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> This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in over 100 years. While everyone else is taking you to the woodshed for the rest of the comment,
by roughly 6y ago
> This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in over 100 years.
While everyone else is taking you to the woodshed for the rest of the comment, I'd like to take a moment to address this, because I think it's a misunderstanding of the term and a misreading of the book.
The point of "Black Swans" was that an over-reliance on standard distributions derived from historical data generates predictions and confidence intervals that misrepresent the underlying phenomenon by assuming away "fat tails" and ignoring changing circumstances. If there's not some good reason why an event can't happen, any forecast or plan which precludes that event is necessarily flawed.
To describe this as a "black swan" event assumes nobody could've seen it coming, there was no reason to suspect it would happen, and it's unlikely to happen again. All of those are false. Every bit of climate forecasting over the last ~decades has pointed towards increased weather variability and increased likelihood of extreme weather events. Specific to this case, increasing the overall energy levels in the atmosphere increases the variability of the polar jet stream and increases the likelihood of polar vortex events like the one Texas is currently experiencing.
So, no, this wasn't a "black swan" event, this was a predictable - and predicted - outcome of climate change, which is a predictable outcome of burning as much coal and carbon-based fuels as we have over the last couple generations.
- teraflop 6y agoIt's even worse than that, because it's not even that there's no historical data to draw from! It got just as cold as this back in December 1989, resulting in power shortages and rolling blackouts, because of increased demand and reduced generation capacity. And then it happened again in February 2011, for almost exactly the same reasons, despite the weather not being quite as severe. https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/February%202011%20Southwest%20Cold%20Weather%20Event/Final_Draft_Assessment_of_Previous_Severe_Winter_Weather_Report.pdf https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/February%202011%20Southwest%2...
- nickysielicki 6y agoIt gets below freezing every year in Texas. But in the biggest city in Texas -- Houston, with a metro population of 7 million, it does not. This is unprecedented in the modern era. Statewide load on the grid, for this time of year, is unreasonably high. Black swan.
- woeirua 6y agoThere are objective meteorological records that definitively prove that you are wrong.
- nickysielicki 6y agoWhere are they?
- ashtonkem 6y agoIt got down to -1F in Dallas on December 23 1989. Houston saw 7F on the same day. Houston saw sub-freezing temps during December of 1985 (25F), 1989 (7F), 1983 (11F), 1979 (26F), and 1996 (21F), among others. And that's just December. So yeah, it happens. Not often, but at least a half dozen times in living memory
- nickysielicki 6y agoIt gets cold in Texas, especially north Texas. I never claimed otherwise. It regularly snows in Dallas, but it does not regularly snow in Houston.
- ashtonkem 6y agoI listed half a dozen times when it got well below freezing in Houston in December alone. Don't move the goal posts to snow, you said that freezing temps in Houston were unprecedented in the modern era, which is just simply not true.
- nickysielicki 6y agoI said that it doesn’t get below freezing in Houston every year. Certainly not for days at a time.
- 6y ago