PM pledge on cold snap gas supply and salt

Gordon Brown has pledged the UK's gas supplies will not run out during the current cold snap, and that road salt will get to "where it is most needed".

It's OK, stocks of salt have been ordered from abroad and they are winging their way to Britain and will arrive in 12 days time on the 21st January - by which time, I suspect, we won't need the bloody stuff. AA spokesman Paul Watters told the BBC that councils had reduced stocks by 250,000 tonnes during the past 10 years. Part of the council's plans for dealing with global warming, I have no doubt. After all, Mr Monbiot thought we might never see another cold winter:

I have spent the last two evenings skating. Last night we laid lanterns out across the ice and swooped and swung and fell flat on our faces on this silent lake in mid-Wales, for hours by moonlight...I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. For the exhilaration of this primal game was shaded with sadness: all of us knew that this time might be our last. It is many winters since most of the lakes in England and Wales have frozen hard enough to support a skating party; with every year the chances of another one recede. The fuss this country has made about the current cold snap reminds us how rare such events have become.

As Mr Eugenides points out, Monbiot said that on 9th January...  last year. 

But not everyone thinks we've seen the end of cold winters:

Can you get it into your thick skulls? If global warming turns out to be true, Britain's weather will go bonkers. It will snow all the time. Weather might be like this more often, not less. Those unseasonably sunny early springs are exactly what there will be fewer of, not more. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

There will be less snow, there will be more snow. Talk about hedging your bets.