See this story in the New York Times.  Millions of Chinese faced a humanitarian crisis on Friday as gasoline and food reserves dwindled and yet more bad weather was forecast for a country paralyzed by record-breaking cold and snow. More than 160 counties and cities in central China suffered blackouts and water shortages, the Xinhua news agency said, including Chenzhou, in Hunan Province, a city of four million that has been without power and water for more than a week. Stricken areas of south and central China are suffering the worst winter weather in half a century, with at least 60 people dead in weather-related accidents.

Hunan, Guizhou and Jiangxi were all facing fresh storms, and Mr. Zhu said the extreme weather could last another 10 days. Nearly six million passengers have been stranded on trains or in railroad stations in the past week. For millions of migrant workers, Lunar New Year is their only chance to see families all year.

Icecap Note: Our friends at the Metsul in Brazil remarked that this event is the “Chinese Katrina” in the sense of a social convulsion after a dramatic weather event. They also noted the Chinese news agency even published a webpage dedicated specially to this event.

We keep reading in these stories, that the cold or snow is the worst in 30 to 50 years. This may friends be because 30 to 50 years ago we were in the cold phase of the PDO and much of the time the warm phase of the AMO, which is currently the case. Recall I recently did a correlation of these factors at least with the US data (I had little faith in any of the global data bases except the satellite and it only goes back to 1979) and found a good correlation of US temperatures with the multidecadal cycles.