The jury is still out on whether climate change is playing a role in the brutal cold, snow, and ice that have wreaked havoc across Texas this week, cutting power to millions of Texans, bursting pipes, and contaminating water supplies. But the same climate connection scientists are debating—Arctic warming causing the jet stream to meander further south—might also cause the southern United States to experience more persistent heat waves in the future.

That’s according to research published last month in Geophysical Research Letters that addresses the poorly studied question of whether enhanced Arctic warming, or “Arctic amplification,” will lead to longer lasting hot weather spells at lower latitudes. Using a new approach of tracking weather systems to see how quickly