It 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
I 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.
> I said that it doesn’t get below freezing in Houston every year. Certainly not for days at a time.
Yeah, but you did not say that.
You said:
> It 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.
If you want to change that to say "this is an unusually long and wide freeze across the entire state", or "this is an unprecedented power outage" that's arguably true. But you didn't actually say that, you said that freezing temps in Houston were unprecedented, which is objectively not true.
Heck, a long freeze knocking off the Texan power grid isn't even unprecedented in this century. A similar thing happened back in 2011[0].
