It is cold that kills not warmth. It is global cooling that will provide the greater challenge for humans – not global warming. But whether cooling or warming or both, humans will be better served by figuring out the best ways to adapt and not waste time and energy on trying to control the climate based on fanciful theories and religious beliefs about what causes climate change.
It’s the Sun, stupid!
Yesterday we had about -20°C, which is pretty cold but not unusual for this time of year. A friend in Australia was sweltering in +44°C -pretty hot but also not unusual. Another friend in Alberta had a normal winter day at about -25°C. Yesterday across the world humans were living and managing over temperatures ranging from about -50°C to about +49°C. Coping – quite successfully – with a temperature range caused by local weather of almost 100°C .
On Friday, Moscow was on a verge of traffic collapse as more than 10 inches of snow fell on the city, which is more than half of January’s average. Thousands of passengers were stranded overnight in the capital’s major airports, as several dozen flights were delayed. Muscovites woke up and found their cars, driveways and houses buried under a thick layer of snow, with city workers unable to get to smaller streets.
Moscow (Reuters / Sergei Karpukhin)
While the snowstorms have caused inconvenience for large population centers in western Russia, they have been life-threatening further east in the country. The polar circle city of Norilsk has been buried under 10 feet of snow – entire apartment blocks, markets, stores and offices were buried under snow overnight.
Banks of snow were as high as two people put together, reaching the second-story windows of some apartment buildings. Cars, stores, garages were blocked. Norilsk metropolitan workers were forced to dig passageways through the snow banks to create access between the outside world and the barricaded city. Meanwhile, icicles up to three feet in length have formed off the ledges of buildings, breaking at random and causing a lethal hazard for pedestrians below.
Norilsk (Photo from bigpicture.ru)
The k2p blog 