Cold weather may raise blood pressure in elderly | The Australian

COLD weather may raise old people's blood pressure and increase the risk that they will suffer stroke, heart attack or kidney failure, French researchers said.
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"(The study) may explain well-established seasonal variations in illness and death from stroke, aneurysm ruptures and other vascular diseases," they wrote.

Minnesota 2008: COLD WINTER, COOL SPRING, TORNADOES AND FLOODS

Nostalgia was a cold thing for Minnesotans in 2008. An old-fashioned winter ushered in the year with five straight months of below-normal temperatures statewide, the first such streak since 1979. April snows were heavy - depressing, some would say - and many northern lakes were still covered with ice instead of anglers for the walleye fishing opener in May. Some migrating birds starved because the bugs they like to eat when they arrive hadn't been born yet. Gardening and farming started two weeks later than usual all across the state. The worst calamities occurred in late spring - a fatal tornado in Hugo and floods in the Austin area. As the year ended, heavy autumn rains and snow in the Red River Valley had people thinking ahead to spring flooding. Statewide, a deep snow cover held the promise of another "traditional winter" stretching into 2009 [Via M4GW]

Green Jobs. What Would Marie Antoinette Do? — MasterResource

Amazingly, a number of Congressional leaders such as Harry Reid and Bernie Sanders point to the struggles the public has had with higher energy costs, and then turn to renewable energy as a solution, without mentioning its (higher) cost. This is rather like Marie Antoinette’s supposed comment that the poor who had no bread should eat cake. Arguing for ‘clean’ energy over ‘dirty’ energy is one thing, but proposing to solve the problem of expensive energy with even more expensive (but ostensibly cleaner) energy is at best disingenuous.