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The big-freeze: thousands trapped in europe as death toll rises to 600

And who wants Global Warming when you can face avalanches, deep snow, and record cold?

How much fun can you have with 2 meters of snow on your house, and none of that evil coal powered electricity?

What’s happening in Europe and Russia over the last two weeks is not just your average cold-snap. Temperatures reached -28C in Moscow. One point in Russia hit -52.8C (-68F) on Monday.

 MOSCOW — Some 215 Russians have died this year in a prolonged period of abnormally cold winter weather, the health ministry said Monday as the overall death toll for Europe rose to well over 600. [National Post]

 

NASA Earth Observatory. Dark blue areas are -15C below average. White areas are average. Deep Red are 15C above. (See the NASA link below for the proper scale):.

The Danube has frozen over from Austria to the Black Sea, and 224 ships (some delivering fuel) have been stuck in their ports. Schools in Bosnia have been closed for days. Trains in Montenegroare at a standstill, and one train with 50 passengers was stranded in a tunnel for three days before rescuers began evacuating people yesterday.

In Serbia 11,000 villagers are trapped by huge snowfalls as temperatures hit – 26C in one town  (Al jazeera puts the figure at 70,000 people), and some Bosnian villages haven’t had electricity for days.

Hundreds of barns are collapsing under the snow, killing the animals below, and prompting Tom Nelson to write “Children won’t know what barns look like”.

For the first time in over 30 years, snow has fallen in the Sahara Desert.

Alan Caruba found a Turkish writer lamenting the waste and misdirection of millions of dollars spent on the Green global warming bureaucracy instead of preparations to save lives.

Writing in a Turkish newspaper, the Hurriyet Daily News, Sophie Quintin Adali, an analyst for a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, said, “As if the debt crisis weren’t bad enough news, the climate freeze sweeping across Europe is wreaking havoc by severely disrupting travel, business and people’s lives. Local authorities, indeed whole countries, are caught poorly prepared.” Turkey is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.

“The lack of readiness should come as no surprise because for decades the sensationalist message of global warming has dominated the public area,” said Ms. Adali.

“Politicians and decades of political environmentalism have a lot to answer for,” said Ms. Adali. “The man-made climate theory…is still supported by a mighty European Union bureaucracy and a green network addicted to public funds.” Even now, the Green Climate Fund “through which millions of taxpayer’s money will still be disbursed” is threatening the lives and the economy of people worldwide.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t recall seeing many headlines over the last week about this phenomenal cold. Now if 600 had died from a heat wave we’d all know that an oil pipeline was to blame.

Time to treat climate research as a science instead of a religion?

The image above comes from the NASA Earth Observatory. Their explanation of the extreme cold is due to Jet Streams:

Masters explains that the unusual cold is a product of the jet stream. Jet streams are bands of strong, upper-atmospheric winds that blow from west to east around the globe. These bands roughly separate colder air at higher latitudes from warmer air at middle to low latitudes, and they generally blow straight west to east. “But this winter, the jet has had a highly convoluted shape, with unusually large excursions to the north and south,” Masters states. “When the jet bulges southwards, it allows cold air to spill in behind it, and that is what has happened to Europe over the past two weeks.” When the jet stream adheres to a convoluted pattern for long enough, extreme weather can result.

There is a fabulous photo montage at the National Post
h/t: Sonny. Thanks, I hear you.

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