Ross Clark has an interesting article in the Express about planning for winter in the UK. While I'm unconvinced by his idea of using wholesale gas prices as a proxy for global temperature, some of his other points are much better. Take this for example:
So why is government policy so obsessed with the prospect of hotter summers and so complacent about that of cold winters? A fortune has been spent establishing a Committee on Climate Change which last September came up with its emergency plan for adapting to higher temperatures – by fixing shutters to British homes and planting trees in the streets so we can walk in the shade.
Yet planning for cold winters has been woefully deficient. An official report into transport failures last winter concluded that, beyond building a bigger stockpile of grit, we didn’t really need to do much to cope with cold winters because they would become much rarer in future. It has taken just five months to expose the folly of basing transport policy on predictions for climate change.