Extreme Heat Is Proving Deadly In Sweden

A small detail overlooked below: CRUTEM4 shows no warming in southern Sweden over the last 30 years.  And if there HAS been any warming, it's not global anyway, as there has been no global warming for 17 years.  Note also that global warming is an average.  Some places will be hotter and some places will be colder than the average.  Sweden could be one of the hotter on average places without it implying anything at all

Climate change has resulted in about 1,500 premature deaths in Sweden over the last 30 years, according to a new study.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, found that temperature increases between 1980 and 2009 caused 300 premature deaths in Stockholm, which researchers say translates into about 1,500 deaths across Sweden. The researchers found that, compared to climate data for 1900 to 1929, instances of extremely hot weather signifigantly increased over the 30-year period, causing deaths due to extreme heat to double. They also found that, even though winters as a whole were milder over the 30-year span, there were more instances of extreme cold events, which contributed to a slight increase of deaths over the winter.

Daniel Oudin Åström of Sweden’s Umeå University, who conducted the study, said the results show that people in Sweden haven’t appropriately adapted to increasing temperatures in the country.

“The study findings do not suggest any adaptation of the Swedes when it comes to confronting the increasingly warmer climate, such as increased use of air conditioning in elderly housing,” he said. “It is probably because there is relatively little knowledge in regards to increased temperatures and heat waves on health.”

Sweden, with its usually temperate climate, is not the only region facing early deaths from heat waves. In China, temperatures surpassing 105 degrees Fahrenheit killed dozens of people this summer. In 2003, the hottest summer on record in Europe was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 70,000 people. The heat in Europe created unbearable conditions for the young and elderly especially, and it coupled with the lack of wind made pollutants like car exhaust hang in the air, creating dangerous environments for those with asthma.

In the U.S., heat is the leading cause of weather-related death, responsible for the deaths of 155 people in 2012 alone. In 2006, a brutal heat wave that spread throughout most of the U.S. was responsible for or contributed to the deaths of 140 people in New York City alone, most of whom were older and lacked air conditioning. In May, a study predicted that by the 2020s, heat-related deaths in New York City could increase by 20 percent — by the 2080s, under some extreme scenarios, they could jump by 90 percent.

As the climate warms, heat waves are becoming longer, more frequent and more intense — since the 1950s, the duration of heat waves has increased worldwide. Some cities and states have taken action: New York state has a program that distributes air conditioners to low-income New Yorkers with serious medical conditions. But other states are struggling to provide for their most vulnerable residents as temperatures rise: in Texas, a program that helps low-income Texans pay their electricity bills will run out of money in 2016, which could force those Texans to go without air conditioning for the summer. And though air conditioners can be a lifesaver in a heatwave, they ultimately are bad news for the climate: during the 2013 heat wave, New York City broke its record for energy use in a single day, as residents with access to A.C. cranked it up to stay cool.

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Climate change alarmism caused our high energy prices

People will die this winter because of the environmentalist obsession with the end of the world, writes Jacob Rees-Mogg. Jacob is sometimes described as the biggest brain in Britain's House of Commons.  He certainly knows a lot about history  -- which is poison to the Green/Left

There is sometimes an almost vindictive streak in politics whereby governments follow policies which they know will harm the electorate but nonetheless they keep them, sometimes for years. The Corn Laws are a classic example. They were defended on the need to secure the prosperity of agriculture which provided so much employment, even if that increased the price of bread for those living in cities. It enriched the landowners who made up a good proportion of the political nation, so served self-interest as well as the poor farm labourer.

Eventually, in an act of great boldness, Sir Robert Peel split the Tory party and pushed through the abolition of the Corn Laws on the back of Whig votes in the House of Commons. This helped reduce the price of bread which was the mainstay of the average Briton’s diet. However, these laws had lasted for 31 years in peace time, often to the serious detriment of the people.

In the 2010s it is not the price of bread that is falsely and unnecessarily inflated by obstinate politicians but that of energy. There are cheap sources of energy either available or possible but there is a reluctance to use them. Coal is plentiful and provides the least expensive electricity per megawatt, while fracking may provide a boon of shale gas. Unfortunately, coal-fired power stations are being shut down because of European Union regulations and shale gas exploration is moving at a slow pace.

It is against this background that energy companies have announced price rises. The regulations imposed by the Government underlie them and additional green taxes exacerbate the situation. The expansion of relatively expensive nuclear power at £92.50 per megawatt, almost double the current market price, is justified by some because it is cheaper than the quite unnecessary wind schemes. But it is much more expensive than coal or gas and these high energy prices which punish the poor most particularly are a matter of choice not of necessity.

The reason this has been done is, of course, because of climate change fears. But is it a reasonable or proportionate response? It is widely accepted that carbon dioxide emissions have risen but the effect on the climate remains much debated while the computer modelling that has been done to date has not proved especially accurate. Sceptics remember that computer modelling was behind the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the global financial crisis; common sense dictates that if the Meteorological Office cannot forecast the next season’s weather with any success it is ambitious to predict what will happen decades ahead. However, even if all their fears are right the influence of the United Kingdom is limited. This country is responsible for under 2 per cent of global emissions so even if the British freeze and industry is made uncompetitive it will not save the world.

Eschatological fears are an ancient human concern. The Romans expected the world to end in 634 BC owing to a prophecy involving twelve eagles while the early Christians anticipated the Final Judgement in their own lifetimes. Pope Sylvester II thought AD 1000 would be the last year, a view updated for the modern age by the Millennium bug.

Clearly expectations of a final disaster are part of man’s psychology and the doomsayers of the quasi religious Green movement fit the bill. Perhaps one day the world will end, giving the last group to predict it the satisfaction of being right – but as many have been wrong so far it does not seem wise to make public policy on the back of these fears.

In the 1830s the average price of a quarter of corn was £2 16s 2d compared to the Prussian price (including the cost of freight to London) of £1 10s 5d. Even after the average tariff of 7s 2d was added imported corn ought still to have been cheaper but such was the acceptance of high prices and the reluctance to import that the market did not adjust. Something similar seems to be happening to the energy market. As the Government has made the price higher so the energy companies put a margin on top. High prices are almost expected.

The solution to this is to free the market, not to control prices which will simply reduce supply. Hence the time has come to copy Sir Robert Peel. He saw that the Corn Laws made the condition of the people worse. Modern politicians know that their constituents will suffer this winter and some may die because they cannot afford fuel. This can be stopped by ending the environmentalist obsession and delivering cheap energy.

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Under-Fire Cameron Calls For Roll-Back Of Green Energy Taxes

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron appeared to signal a major shift in energy policy today as he told MPs that the Goverment should “roll back” costly environmental regulations and charges brought in by the last Labour government.

Mr Cameron suggested the plan as he came under pressure at Prime Minister’s Question from Ed Miliband, who taunted him over Sir John Major’s call yesterday for a windfall tax on energy companies.

The Prime Minister was further embarrassed when he was rebuked by the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, for twice calling Mr Miliband a “conman” for his promise to freeze energy bills if he wins the next election.

“Conman is, frankly, unparliamentary,” Mr Bercow said. “The Prime Minister is a man of great versatility in the use of language. It’s a bit below the level — we’ll leave it there.”

Mr Miliband’s promise to freeze prices for 20 months after the election has been dismissed by the Goverment as economically illiterate and impossible to implement, but appears to have struck a chord with voters.

A fresh round of price increases from the Big Six energy companies, which threatens to push average household energy bills past £1,500 a month, has added to the pressure on Mr Cameron to tackle the energy market.

In a lunch with political reporters yesterday, Sir John rejected the price freeze plan — although he said that Mr Miliband’s heart was “in the right place” — and called instead for a windfall tax on energy profits to help pay pensioners’ bills this winter.

A jubilant Labour leader reminded that Mr Cameron today of his comment that anyone who wanted to intervene in the energy markets was a “Marxist”.

“How does he feel now that the Red Peril has claimed Sir John Major,” he asked, pressing the Prime Minister to choose between either the windfall tax or an immediate price freeze.

In a move likely to put him at odds with the Liberal Democrats, Mr Cameron said that green regulations introduced by Mr Miliband as Energy Secretary, which add to household energy bills, would have to be ditched.

“We need to roll back some of the green regulations and charges that push up our bills. We all know who put them in place,” he said.

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Controlling the Scientists

 by Dr. Vincent Gray

The Environmental Movement is an anti-science pseudo religion which believes that humans are destroying “The Planet”, In order to promote this view they have set up organisations for their activists, such as Greenpeace, where every member and official had to propagate the official doctrine, imposed from above.

IPCC sinking

In the 1980s a group of rogue scientists, who supported this dogma, suggested that the public and governments would accept it more readily if it was a “settled” opinion of a sufficiently large group of scientists. They invented a new pseudo-scientific model of the climate which ignored the scientific understanding of the climate built up by generations of meteorologists, which was supposedly related to Fourier’s explanation of how a greenhouse worked. It claimed that climate is controlled by human–related emissions of carbon dioxide and other minor “greenhouse gases."

They persuaded the World Meteorological Association and their own United Nations Environment Programme to set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to gather together scientific material to support this project in preparation for the Rio Earth Summit in 1991 which launched the deception.

At the time, employment of scientists had fallen, Generous salaries, promotion and foreign travel was offered to those who would support this programme, combined with a campaign of elimination of critics by influence on Journal Editors, the Universities, Official Scientific Bodies and the international media.

The IPCC has now issued five major Reports. These have been amazingly successful in persuading governments all over the world that they can prevent what is alleged to control “global warming” by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other minor 'greenhouse gases.'

The IPCC ran into a problem that does not affect an organisation such as Greenpeace, Scientists are usually trained to think for themselves, and some of those who have been recruited to support the “climate change” programme find if difficult not to insert their reservations into the opinions that are proscribed for them.

The main mechanism for ensuring uniformity of thought is applied by the presence in all of the IPCC Reports of a “Summary for Policymakers” at the beginning. This is really a Summary BY Policymakers, because it is dictated, line by line by the government representatives who control the IPCC to a group of reliable “Drafting Authors” It is published before the main Report, to emphasize the need for conformity. In addition they try to exert pressure in the choice of “Lead Authors”, and in the treatment of comments made by the “reviewers” who receive drafts of the Reports.

Despite all this pressure, complete uniformity of thought has, so far, never been achieved. The First IPCC Report “Climate Change´(1990) stated plainly:

“The persons named below all contributed to the peer review of the IPCC Working Group I Report. Whilst every attempt was made by the Lead Authors to incorporate their comments, in some cases these formed a minority opinion which could not be reconciled with the larger consensus. Therefore, there may be persons below who still have points of disagreement with areas of the Report.”

But it still stated, even in the “Summary for Policymakers” of the 1990 Report and in its 1992 Supplement:

“The size of this warming (which they claimed) is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability.”

Climate observations, which appear only in the last chapter of the 1990 report, are not “broadly consistent with the predictions of climate models.” Also all subsequent Reports had to admit that they are actually incapable of making “predictions” but only “projections” dependent on whether you believe the assumptions of the models.

The Second IPCC Report “Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change” had to confront a series of opinions in the Draft of the Final Report which disagreed with the greenhouse theory. It included the following statements:

 "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

"Finally we come to the most difficult question of all: 'When will the detection and unambiguous attribution of human-induced climate change occur?' In the light of the very large signal and noise uncertainties discussed in this Chapter, it is not surprising that the best answer to this question is 'We do not know’. Few if any would be willing to argue that unambiguous attribution of this change to anthropogenic effects has already occurred, or was likely to happen in the next several years."

One of their scientists (Ben Santer) was given the job of eliminating all the offending passages, or changing them to give a more favoured opinion. But after all that they ended up with this equivocal conclusion:

“The balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human influence on the climate.”

This is something everybody can agree on. Humans spend all of their efforts in trying to influence the climate. The statement says nothing about 'greenhouse gases' or of carbon dioxide. It supports the offending passages that were deleted.

The Third Report “Climate Change 2001: The Scientific  Basis” was the one for which I did a detailed analysis  called “The Greenhouse Delusion.”

The following statement appeared in Chapter 1:

“The fact that the global mean temperature has increased since the late 19th century and that other trends have been observed does not necessarily mean that an anthropogenic effect on the climate has been identified. Climate has always varied on all time-scales, so the observed change may be natural”.

In the Policymakers Summary we get another equivocal opinion:

“in the light of the new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.

Here they change tack. Once again they do not claim that there is evidence that this is so, merely that it is the opinion of their paid “experts":  They seem to think that if they assign to the opinion “likely” as meaning greater than 60% probability that this makes it any other than merely an opinion.

.And so we come to IPCC Science Report No 4 “Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis”

Now we get a slight amendment to the previous equivocal statement:

“Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperature since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Again it is not evidence but opinions of their paid experts who are now 95% certain they are right, but it only applies to "most” of the evidence and it only applies to their highly inaccurate temperature series, but not to the more accurate satellite and radiosonde series which began in 1978 and 1958 respectively.

Despite all this they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with Al Gore.

The Fifth IPCC WGI AR5 Report “Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis” has now been made available from their recent  meeting in Stockholm.

They have now “Approved” the Summary for Policymakers once more via the line by line dictation of supposedly “consensus” agreement by the 119 anonymous Government representatives to the “Drafting Authors.”

We get yet another set of  equivocal opinions:  “Human influence on the climate system is clear”

Is this an advance on “discernible” ?

“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid 20th century.”

 Again no mention of greenhouse gases and how much is “dominant?"

“Since the mid 20th Century”, is pretty short in geological or even in human lifetime terms and it is again arranged so as to eliminate the more reliable satellite and radiosonde measurements. They ignore completely the “hiatus” that has taken place. Their technique of “observing” this “unequivocal” and “unprecedented” warming has failed to do so for the past 17 years.

The Summary for Policymakers may have been approved, and it is issued freely to the public, but it is obviously unfinished, has a large number of necessary editing, and it carries the request “Do not Cite do not Quote, do not Distribute.”

For the first time they have failed to approve the Final version of the Report. They merely “accept” it and issue a list of 134 “Corrections” which are intended to make the main Report compatible with the “Summary for Policymakers”.

So we have once more the same game they played on the Second Report, except this time it is applied officially by all of them and not by one individual. I have had a good look through all of them and have not found evidence of drastic alteration. They seem merely to be trying to improve the cover up of the so-called temperature “hiatus” which has made them feel even more confident than before that it does not matter and will soon go away.

I have managed to make my way through much of the main Report and l have a few preliminary comments.

They have laboured hard to deal with the “hiatus” by such devices as using “decadal” averages and different starting and ending dates but not very successfully.

They still avoid the mismatch between “emissions” which are only from the land and “concentrations” which are mainly measured over the sea, and the fact that there is no established relationship between them.

They have deliberately confused “sea level” of the ocean, usually calculated from models and “relative sea level” between sea and land which is the only one that matters.

It is now obvious that the uncertainties which they have attached to estimates of the earth’s energy on their revised diagram are so much larger than the claimed “projections” of the model calculations are meaningless.

As a final conclusion, attempts of the IPCC to impose rigid discipline on a large group of scientists to persuade them  to claim that human emissions of so-called greenhouse gases harm the climate, without being able to supply convincing evidence, has been a failure.

Even their opinions on the supposed reliability of their “projections” always leave an increasingly small escape route for the day when their approach is proved wrong.

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Physicist: There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster

by Kelvin Kemm, nuclear physicist

The terrible toll from Japan's tsunami came from the wave, not radiation

I have watched a TV programme called ‘Fear Factor.’ In the series there are contestants who have to confront their worst fears to see who bales out and who can fight the fear and get through.

People who are afraid of heights are made to Bungee-jump off a high bridge, and people who are scared of spiders or insects are made to get in a bath full of spiders.

In virtually all cases the contestants later say that the fearful experience was not actually as bad as they feared. So the fear of the fear was greater than the fear itself ‘when the chips were down.’

This is often the case in life, that the fear of some factor turns out to be worse than the experience itself. The human mind builds a very scary image in the imagination. The imagination then feeds the fear.

If the picture in the imagination is not very specific or clear it is worse, because the fear factor feeds on the unknown.Fukushima nuclear plant

This is what has happened in the public mind concerning nuclear power over the last half century. Concepts concerning nuclear reactions and nuclear radiation are in themselves complicated and mysterious.

Over the last couple of decades physics advances in fields such as quantum mechanics, which is linked to nuclear processes has compounded matters for the public. The image of strong and mysterious forces and effects is now well entrenched. There are Hollywood movies and TV programmes about space travellers or alien invaders who use time travel and quantum forces, and then battle to evade the dangerous intergalactic nuclear zones.

A consequence of all this is that internationally the public is now really ‘spooked’ when it comes to the topic of nuclear power. A real ‘fear factor’ looms over the mere word ‘nuclear.’ Newspapers love this, and really push imagery like; ‘nuclear leak’ or ‘radiation exposure.’

To a nuclear physicist like me, I look upon such public reaction half with amusement and half with dismay. The amusement comes from the fact that so many people can be scared so easily by so little. It is like shouting: “Ghost in the bedroom,” and everyone runs and hides in the hills.

The dismay reaction is that there is a body of anti-nuclear activists who do not want the public to know the truth, and the anti-nukes enjoy stoking the fear factor and maintaining public ignorance.

Let us now ponder the Fukushima nuclear incident which has been in the news again lately.

Firstly let us get something clear. There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster. Total number of people killed by nuclear radiation at Fukushima was zero. Total injured by radiation was zero. Total private property damaged by radiation….zero. There was no nuclear disaster. What there was, was a major media feeding frenzy fuelled by the rather remote possibility that there may have been a major radiation leak.

At the time, there was media frenzy that “reactors at Fukushima may suffer a core meltdown.” Dire warnings were issued. Well the reactors did suffer a core meltdown. What happened? Nothing.

Certainly from the ‘disaster’ perspective there was a financial disaster for the owners of the Fukushima plant. The plant overheated, suffered a core meltdown, and is now out of commission for ever. A financial disaster, but no nuclear disaster.

Amazingly the thousands of people killed by the tsunami in the neighbouring areas who were in shops, offices, schools, at the airport, in the harbour and elsewhere are essentially ignored while there is this strange continuing phobia about warning people of ‘the dangers of Fukushima.’ We need to ask the more general question: did anybody die because of Fukushima? Yes they did. Why?

The Japanese government introduced a forced evacuation of thousands of people living up to a couple of dozen kilometres from the power station. The stress of moving to collection areas induced heart attacks and other medical problems in many people. So people died because of Fukushima hysteria not because of Fukushima radiation.

Recently some water leaked out of the Fukushima plant. It contained a very small amount of radioactive dust. The news media quoted the radiation activity in the physics measure of miliSieverts. The public don’t know what a Sievert or a milliSievert is. As it happens a milliSievert is a very small measure.

Doubling a very small amount is still inconsequential. It is like saying: “Yesterday there was a matchstick on the football field; today there are two matchsticks on the football field. Matchstick pollution has increased by a massive 100% in only 24 hours.”

The statement is mathematically correct but silly and misleading.

At Fukushima a couple of weeks ago, some mildly radioactive water leaked into the sea. The volume of water was about equal to a dozen home swimming pools. In the ocean this really is a ‘drop in the ocean.’

The radiation content was so little that people could swim in the ocean without the slightest cause for concern. Any ocean naturally contains some radioactivity all of the time anyway. There is natural radiation around us all of the time and has always been there since the birth of the earth.

Understandably the general public do not understand nuclear radiation so the strangest comments occur. On an internet blog some person stated that people on the north coast of Australia must be warned about the radiation in the sea coming from Fukushima. Good grief!

Meantime the Fukushima site now looks like an oil refinery. A lot of storage tanks have been built there to hold water that has been flushed through the damaged reactors to aid in cooling. Quite frankly, scientifically speaking, the best thing to do with the mildly radioactive waste water would be to intentionally pour it into the sea. The water which is currently in the new Fukushima storage tanks has already been filtered to remove radioactive Caesium.

All that is left is a bit of radioactive Tritium. Tritium is actually part of the water molecule anyway…so what we really have is…well, water in water. The Tritium atom is a hydrogen atom, which has two neutrons in its nucleus which is a normal but rare variation in the hydrogen atom.radioactive tritium

Most hydrogen atoms have only a single proton in the nucleus and no neutrons. A rare hydrogen variation is called Deuterium and such atoms have one proton plus one neutron. Even rarer than Deuterium is the Tritium form of hydrogen which has one proton plus two neutrons. These variants are known as isotopes. Water is H2O and water molecules in which the Tritium isotope of the hydrogen atom is found are molecules referred to as ‘Heavy Water.’ It really is just water, so you can’t filter it out of the normal ‘light water.’

The Tritium heavy water is very mildly radioactive and is found normally in the sea all over the world all of the time. This Tritium concentration in the one thousand storage tanks at Fukushima is higher than that found naturally in the sea, but is still so low as to pose no real danger at all.

No doubt the Japanese government is too scared to release this water into the sea because of the howl of criticism which would no doubt follow.

A further complication is that in the last couple of weeks the press has reported further spillage of water. These reports are such that it looks like a continuous failure of the Fukushima engineers to contain the situation.

The latest spillage was about 400 litres of water, which is about as much liquid as would fill four motor car fuel tanks. Reportedly, one of the one thousand storage tanks was not totally horizontal when it was built so when it was filled to the top some water overflowed on one side.

As soon as the spillage occurred they fixed the problem. But the rules require the incident to be reported, even though the spillage was not of any biological consequence to anyone, or to any fauna or flora.

The Fukushima incident will continue to attract media attention for some time to come, I imagine. It has become such a good story to roll with that it will not just go away. However, in sober reflection and retrospection one has to come to the conclusion that far from being a nuclear disaster the Fukushima incident was actually a wonderful illustration of the safety of nuclear power.

The largest earthquake and consequent tsunami on record struck an ageing nuclear power plant which was built to a now obsolete boiling water reactor technology, and no nuclear damage resulted to people and property in the neighbourhood.

Poor management systems compounded matters and were implicated in the failure of the cooling circuit. The reactor cores suffered a meltdown. Due to the magnitude of the tsunami disaster there were no emergency services able to help, they were deployed elsewhere or paralysed because there were no roads or infrastructure available.

Hydrogen gas leaked out of a reactor, collected under the building root and then exploded, blowing the roof off in front of the world’s TV cameras. Fukushima had devices called ‘recombiners’ designed to prevent the hydrogen build-up but they were not working because they needed an external electricity supply.

Financially speaking and operationally speaking the reactors were wrecked, but nobody was killed or injured by any nuclear radiation.

Fukushima showed that a nuclear power plant can take the maximum punch of nature’s brutality, and yet the surrounding population does not fry and die as so often dramatically predicted by the fear factor enthusiasts

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“Most Severe Winter Start In 200 Years!” + Euro Municipalities Now Ignoring Foolish Predictions Of Warm Winters

Last Thursday evening and yesterday winter made its debut in Southern Germany and Austria  – and how! Read more here.

German RTL television last night here (starting at 4:30) called it the “most severe start of winter in 200 years!“, saying many meteorologists were caught by surprise. Up to half a meter of snow fell at some locations.

Gone are the mild winters of the sort Europe seen in the 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed for central Europe the last 5 consecutive winters have all been colder than normal – a record!

Municipalities ignoring forecasts of warm winters

These days are blockbuster times for German road salt manufacturers. In Europe municipalities have learned their lesson: ignore foolish predictions of warm winters, order huge quantities of salt, and do it early!

Municipalities and road commissioners were once led astray by climatologists’ predictions of increasingly warmer winters and led to thinking that these had become a thing of the past due to global warming (recall famous words of David Viner and Mojib Latif). One major daily even proclaimed that spring would arrive in January!

As a consequence of these false global warming predictions, municipalities unwisely kept much smaller stocks of road salt for expected shorter and milder winters. Road commissioners saw little reason to keep thousands of tons of road salt in stock.

Then beginning in 2009 came one harsh winter after another. Road maintenance crews and commissioners were caught red-faced. Suddenly municipalities were running out of salt by January and were even no longer able to keep the most vital traffic arteries cleared. Traffic chaos ensued and motorists were left to fend for themselves. Municipalities were stunned and left scratching their heads. Weather-wise the exact opposite of what climatologists had predicted had taken place. They learned the hard way. Now they are no longer heeding the foolish forecasts of warm winters.

Not surprisingly, many of the very same climatologists have since changed their tune and are now suddenly predicting cold, bitter winters for Europe….because of global warming!

German public radio SWR here reports that this year municipalities and road commissioners are stocking up on road salt:

The Salzwerke AG in Heilbronn said that municipalities had ordered large quantities of road salt. [...] Over the past years road salt had often been in short supply in some municipalities because the cold periods lasted longer and longer than expected.”

The online daily Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung here reports that the city is now building up its stock of road salt, writing:

In the last season 2012/2013 about 90,000 tonnes of road salt were used. Because of the long and harsh winter considerably more than normal was used, said Mitschka. road salt had to be continuously re-ordered.

In 2010/2011 there were delivery bottlenecks. Even the autobahns in Brandenburg could not be adequately salted at the time.”

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