this is the Tom Hartman program. Tom Hartman here with you. We've got a lot to cover

and today's program, a really big program today. Peter Aldis is going to be talking with

us about some just startling new information that came out of Texas about what happened

when the power grid shut down when the cold, the Arctic air came down. On the line with

us is the science reporter for BuzzFeed news, BuzzFeed.com of course. Peter Aldis is on

website, Peter Aldis, ALDHOUS.com and his Twitter handle, P-A-L-D-H-O-U-S or at BuzzFeed

as well. Peter, welcome to the program. You have done a deep dive into what happened

in Texas after this God-awful storm that seems to be climate change on steroids, spilling

Arctic air all the way down to Texas, took out the power grid down there. You want to tell

us about it? Yeah, glad to be with you. What I did with my colleagues is what's called

an excess deaths analysis. So we were looking at the official count coming out from the state

of Texas, which last time I looked at 151 and thinking that that number was likely not accurate,

we can go into why it was likely an undercount if you'd like. But what we decided to do

was look at CDC data on deaths which they maintain. Look at how many you would expect

in any given week, which is a thing you can do statistically, and then look at the difference

in individual weeks, both in Texas and we looked at the surrounding states as well, which

experienced much of the same weather but didn't experience those prolonged power outages.

And what transpired from this after we'd also accounted for COVID deaths as well and taking

those out of the picture was a very pronounced spike in deaths above what's expected in

Texas in the week following the storm and during the power outages. So that's the week

ending February the 20th. Our best estimate is that 702 people died, that wouldn't have

died likely if the storm and power outages hadn't have happened. There's some uncertainty

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