The ongoing bitter cold snap and snow, dubbed the “Beast from the East”, have been wreaking havoc in Europe and claiming hundreds of lives. According to the UK online The Sun, the winter wave is “killing 270 people a day” – in Britain alone!
Chief Medical Officer Professor Dame Sally Davies of Britain’s Department of Health said mortality rises almost a fifth during the winter, “with 1,560 excess deaths a week. But “very severe weather can substantially add to this.”
Read more at: The Sun.co.uk
Winter conditions continue to plague Germany, Spiegel reports. Over the weekend the cold claimed “multiple lives”. Snowfall snarled air traffic, leading to hundreds of cancelled flights. Autobahns were jammed with hundreds of motorists having to spend the night stuck in their cars.
In Northern Greece temperatures dropped to -7°C Monday morning – schools remained closed.
The situation is even worse in southeastern Europe. Up to 3 feet of snow have fallen in northern Montenegro, reports the AP here. “At least nine deaths across the region have been blamed on the snow and deep freeze, with temperatures as low as -15 Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit). […] In Croatia, doctors issued warnings to the elderly and sick to stay indoors as local hospitals reported dozens of cases of broken limbs from falls on the ice and snow.
Fortunately warming is forecast to arrive later in the week, and thus this will likely crank back the death toll.
Never mind, once the EU get those 200,000 windmills in place the forthcoming cold will kill thousands more.
“Today, here in the UK, the temperatures have just about crawled above zero, after a night of hard frost. And how much electricity have our obscenely subsidised windmills contributed to the grid over the last 24 hours? = 0.6% !”
says: http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/just-enough-to-boil-the-kettle/#more-2109
A UK headline on 11th Dec. 2010 said: “WEATHER: 35,000 DEATHS FEAR IN NEW ARCTIC BLIZZARDS”. Whether we get the same situation up to the end of this year remains to be seen. The sea ice in the Baltic is not far away from the situation two years ago. A comparison here: http://www.2007seatraining.de/index.html
You reckon Denmark is in danger of being invaded by Sweden again? 😉
More seriously, one has to keep in mind those million or so households in Germany that can no longer afford to pay their energy bills. If that’s happening in a “prosperous” nation, how much will people suffer in other countries?