I was at my parents’ home in Virginia on Sunday, watching the Denver Broncos play the Green Bay Packers when the power went out. The lights poofed and the living room darkened. I waited for everything to pop back on, because, living in Bangalore, I’m used to having a generator, but most people in the United States don’t have those, and my parents are no exception. Growing up, I don’t think I knew generators existed. We were used to the power going off on occasion during a Summer thunderstorm, but my parents and I couldn’t remember it ever happening in Winter. It was 17 degrees Fahrenheit outside, about -8 Celsius.

I had just come back from a run, and the cold was still sharp on my skin. That day was the first time in years I’d worn a balaclava, looking like a bank robber making the world’s slowest getaway. Frozen clumps of snow crunched under my shoes. Wind lashed my forehead and I swear it felt for a minute like I had brain-freeze. My armpit sweat cooled so quickly that it felt like icepacks against my ribs. I was very glad when I stepped back inside.

The loss of electricity was, for us, obviously not an existential threat. Within minutes mom declared that if the power (and therefore the heat) didn’t come back in a few hours, we would be staying in the hotel down the street. Even if we didn’t have a hotel within a three-minute drive, we had plenty of sweaters, sweatpants, socks, and blankets. No one was going to freeze, and yet it was immediately clear how that could happen in a house with thinner walls and without extra clothes. Other than a few candles pulled from random drawers, we had no means of generating warmth. We went to a movie that night, and by the time we got back, the temperature in the house had already dropped three degrees.

In February of 2021, three consecutive storms blitzed through Texas, eviscerating the state’s electrical grid and sinking temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, or -17 Celsius. More than one third of Texas’s 31 million people lost power at some point, and many of them didn’t get it back for a few days. Roads were a disaster, and so the only thing to do was endure until either the heat flipped back on or their bodies gave out. At least 246 people in Texas died during the storms, around two thirds of them from hypothermia, their bodies unable to produce enough heat as the outside’s numbing cold seeped indoors. Three people died from frostbite.

So much talk about the dangers of climate change focuses on how these dangers unfold a little too slowly for people to recognize as such. It’s hard, for example, to notice that the ocean has encroached a couple inches, and even more difficult to equate that with why flooding has gotten so much worse. But storms are different. Modern weather can whip from moderate to blizzard without much notice. You can be sitting in your living room watching football when the power goes out, and suddenly your Sunday becomes an uneasy assessment of how long you and your family can ride out the cold.