BBC News - Southern Chile emergency after heavy snowstorms

Chile declared eight municipalities a disaster zone after a massive snowstorm hit the South of the country.

More than 12,000 people are isolated and facing food shortages. The snow has also affected electricity and communications.

Climate Change Mission Creep: Will the UN Security Council Establish a ‘Green Helmets’ Peacekeeping Force?

The Security Council is a relic from the Cold War. Clearly, these folks don’t have enough to do. The Security Council, of course, would not be the first UN body to turn fear of climate change into a lifetime meal ticket.

sp!ked review of books preview | Admit it: environmentalism was an ugly experiment

Mark Lynas has converted from eco-alarmist to pro-growth rationalist. But he still doesn’t get the problem with green thinking.

In other news... | The Spectator

If a tabloid used a single spell of cold weather to try to pooh-pooh the theory of global warming, it would rightly be accused of unscientific nonsense. Yet Sir John Beddington, the government’s scientific adviser, has proposed that the government do the same in reverse. In a report entitled ‘International Dimensions of Climate Change’, he calls upon the government to use weather-related disasters as ‘policy windows’ to push through unpopular policies to cut carbon emissions.Every time there is a flood in Bangladesh, in other words, we can expect another couple of pence of duty on a litre of unleaded.

Sir John Beddington’s job is to advise on science. Instead, he appears to have appointed himself minister for propaganda. Even the Met Office accepts that individual meteorological events cannot be attributed to climate change. Drought and tempest were with us before industrial civilisation — though to read Sir John’s report it might be easy to imagine they were not. On half a dozen occasions he brings up the subject of Hurricane Katrina as supposed evidence of climate change. He must know that Katrina was far from the strongest storm to hit the US coast — it was only category three out of five by the time it landed, and there have been 15 stronger ones in the past 100 years, the strongest back in 1935 — but it struck a particularly vulnerable city.