I have had a lot of stuff sent... not a great deal of which I could post.
This I can
"In 1992 I almost froze to death while out on an excercise, on the coldest night of the week temperature hit 52.6 degrees.
We did not have anywhere to shelter, and we dug into a snowpile, and huddled together for warmth, making certain to take turns being at the inside of the pile.
The cold never left me, and I still have damages from that night.
It is the main reason for me hating cold, and why I have constant pains if I am in a climate that is lower than 25C.
So, I am commisserating with anyone on the brink of freezing to death.
I may seem glib sometimes, but it is just my way of staying sane in an insane world.
So, I am definitely not taking any joy in todays musing.
Moscow
I have already mentioned that 250 000+ residents in Moscow and the surrounding suburbs are without heating.
The number of districts and suburbs out of heating have now reached 27.
Today the temperature have gone up, currently it is -15C, but the weekend is set to hit -25C.
And the parade of dead frozen Russians is continuing nonstop in Moscow, and the authorities are doing nothing to help.
Obviously the protests are increasing over time, and it does not help that Moscow is completely out of fuel for their cars.
Muscovians now have started to take shelter inside the subway stations that remain warmish, yielding scenes reminiscent of Ukrainians hunkering in subway shelters to avoid bombs.
But it gets worse, far worse.
Omsk
This City in Siberia have had a massive fault in one of its two thermal heating powerplants.
If there is a sentence you do not want to read in January it is Siberia and loss of heating.
Currently it is only -27C in Omsk, almost a heatwave for being there.
Not that this will help the half a million people stuck in their icy apartments lacking any heating.
They are now hauling out hundreds of frozen people and take them away for burial in the summer.
There's so many of them that they are using hockey arenas as morgue freezers.
The Rest of Russia
We can only speculate about the rest of Russia, but we do know that people have frozen to death in St Petersburg and other more civilised places, and it is probably a safe bet to assume that things are grim in other places that we never will hear about.
A low estimate would be another half a million up to perhaps 2 million that now are lacking any heating in Russia.
Ukraine
Partially this has been due to Ukraine hitting thermal power plants and various factories providing district heating.
In Moscow about 1 cold district out of 3 is due to Ukrainian strikes.
Ukraine did early on warn Russia in no uncertain times that for each missile on a Ukrainian power installation, one plant in Russia would be destroyed.
Note the difference, Ukraine stated that they would take out a plant per missile or drone, and they shot down almost all of them, and still took out a plant per missile or drone, shot down or not.
It was not a decission taken lightly by Ukraine.
But they knew they had to do something after last years Russian campaign to freeze them to death.
And, weirdly it seems like Russia listened somewhat.
Their initial attacks against power infrastructure was fairly probing in nature.
And after the massive reply they got, they have mostly stayed away from going after Ukrainian power thingies.
So if Ukraine are only responsible for a limited number of destroyed Russian power infrastructure, what the heck then is happening?
Russia
Russia happened to Russia.
And in two different ways.
The first version is that due to corruption there is a lack of upkeep in the heating systems, the money was diverted and produced superyachts.
The other reason is that Russia caused a lot of sanctions against Russia.
Two years ago I wrote that the sanctions would slowly grind down Russia as lack of spareparts set in since most of those are sourced in the west.
I said that it would take two years before we started to note any problems, and about 5 years until Russia would grind to a screetching halt.
I was obviously wrong, I forgot about the corruption.
My new timeline is that the screeching will happen next winter.
As Ukraine attacked there was no spareparts, and Russia tried to counter this by patching over electricity and heating from other powerplants.
And then the worst coldspell since 1998 hit, and the system started to break down rapidly.
Even simple faults could not be fixed due to lack of both technicians (called into military service) and lack of spareparts.
More switching, more faults...
The Real Problem
People who are freezing to death are hard to miss, and also hard to hide for long.
So, this is what we are seeing.
But, the problem is far larger, the entire technological infrastructure of Russia is breaking down at the same rate as the heating.
Factories faultering due to broken machines and lack of electricity and heating.
The climate is also crashing fuel pumps, pipelines, refineries, oil-pumps at wells...
And so on and so forth in every sector in life, up to and including cell phone masts and internet.
In large western factories you stop production once every year to service all systems and replacing all worn parts, this is normally done during summer vacations.
If you skimp you can do this once every two years, but beyond that and your production will become unreliable and you will rapidly start to lose contracts to discerning customers, and you are on the road to bankruptcy.
Average service interval in Russia is once every five years.
Instead they used to have large departments of technicians and a pile of spare parts and do repairs on the fly.
It somewhat worked, and it made the owners get more superyachts.
Now we see factories and powerplants that have been running seven years without service, and two years without spare parts and technicians.
Now, ponder this.... heating and oil are important stuffs in Russia.
They do at least bi-annual servicing on those, in many cases yearly.
If one of those are starting to b***r off you should expect the ordinary factories to be in far worse condition.
And conservatively 10 percent of all powerplants in Russia are now completely shut down, with another 10 percent operating on reduced capacity.
At the end of winter this will be at least ten percent higher, and that is if Russia does not force Ukraine to take out more of them.
Then we could end up with 50 percent of all powerplants in Russia being ex-plants (much like mine when I returned from Ukraine, oh... I meant flower-plants...)
There is now a clear risk/chance that the war will end up by Russia freezing to pieces.
Somewhat ironic since that was their plan for Ukraine and Europe last year, something that failed thankfully.
Food
We should also remember that food is depending on fuel, heating and functioning factories, especially in a country like Russia that is under heavy sanctions.
As Russia start to run out of fuel, the heating for the greenhouses, and their factories break down, there is a growing risk for starvation in Russia.
Right now we are seeing food-prices skyrocketing with about 10 percent per month, and already this is causing problems.
But, for now Russia has enough food, at least to tide them over until harvest time.
Problem is just that harvests will inevitably be smaller, less will be prepared and stored properly, less will be canned and frozen, less will be transported due to lack of trucks, trains and fuel.
My bet is that next winter Russias shrinking population will find a new way to shrink, this time around their waists.
And, the combination of lack of food and heating is lethal.
At -20C you need 6000kCal to stay alive and not get hypothermia, less than that and you will after a while die.
This figure is for being fairly still in -20C, if you work hard you need even more.
If there is a famine and no heating in half of Russia, then we are looking at deaths counted in million across next winter.
I fear that this is what we will see.
The Russian Food problem is also compounded with Russia paying for their shells and missiles from North Korea by sending huge amounts of food, this on top of other payments.
Life has all of a sudden gotten much more pleasant in North Korea, basically Russia took on 26 million more mouths to feed.
Something tells me that next winter Russia will prioritise North Koreans over their own starving population.
Obviously Kremlin doesn't give a **** about this.
It is after all mostly elderly people that freeze to death, and that will starve to death.
They have the least amount of money, and the cost of paying their pensions will dissappear if they die, and there would be more food for the others if they die.
And, Russia is probably finding it a boon that this will fix their ridiculous population age pyramid.
10 or 20 million dead Russian seniors would probably just cause celebrations in Kremlin.
I do though think/hope that all those missing Babushkies will kickstart Russian minds, but I do not have great hope.
Oddly, intervening in the war would probably save millions of Russian lives, far more than Ukrainian lives."
www.thesun.co.uk
