Reader Indomitable Snowman sent a link to an AccuWeather report telling us of the intense winter weather gripping eastern Europe and how it has claimed close to 60 lives thus far. German weather site wetteronline.de also reports of close to 60 cold deaths so far from the current Eastern European cold blast.
Although we get scattered reports of cold deaths here in Europe, it’s been tough to find a total tally from the German global warming-devout mainstream media.
Millions of people from Baltic states and Poland southward to the Mediterranean Sea have endured dangerous cold and bouts of snow. Thousands of refugees have also had to endure the bitter cold which is expected to last through at least Thursday. Temperatures plummeted to the lowest level in years in Warsaw, Minsk, Budapest and Moscow.”
Rescue from cold for the birds?
Entering the German term “Kältetote” (cold deaths) in Google, one gets few reports of the total deaths in Europe (at the time this post was written) from the German mainstream media. Online daily Bild did wrote here 2 days ago how the intensely cold conditions posed a dangerous threat to refugees in transit. Indeed this was true, and it still is.
Yet, another site here seem to think the real story of the day was how one man rescued a bird from freezing to death — as if poor citizens do not matter so much?
Die Welt reports 50 victims
To its credit, the online Die Welt here reported on the eastern European cold deaths earlier today:
Especially in the east and south of the continent several dozen people have frozen to death, in Belarus, Ukraine, in Hungary and Slovakia, in Bosnia, Austria, Belgium and Italy. Especially hard hit is Poland, where the mercury fell at times to -30°C. […] In total the cold wave in January has claimed so far about 50 victims, since November the number is close to 70 people.”
The most vulnerable unable to afford heat
Moreover it appears that Europe’s socialist, compassionate systems aren’t really doing their job of helping society’s weakest. Die Welt comments that “pensioners, the unemployed and the homeless often cannot afford heating” and thus are the ones paying the price of a low-energy society with their lives.
Die Welt has been reporting regularly on the story, writing four days ago how the cold was claiming the lives of refugees and the homeless.
Cold wave forecast to spread, continue
Unfortunately there is going to be no let up in people freezing to death. The cold and wintry mix will spread across central Europe by the weekend, according to wetteronline.de.
Pierre, this is likely to interest.
http://www.thegwpf.com/the-end-of-germanys-energiewende/
Mick.
So build a lot of gas plants as backup, produce gas when wind/solar is generating more power than is needed (or buy it on the market if it turns out to be cheaper) and off you go. Why shouldn’t that be possible?
Titles like “The End of …” or sentences that declare something to be impossible while it is at max just expensive endeavor should make you sceptical. This is a sceptics blog after all, isn’t it?
So the solution to the expensive and intermittent energiewende is more expense and more intermittency with OCGTs? (They aren’t noted for their low emissions and they are costly to run and maintain).
You might think that there is an unlimited amount that can be spent on your daydreams but a lot of others could think otherwise.
By the way, how much has the energiewende reduced Germany’s emissions?
“So build a lot of gas plants as backup,…. Why shouldn’t that be possible?” – SebastianH
It is a phenomenally expensive waste of resources.
With those resources we could be helping people in Third world areas lift themselves out of poverty, which would improve their quality of life and their life expectancy. But leftists are selfish and callous, not caring who they hurt, as long as they get their own way.
Leftists are wasteful and destructive, and the evidence for that is littered all around us. They are NOT “good” people.
““So build a lot of gas plants as backup,…. Why shouldn’t that be possible?” – SebastianH ”
ROFLMAO,,
So build a whole second supply system to fill in the HUGE gaps when wind can’t supply. DOH !!
Why not just build the whole system using gas and coal, and have them operate 24/7 without having the absolute economic WASTE of ramping up and down.
Then no wind-turbines would ever be needed. They are nothing but a burden of the electricity supply systems , and on the economies of any country that is stupid enough to down that path.
This is the FAR MORE SENSIBLE option.
We have an army of cultural marxist teachers to whip the sensible out of children.
Just what we would expect to happen in warming world 😉
This is the new eugenics. It is the fate that “greenies” everywhere want to impose on us. They pretend they are doing this for noble reasons, when their motives are the most ignoble imaginable.
It’s the old eugenics. It’s the old plan from Maurice Strong and co. working its way to the inevitable conclusion.
Climate change (aka CAGW) is the settled science of the age. Previously “…it is amusing to note that eugenics was “settled science” in the 1920s!”
I believe that policies of eugenics are still active today, and may in fact be engrained into many Western governments, and international organizations (UN, NATO, World Bank, IMF, etc.,) policy.
.
It is a modified version where the (eugenic) acts are not caused by commission but by willful (and often planned) omission. That both national governments and international agencies are deliberately slow in stopping minor disagreement escalating into regional conflagrations, or regional disease outbreaks morphing into global epidemics through inaction, are evidence of this policy.
The lateness in action of world leaders to the African Ebola outbreak (and AIDS before it), NATO’s continuing harassment of the Russians via the politics of their borders, the lack of resolve in restraining the Syrian war (and feeding both sides with arms). And many more…
The fact that UN-Peacekeeper do not keep any peace but just catalog damage and tally numbers, especially of dead bodies after conflict. They will supply aide and relief to overstressed areas but only after enough political pressure has been brought to bare on the situation.
There are many other instances of these kinds of (political) omissions, eugenic by stealth, I’m sure you can think of a few more.
Then consider who subscribes to the Malthusian doctrine —
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States.” -John Holdren (1973), Obama’s Science Czar
“Malthus has been vindicated; reality is finally catching up with Malthus. The Third World is overpopulated, it’s an economic mess, and there’s no way they could get out of it with this fast-growing population. Our philosophy is: back to the village”.
Dr. Arne Schiotz, World Wildlife Fund Director of Conservation, stated such, ironically, in 1984.
“There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it….” “Our program in El Salvador didn’t work. The infrastructure was not there to support it. There were just too goddamned many people…. To really reduce population, quickly, you have to pull all the males into the fighting and you have to kill significant numbers of fertile age females….” The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa, or through disease like the Black Death….”
Thomas Ferguson, State Department Office of Population Affairs
“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”
Mikhail Gorbachev
“Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries”.
Dr. Henry Kissinger
“The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary”.
Initiative for the United Nations ECO-92 EARTH CHARTER
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels”.
Prince Phillip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund
“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”
Obama’s science czar John P. Holdren, Co-author of “Ecoscience”
I have quotes running to hundreds from the elites of the world who all believe that by slow unhurried attrition of the world’s population can be made by neglect and slow action during a crisis.
“Nice” collection. Nice and Macabre, that is.
It helps if you can source them.
Have you got this one on Holdren?
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
There are photostats of his book, so it’s harder for him to deny the garbage he’s spewing.
“Have you got this one on Holdren?”
Yes I have it somewhere. I’m currently digging through some old hard disk-drives from my old wrecked PCs from storage. Finding lots of curious old stuff. If I find the source I’ll let you know.
TM
Thanks. Good material to put together. Before 9/11 I was collecting links to Muslim websites. They were all bad. But after 9/11 the rats ran back in their holes, i.e., erased all the incriminating stuff, and put on smiley faces. But I saw them before that, and know what garbage they all were.
Interestingly, much of the US continues cold this week, as was last week. Temperatures are not seriously below normal for mid-winter, so this won’t generate much news.
The following week, will be noticeably warmer — this too is common and has been known as “The January Thaw” [aka — bonspiel] since settlement by Europeans.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/january-thaw/
Checkout the daily update. He starts with mention of Europe
http://www.weatherbell.com/
Of course people will say it’s only weather and only in the Northern hemisphere, which is why this happened…
Perth, Australia – Coldest winter in more than 20 years.
But headline talks about 2016 being the coldest year in a decade.
“This BOM article minimizes both of those facts to the point where you’d swear it was the hottest instead,” says reader H.B. Schmidt.
http://www.news.com.au/national/western-australia/weather-2016-perths-coldest-year-in-a-decade/news-story/95e9c052e51166c48279176606a0b780
Umm, maybe that Gavin guy’s “hottest year eva!” was a bit premature…
Take a look at the pictures from Warsaw. We’ve also had a huge problem with air pollution (smog) because of the windless weather.
See also:
http://tvnmeteo.tvn24.pl/informacje-pogoda/polska,28/jak-i-kiedy-powstaje-smog,221243,1,0.html
Some measurements from a control station, located in the center of Warsaw:
http://powietrze.gios.gov.pl/pjp/current/station_details/table/530/10/0
And an adiabatic inversion.
But that smog is NOT from CO2..
… you do know that, don’t you ????
Many of these smog issues around the world could have been solved or great alleviated if the AGW fools hadn’t concentrated on the NON-POLLUTANT, CO2, but had actually spent even a fraction of the money WASTED on renewables etc on battling actual REAL pollution.
The Anti CO2 crusade has A LOT TO ANSWER FOR, in slowing world development to a crawl, and stopping third world countries getting decent power supplies.
The whole scam is DISGUSTING and ANTI-HUMAN.
Thanks, Casper.
That’s pretty nasty. I hope you aren’t stuck in it.
I can’t wait for some warmist to tell us if they had wind power there, instead of coal (is that what they use?), there wouldn’t be any smog. Yeah, no smog, no power either when the wind doesn’t blow.