Not so happy new year weather news from UK

Some depressing New Year weather news from U.K. reported in the Daily Star by Victoria Richards:

The coldest December for a decade has claimed seven victims in the past few days.

Three people died in avalanches, three were killed on icy roads and a woman in her 40s died when her car plunged into a pond in Horton, near Bristol, on Wednesday.

And the body of Adam Passfield, 22, who had been missing for a week, was pulled from the River Chelmer in Chelmsford on Wednesday.

In Scarborough a woman and her two-year-old child were knocked over and washed onto a busy road after a freak wave hit a sea wall. Forecasters are warning that the cold snap will tighten its grip into 2010.

I was particularly alerted by the last paragraph where a freaque wave does not wash people out to sea but washed them "onto a busy road". Freaque wave even happens in "coldest" weather. A wave can hit and over the top of a sea wall is probably a freaque wave in the usual sense. Again no one really knows what was really happening. But in the coldest December for a decade and they had that big hoopla in Copenhagen about global warming. Scientific creditability, anyone?