Record Chills Hit India, Including Kolkata; Coldest Melbourne Cup In 3-Decades As Antarctic Outbreak Grips Australia; + Global Energy Crisis Will ‘Really’ Hit Next Winter, Warn Oil CEOs

Cap Allon

Record Chills Sweep India, Including Kolkata

A strong cold wave is currently gripping much of India as north-western winds blow in.

The mercury dropped to 19.6C (67.3F) in Kolkata on Saturday, making it the city’s coldest October reading in decades.

For reference, and according to the country’s Meteorological Department, the previous coldest October temperature observed in Kolkata was the 19.9C (67.8F) from 2019; while the all-time record remains safe — the 17.2C (63F) from 1954 (solar minimum of cycle 18).

Cold wave conditions have persisted in the state of Bhubaneswar, too, sending temperatures crashing below 15C (59F) in many locales on Monday, including Odisha, Kirei, G.Udayagiri, Phulbani, Daringbadi, Sonepur, and Bhawanipatna; while the lowest reading was registered in Semiliguda, which logged a new record low of 11.4C (52.5F).


Coldest Melbourne Cup In 3-Decades As Antarctic Outbreak Grips Australia

As forecast, a powerful Antarctic outbreak has engulfed practically ALL of the Aussie continent this week. The higher reaches of Victoria, NSW and Tasmania are even bracing for snow as they shiver through one of the chilliest openings to November on record.

According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), Tuesday is delivering one of the coldest Melbourne Cup days ever witnessed, too. A reading of just 9.5C (49.1F) was registered at 12:30pm in Flemington on Tuesday –which would have felt like 2.5C (36.5F)– as a strong, out-of-season polar front brings wintry weather back to Melbourne.

It is comfortably on course to be the coldest race day since at least 1995 when Flemington reached just 13.6C (56.5F).

The strength of this front is highly unusual, particularly for November, admitted BoM forecaster Dean Narramore.

“[It] goes to show Victoria can have winter weather any time of the year,” the forecaster said–which is a bit rich given the fact that his agency has been prophesying that ‘winter weather will become a thing of the past in winter’, let alone in mid-spring.

The higher parts of the state, such as Trentham, Mount Macedon and the Yarra Ranges faced the real possibility of snow, added ‘explain-away’ Narramore: “It’s unusual, but it’s not unheard of to have snow in November,” he said; “It’s not common, but we had some snow last November.”–So it is perhaps becoming more common, then? Why is it so hard for these folk to think and speak outside of The Narrative.

GFS 2m Temperature Anomalies (C) Nov 1 – Nov 4 [tropicaltidbits.com].


Global Energy Crisis Will ‘Really’ Hit Next Winter, Warn Oil CEOs

“Politicians and governments around the world are bracing for potential civil unrest as many countries grapple with mounting energy costs and rising inflation”, reads a paraphrased line doing the MSM rounds today.

A war in Europe, lower output of oil, gas and food, as well as high inflation, are slowly-but-surely bringing the global economy to its knees. Concerns are centered on the coming winter, especially for Europe, with cold season, combined with the aforementioned shortages, set to upend lives and businesses with rationing and blackouts.

But while this winter looks bad, it’s the winter of 2023-24 that people should be really worried about, according to a new, synchronized warning from major oil and gas executives.

“We’ve got a difficult winter ahead, and subsequent to that we’ve got a more difficult winter in the year ahead of that, because the production that is available to Europe in the first half of 2023 is considerably less than the production we had available to us in the first half of 2022,” said Russell Hardy, CEO of major oil trader Vitol.

BP CEO Bernard Looney, agrees: Energy prices “are approaching unaffordability,” with some people already “spending 50% of their disposable income on energy or higher,” he said. Provided its not a brutally cold Dec-Feb, Looney thinks “it has been addressed for this winter. It’s the next winter I think many of us worry, in Europe, could be even more challenging.”

The CEO of Italian oil and gas giant Eni expressed the same worry expressed the exact same concerns, adding that next winter is the headache “because we are not going to have Russian gas – 98% [less] next year, maybe nothing.”

The criminal levels of profit these energy companies are managing to generate during a supposed energy crunch is another hot topic. Obviously, the energy is there — Europe has managed to fill its boots, to 90% capacity. The energy is there, at least this year; could it be that the likes of BP are enjoying one last pay day before the spigots are turned off for good next winter? I don’t know.

Somewhat laughably, energy company CEOs are blaming governments for poor energy investment; more specifically, that investment in reliable fossil fuels has taken a hit in recent years as countries push for the transition to renewables.

BP’s Looney stressed the need to “invest in hydrocarbons today, because today’s energy system is a hydrocarbon system.”

The energy companies are of course playing their own games here, let’s not be naive. It was BP that coined the term ‘Carbon Footprint’ as a way to pass the buck to the consumer’s consumption, rather than the energy company’s production.

The UN and its grubby little offshoot, the IPCC, are still blindly decrying the use of fossil fuels, warning, as they do, that a far bigger crisis looms if people’s access to cheap and reliable oil, coal and gas isn’t immediately curtailed. In June, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for abandoning fossil fuel finance, and called any new funding for exploration “delusional.”

What is delusional, Guterres, is trying to heat hundreds of millions of homes in the dead of winter with wind and solar, and what is criminal is forcibly switching everyday folk over to these failing technologies through decades-now of under-investment.

I’ve been warning about this very disaster for years, which, like inflation, really wasn’t that hard to see coming; nor is it tricky to see where it’s steering us, either — the MSM and energy CEOs are telling us themselves:

As reported by cnbc.com, “serious social unrest” is on the cards in the near future.

In fact, “small to medium-sized protests” are already cropping up around Europe. Anti-government protests in Germany and Austria in September and in the Czech Republic last week –the latter of which has seen household energy bills surge tenfold– may be a small taste of what’s to come, continues cnbc.com article.

Are they priming us to get mad?

Do they expect/want us marauding the streets hurling trash cans through shop windows?

Any “serious social unrest” will surely be met with more ‘interventions’–let’s call them; more restrictive measures, more lockdowns, and more state power grabs. Again, I don’t know, but a ‘break’ is coming, a collapse, THE collapse, that I’m sure of — they need a Great Depression in order to have to their Great Reset.

And given this latest ‘messaging’, perhaps it stands that we have one more year to make hay and prepare. This would also allow for that final parabolic pump in the stock markets that I’m betting on. Let’s say the Fed pivot on interest rates, there’s an easing of tensions between the Ukraine and Russia, and the EU’s gas reserves see the block scrape through this upcoming winter. These three scenarios would send risk-on assets to the moon and would provide a moment of hope and euphoria before the Mother Of All Crashes (in early-2024) catches retail investors unaware –as it always does– proceeds to cripple them, and then, ultimately, leads to the ushering in of the new financial system, with its CBDCs, Digital IDs and Social Credit Scores in tow — and by that time, things will be so bleak that nobody will have the capital or wherewithal to resist.