the types of conditions we can expect in the future.

“The more we push the climate away from what it has been for much of the past 10,000 years, the more likely it is that surprises will come,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmentalist from California think tank.

Preparing for the challenges of climate change will be difficult – and expensive, experts say.

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

Is this deep freeze related to climate change? The jury is still absent

There is abundant scientific evidence that climate change is making heat waves hotter and longer lasting around the world.

But is global warming also increasing the chances that masses of cold air – like the one that swept across much of the United States this week – will escape the Arctic and settle in the lower latitudes?

On this issue, scientists are still unsure.

Surrounding the region is a jet stream, a strip of winds that blow from west to east and provide a kind of barrier between cold arctic air and warmer mid-latitudes.

The jet stream, however, doesn’t just revolve around the top of the planet in a perfect circle – it curves up and down for a variety of reasons, allowing cold air to occasionally plunge south.

This appears to be what happened this week, although it is a very extreme version, said Tim Woollings, professor of climate science at Oxford University, whose research has focused on changes in the jet stream over time.

But Woollings says we still don’t have enough data to know whether these types of events will become more common in the future.

This does not mean that we will no longer have occasional cold waves – even those as extreme as this one. But the more humans warm the planet, the more likely they are to become increasingly rare.

“These theories are definitely interesting, but at the moment there is not much evidence in favor of them,” he said.

Preparing for ‘unknown territory’

There is, however, abundant evidence that climate change is increasing threats from a variety of extreme events, which will stress critical systems in a way that has not been tested before.

“Without adaptation, climate change will continue to degrade infrastructure performance for the rest of the century, with the potential for cascading impacts that threaten our economy, national security, essential services and health and well-being,” warns the report.

So, how do we prepare complex systems – like our power grids – to deal with this?

Scientists say that doing so will require a delicate balancing act – ensuring that systems can withstand today’s conditions, while planning the extremes of time outside the limits of what we have experienced before.

“We are really in unfamiliar territory and we need to focus much more on resilience in the future to respond to new and perhaps unprecedented extremes,” said Hausfather.

The Texas power grid – so far at least – has shown that it is equipped to handle the cooling demands of a hot Texas summer, when millions of air conditioning units buzz to make life at home bearable.

But when temperatures dropped this week, demands for heating and electricity skyrocketed. At the same time as demand increased, electricity supply was hampered by natural gas and coal plants that froze.

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

In general, several power systems using multiple sources are more resilient, said Jenkins.

Instead, we need to design our existing systems to work in more extreme climates. This includes protection from the weather and the wind turbines themselves, but also the insulation of our homes to improve efficiency, so they need less energy to stay hot or cold.

This is not the first time that the weakness of the Texas electrical 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 for the full scale of property destruction caused by the Arctic blast to be seen, but it is likely to have caused several billion dollars in damage, said Steve Bowen, Aon’s head of disaster analysis.

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

After that, will the state be willing to pay the bill to keep the lights on in the next deep freeze? And are the regions of the country used to the cold prepared to make the necessary investments to withstand the next record heat wave?

Preparing these systems will not be cheap, said Jenkins. But, as this episode showed, people are going to pay for it, one way or another.

“(This extreme cold) was outside the range of planned conditions or was considered so rare that it was not worth the additional cost to weather different types of infrastructure and buildings,” said Jenkins. “I think we’ll see at the end of that, when the damage is calculated – and I hope that not many lives have been lost – whether the calculation was accurate or not.”