U.S. FREEZE SET TO DEEPEN

Arctic air remains entrenched across the United States, delivering widespread cold, heavy snow, and mounting impacts.

As of Monday evening, the Lower 48 average temperature was 27.8F, which is 10.4F below normal, with about 206 million Americans below freezing.

That cold intensifies again this weekend.

By Tuesday, national average lows tank to 13.6F (map below), with more than 260 million below freezing overnight and roughly 140 million failing to thaw during the day.

From Jan 23 to 26, almost 1,000 reports of ice accumulations and/or ice storm damage have been received by NWS offices from New Mexico to New England:

Snow totals continue to climb, too.

Preliminary reports already exceed 20 inches in parts of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, with Boston adding again to seasonal totals. Several stations are approaching daily and multi-day snowfall records, with final tallies still being compiled.

Below is a snapshot of U.S. snow cover on Jan 23 and then Jan 26 (NOHRSC). It shows 56% coverage of Lower 48 Monday AM, which is by far most widespread of the season.

Lake-effect snow remains active downwind of the Great Lakes and will persist until surface waters freeze.

Another major winter storm is likely late this week.

Model guidance consistently develops a powerful coastal low, with several runs dropping central pressure into the low-960s mb range. Track uncertainty remains, but heavy snow and strong winds are likely along the coast from the Carolinas to New England.

A modest westward shift would significantly increase impacts along the I-95 corridor, including New York City and Boston.

The cold extends deeper into the South this time.

A strong Arctic front clears Florida late weekend, followed by a dry, dense air mass. Central Florida faces a high risk of a damaging freeze, with teens and 20s reaching toward Interstate 4. Northern Florida drops well below freezing, and parts of South Florida may briefly touch low-30s. This magnitude of cold has not been seen there in decades.

The ongoing cold and winter weather have already turned deadly. The death toll to date stands at 50, but is set to rise.

Extended guidance shows no quick exit. Arctic air remains dominant into early February, keeping the door open for additional snow events and renewed cold waves. Daily temperature anomalies for the next 5-days (Jan 26 to Jan 30) look brutal:

TEXAS’ RENEWABLES FAILURE

As temperatures fell across Texas, renewable electricity generation declined rapidly.

Wind, solar, and battery output fell from supplying between 15% to 60% of total generation in the days before the outbreak to just 7% (and falling). As the weather worsened, renewable ‘generation outages’ soared:

[Kerry Clapp]

Solar output dropped first due to cloud cover and low winter sun angles. Wind generation also declined as the cold intensified. Battery storage contributed little because there was limited surplus electricity available to charge systems during the event.

The grid has remained stable because dispatchable generation picked up the slack. Nuclear generation remained steady throughout. Coal increased sharply. While natural gas provided the primary balancing supply.

Texas is holding (so far), people aren’t freezing to death, because dispatchable generation was there to replace failing renewables. Post-Uri upgrades improved resilience, but those measures only function when firm generation is present.

The storm is ongoing.

As for the country as a whole, the electricity generation mix on Sunday, Jan 25 (based on full-day EIA data) is shown below. Natural gas supplied 41% of power, coal 22%, and oil 2%, meaning fossil fuels (plus nuclear) delivered 82% of total generation.

SILVER SHOCK HITS SOLAR

Silver prices have surged in recent weeks, and the solar industry is feeling it.

Silver approaches $120 an ounce.

Solar panels use only small amounts of silver, but soaring prices mean the metal now accounts for 30% of total panel cost. In 2023, it was just 3.4%.

The industry was already under strain.

Chinese manufacturers have spent years slashing panel prices to stay competitive, yet many are still struggling to clear excess supply in Western markets. Now they are being forced to raise prices and accelerate plans to replace silver with copper.

But copper prices are rising too:

Copper surge.

For the West, this is why it’s risky building power systems on volatile materials and foreign supply chains.

Energy security requires domestic control.

INDIA IS GREENER — NEW STUDY

Across India, CO2 fertilization has driven a large expansion in global green cover over the past two decades and has nearly doubled the long-term trend in plant growth. At the same time, much of India has cooled since around 2000.

Satellites clearly show India getting greener. More leaves, more vegetation, more plant cover. Yet many reports have claimed that plant productivity —how much new plant material is actually being grown each year— was flat or even declining.

That contradiction fed a simple narrative the media leapt on: global warming was damaging ecosystems.

However, a new study from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay shows that story was wrong.

From space, plant growth is estimated using satellite algorithms that convert sunlight, temperature, and moisture into an estimate of how much carbon plants absorb. That number is called net primary production, or NPP. But there is a crucial omission in the standard satellite method: it assumes plants respond to CO2 today the same way they did 20 years ago.

They do not.

As atmospheric CO2 rises, most plants photosynthesize more efficiently. They lose less water and gain more carbon for the same amount of sunlight. This is basic plant biology, known as the CO2 fertilization effect. Ignore it, and real growth is systematically undercounted. You can only have more plants but less plant growth, as claimed, if the measurement method is broken.

Researchers at IIT Bombay rebuilt India’s satellite plant-growth record from 2001 to 2024 and added this missing CO2 effect back in. When they did, India’s plant-growth trend nearly doubled. Areas previously labeled as “declining” vanished.

Plant growth increased most in northern and central India — regions that also show cooling over the past two decades:

CO2 has quietly made plants more efficient at growing. Satellite products that ignored this basic biology created the illusion of stagnation.

India is greener.

So too the planet as a whole.

Satellite records show that as much as 50% of the Earth’s vegetated lands have become greener since the early 1980s, and that total global leaf area has risen by about 5 % since the early 2000s, adding vegetation roughly equivalent to the size of the entire Amazon rainforest [NASA].

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