Jonathan asks why other cities don't shut down, the way London has, when it snows.
While I'm not going to discount a bit of good old fashioned bureaucratic incompetence, I think that the main cause is that these days are rare in most of Britain. Unlike in Moscow, Oslo or New York we don't get many days of snow each year, often we'll have none. When they do come along people, organisations and equipment in those cities are well prepared.
Research for the International Journal of Biometeorology showed that a similar phenomenon exists with respect to heat waves. Isolated heat waves can be incredibly lethal - in 2003 a heatwave killed nearly 15,000 people in France and over 2,000 here in the UK - but as they increase in frequency the number of deaths tends to fall rather than rise "because of adaptations: increased use of air conditioning, improved health care, and heightened public awareness of the biophysical impacts of heat exposure." That's one reason why Global Warming is unlikely to lead to a marked upsurge in heat-related mortality.
On the other hand, tens of thousands of Britons die each year thanks to the cold. Excess winter mortality in the winter of 2007-08 was 25,300. That figure has been fluctuating between twenty and fifty thousand since the seventies. That is far more than the 8,724 alcohol related deaths in 2007. Given the severity of this winter, it is quite likely that the number of deaths will be tragically high again. British rates of excess winter mortality are roughly double those in Scandinavian countries.
Our failure to use growing incomes in the last decade to adapt to the months of winter cold is a more telling failure than our infrastructure struggling to cope with weather we only experience once or twice a year. Adding 14% to domestic electricity bills and 3% to domestic gas bills through climate change policies (BERR's estimate, PDF, 10.5.3) and, thereby, making it more expensive for people to keep the thermostat up might have something to do with that.
