WakeForestRanger
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Texas is facing a serious situation tonight. Temperatures are in the single digits and 4 million customers are without power.
That article doesn't seem to support that Abbot told grid operators to keep charging the maximum. They directly claim he said to do whatever they had to maintain power where it was reestablished after blackouts. There are some blanks that need to be filled in.
While I don’t discount the global warming implications I do wonder about the reliability of maps like that. They pop up once a year or so in like Iraq or India or wherever and show temps way above the record temp on Earth, which is 130. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a30270365/hottest-place-on-earth/
And sure the new record could be broken here but that’s quite a bit above 130.
I don’t know about the Iraq maps you’re referencing, but the india map above is ground surface temperature which can easily be much higher than air temps, but is highly correlated. The link you provided to the Death Valley record temp was measuring air temps.
There are plenty of stories out there about the current record breaking heat wave in India if you are skeptical. Here is one: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/05/02/asia/india-pakistan-heatwave-climate-intl-hnk/index.html
Fair enough in terms of ground vs air temps. Seems like in general news we use air temps, but are ground temps are more accurate measurement, or one more favored in the scientific community?
I went back and found some articles about an Iraq heat wave topping 125F but I swear when it was happening there were predictor maps on Twitter with much higher temps. But maybe those too were ground temps.