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Last fall, I drove down to the Calvary Church of Granbury, a Pentecostal congregation in the little town southwest of Fort Worth that was devastated by last night's tornadoes. It's a tiny building with vivid green carpet, next to an empty field and just up a narrow country road from the town cemetery. I was there to hear Irvin Baxter, an End Times preacher who's pretty sure the Apocalypse is due any minute.

Last night, as Calvary notes on its Facebook page, a group of congregants was sitting in the church, in the middle of reading Revelation 11. The chapter deals with the "two witnesses" who prophesy for "a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth," just before the seventh trumpet sounds. As they reached the last line of the chapter, the hail started.

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First, a bit of background. There's a giant banana-shaped car making its way across the country right now. It's official name is the Big Banana Car, and it's the brainchild of a Brit named Steve Braithwaite who, along with his brother, is "making a documentary film about building a huge banana car and then driving it around the world." Their stated mission is to build awareness of deep vein thrombosis, which killed their mother.

The Braithwaites had the misfortune of arriving in Dallas on Wednesday, just as last night's deadly storms were beginning to roll through. Bad timing, to be sure, but they covered the car -- which somehow manages to seat four -- in their trusty silver tarp and rode out the storm.

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Nearly a Dozen Tornadoes Swept Through North Texas Last Night

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@GrantJNBC5

Outside Weatherford.

As day breaks in North Texas, residents are surveying the devastation wreaked by last night's storms. Dallas escaped the worst of it. The tornado sirens by our place just south of White Rock got going around 9 p.m. and kept on for a half hour, but we saw nothing but rain, heard nothing but thunder.

An hour to the southwest, people weren't so lucky. At least 10 tornadoes swept through Hood and surrounding counties, killing six and injuring dozens of others. The epicenter was Granbury, where all the deaths occurred, but Cleburne and Ennis were also hard hit.

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It's freezing in New York--where the hell is global warming?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2013

It's cold this morning. Not quite freezing like in New York, but it's 40 degrees. In North Texas. In late April. It's a little odd, a bit of a surprise.

Less surprising: That hordes of amateur scientists are using the temperature dip, combined with their finely honed powers of Holmesian deduction, to pick apart decades of painstaking climate research. (Just so we're clear, they're wrong.)

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Just in case all this temperate whether has lulled you into the perception that the Texas power grid doesn't have the thinnest margin of safety between lights on and lights out anywhere in the country, here's a reminder: Summer is coming.

ERCOT, the grid operator for most of Texas, says the odds this summer are "significant" that it will have to declare an "energy emergency alert," in which it implores us all to dial up our thermostats because electricity demand is edging perilously close to supply. If the two get too close, ERCOT may have to institute rolling outages to prevent an uncontrolled blackout.

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Southwest Texas Rain-Enhancement Association

The view of a just-seeded cloud in Dimmitt County.

Hidden deep within the bureaucratic folds of the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which devotes most of its resources to overseeing cosmetologists, air conditioner repairmen, auctioneers and the like, is the state's weather modification bureau.

It's not nearly as post-apocalyptic as it sounds. You might use the term "cloud seeding," or, taking another step toward obfuscation, "rain enhancement." In layman's terms, that means flying small aircraft into gathering storms to coax more precipitation from clouds -- which, admittedly, still sounds a tad Orwellian. But if Texas were really serious about controlling and changing the weather, they'd at least give George Bomar an assistant.

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The Lawn Whisperer may soon have a new job: process server.

As it stands, anyone caught watering their lawns more than twice a week and/or during daytime hours and/or outside the official watering days ordained by City Hall faces a fine of between $250 and $2,000. As of last summer, the city had handed down slightly more than a handful.

But this is Texas, where a verdant lawn is a God-given right, up there with driving on roads uncluttered by bicycles. In other words, it's inevitable that some green-lawn fetishists will simply ignore the municipal restrictions (not to mention the fact that Texas is in a historic drought and facing a long-term water crisis) and keep flooding their thirsty St. Augustine, absorbing whatever penalty they have to pay on the off chance that code inspectors show up.

State Representative Rafael Anchia, Democrat from Dallas, wants to make the consequences a bit more painful. He filed a bill yesterday allowing cities to sue residents who ignore municipal watering restrictions.

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U.S. Drought Monitor

Last winter was a godsend. After surviving the driest year in Texas history, we got one of the wettest winters on record. Since April, though, North Texas has been racking up rain deficits, according to the National Weather Service's winter outlook.

October was drier than usual, and November saw virtually no measurable rainfall, "resulting in a rapid intensification of the drought." Unfortunately, this winter won't bring much relief. We thought an El Niño might be forming in the equatorial Pacific last summer, with the potential of bringing increased rainfall to Texas in the winter. It doesn't look like that's going to shake out. We're in store for a dry one.

We should also expect a warm one. Which should surprise few, because it's December and sandals still represent appropriate footwear. Still, it's a little bizarre, because neutral years (years without El Niño or La Niña) typically are colder. But the wider trend toward warmer winters and prolonged drought seems to have blunted the effect.

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The record-breaking drought that Texas endured in 2011 wasn't good for much of anything. Farmers and ranchers suffered, as did the people in towns whose water supplies ran dry. And let's not forget the owners of lakefront property whose lots fronted an empty stretches of parched earth.

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A Decade-Long Drought? Yeah, Maybe So, State Climatologist Says

The lack of rain, though, was particularly hard on plants. Exactly how hard became a bit clearer yesterday when the Texas A&M Forest Service announced that 301 million trees in Texas died as a result of the drought. Forested areas in North and Northeast Texas fared particularly badly, losing more than 8 percent of their trees.

The A&M survey, the product of three months worth of on-the-ground tree health assessments and satellite imagery, focused only on rural areas. A previous survey of cities and suburbs counted 5.6 million dead trees.

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Earlier this week, Time magazine opined that West Nile disease, which has now killed 12 people in Dallas County and sickened almost 300 more, is a "self-inflicted wound." Bryan Walsh wrote that an extremely mild winter and scorching summer created a great breeding ground for mosquitoes. Climate change also isn't helping: As the climate warms, tropical diseases are becoming more common outside the zones where they were once traditionally found.

But Walsh also blames poverty for the spread of West Nile: "[T]he South is also the poorest region in the U.S. -- especially in Gulf Coast states like Louisiana and Alabama, where the poverty rate can push 20 percent," he writes. "If we can't fix that problem, this summer's brush with West Nile will look like a bug bite compared to the troubles to come."

For those of us who have watched as some of Dallas County's wealthiest areas were hardest hit by West Nile, one response comes to mind: Huh?

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