As We Count the Cost of the Freeze, Government Prepares for Global Warming

As we emerge, temporarily perhaps, from weeks of the coldest weather since records began – with snow disasters right round the northern hemisphere, from the US and Europe to China and Mongolia – more examples come to light of how the cost of extreme cold is far greater than that of warming. We already have a £9.6 billion backlog to cover repairs to roads damaged in previous winters, and the price of repairing the potholes and crumbling asphalt caused by this winter’s even more intense cold threatens to raise that by billions more (even though Government cuts will trim that budget by 15 per cent).

In Northern Ireland, 80,000 households were deprived of water by burst mains operated by the state-owned Northern Ireland Water. Yet as recently as October it published a strategic plan wholly obsessed by the need to transform its infrastructure to meet the challenge of global warming.'

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