Pensioners burning books to stay warm.

[ab6pn]

www.metro.co.uk/news/807821-pensioners-burn-books-for-warmth

I find this very troubling. But since the UKmet has forcasted a very mild winter wrongly for the last two years they deserve part of the blame. Especially since others forecasters without an AGW bias predicted that this winter would be very cold indeed.

Wonder how many British Thermal Units are in every copy of Al Gore's book "An Inconvenient Truth"

[curiousgeorge]

Probably a marketing strategy to increase Kindle sales.

[nautonnier]

Jan 9, 2010 21:46:39 GMT curiousgeorge said:

Probably a marketing strategy to increase Kindle sales.

No - tried those they don't burn as well and you get some really bad black smoke

[hairball]

Many elderly people are going to be found dead when the thaw comes solely because the UK wasn't prepared for typical UK weather.

[sigurdur]

Hairball:
I hope you are wrong in that prediction.

[hairball]

Loads of old people here in Ireland are trapped in their homes. The postman is the only contact many of them have and it looks like even some main roads will have to be closed this week because we can't get any salt. The weather here is nothing like as bad as yours, it should be criminal not to plan for this but the politicos can just hand waive it off as a freak occurrence because of AGW.

[sigurdur]

All I can say, looking in from the outside, it your folks really need some new leadership in the worst way.

I find it so hard to believe that anyone is so caught up in AGW that they would not prepare for winter.

There is no excuse for this type of stupidity.

[hairball]

Our government has been staggering around like a zombie for a year now, and the other parties don't have the courage to put it out of its misery. The Green Party leader is our Environment Minister. At the next vote they will not win a single seat. He says they did nothing wrong because Britain is in the same situation. But the UK has 2 salt mines and we have none. They're on a month or more vacation at the moment. There really should be civil unrest when parliament reconvenes.

[sigurdur]

Have the Irish been as duped as the Brits on this AGW thing?

The Irish always seemed to be much smarter than the average Brit. Maybe their Celtic heritage has abadonded them?

[hairball]

It was never a big thing here, but like in many places the true believers had loud voices and the biggest party needed the Green's 6 representatives to form a government. And of course Reuters and AP kept the papers full polar bears cannibalising each other while they drown. There's all kinds of crazy schemes now. The IPCC summary for policymakers is a bible for every ruling party in the world I'm sure.
The biggest party here is as corrupt as they come and they gave the bankers €100,000 ($145,000) insurance for every man, woman and child in the country. So now we have to give the banks everything 'cos if they fail under that insurance we'll all be slaves.
They turned us into a service economy and now even the worst jobs are being sent abroad 'cos there's millions of Indians who speak great English. Honestly, in the 1990's they were giving government jobs with huge pensions to anyone with a pulse. If it wasn't for Intel and the viagara factory we'd all just be sitting around.
There was massive flooding in November and they couldn't get a grip on it, now this freeze looks like shutting the country down with a couple of inches of snow.
I despair. How difficult is it to build a roof over a pile of salt?
We just bought into the modern culture and only took the worst bits. Things will have to change soon.

I heard recently that North Dakota has it's own bank that's owned by the public, that sounded like a fantastic idea. Sorry for filling up the board with my grumpiness.

[sigurdur]

Smiling:
We are a contrast it would seem here.

WE were screwed over by the bankers in the 30's...so yes, we have the Bank of North Dakota.

You aren't being grumpy. This is all part of the AGW thing. Now, it is getting personal to you when you see how the forcasts have been believed, and what happens when they are wrong.

I have a hard time understanding how folks give up freedoms for security in the sense that they do. And when that security is guaranteed by a government, all freedom is gone and all security is gone as well as no matter where you are, government consumes and does not produce.

Here, there is this big push for green jobs that cost goverment 135,000 per job. Tell me how that is productive? When the cost of that energy produced by the green is 3 times the cost of fossil fueled energy.

And then I think of people being short of energy and freezing because of green stupidity.

Sheer and utter madness. Sheer and utter madness.

[sentient]

Unfortunately, its simply an unavoidable manifestation of the 9 times rule. We are nine times more susceptible to rumor than we are to fact.

No matter what infrastructure we build it seems it is immune to graft and corruption. Energy, a capital intensive regime under any circumstances, and the focus of much frustration from all sides, seems impossible to govern in anything resembling a sane way. Obscene profits, no matter which way basic prices move.

And those profits are more than sufficient to afford the pittance of political assuredness. There will be no fair management of energy. Period. No system of anthropogenic government has even come close.

What legislative guarantees of profit and solvency would really be sufficient to attract proper investment?

Or is it that the dominance imperative, the unmitigated primordial necessity of maintaining as many hostages as possible to one's avowed creed the only form of governance possible for us?

[boxman]

Here in Norway we had a story about some elderly lady who had to sleep in front of here open running stove for days. Was apparently impossible to get the inside apartment temp to more than 9c even with electric heaters running at full.
pub.tv2.no/multimedia/na/archive/00748/Torborg_Agn_s_To_74800216x9.jpg

I bet she will also get a nice electricity bill.. Does not help that electricity prices in large parts of the country is currently 10 times higher than normal, thanks to overloaded grid network and high import prices.

[sigurdur]

Jan 10, 2010 1:47:13 GMT boxman said:

Here in Norway we had a story about some elderly lady who had to sleep in front of here open running stove for days. Was apparently impossible to get the inside apartment temp to more than 9c even with electric heaters running at full.
pub.tv2.no/multimedia/na/archive/00748/Torborg_Agn_s_To_74800216x9.jpg

I bet she will also get a nice electricity bill.. Does not help that electricity prices in large parts of the country is currently 10 times higher than normal, thanks to overloaded grid network and high import prices.

Norway is a rich country. What has happened to your generation capacity? And when you refer to the grid....isn't it maintained?

We must be a strange lot in ND. The cities are served by private utilities, the rural served by co-ops. The private utilities AND the co-ops by elec from a co-op that they have formed. So in essense, our elec generation is owned by the consumer and ran as such. It has worked well for us, and our rates are in line or lower than the rest of the nation.

The storm in Europe has been a learning one for me with the comments etc on this board.

Thank you.

[ab6pn]

I am surprised that nobody has died trying to use charcoal barbecue grills indoors for heat. This happens every year in the states and just a week ago several people died doing exactly that.