Last week's heavy weather (with more to come in the next few days) is a healthy reminder that winter storms can be as severe as those that strike in the more notorious hurricane season.

Two things stand out. One is that this is surely one of the worst winters Bermuda has experienced in several years in terms of sustained storms and cold.

The cause of this could be that it is just one of those years (and perhaps El Nino in the Pacific has something to do with it too) but it also fits into a pattern of more extreme weather around the world.

Bermuda's weather is a result of the horrendous winter weather being experienced on the US East Coast, but Western Europe had near record snow last month, Asia is reportedly blanketed in snow, and in Sydney, Australia where it is summer, record floods are being reported.

Climate change sceptics might well take the frigid temperatures as more proof of the unravelling of the grand conspiracy of scientists and environmentalists to defraud the world over global warming. But it is equally possible that climate change tends to contribute to more extreme weather, with winters that are either unseasonably warm or unseasonable cold and so on.

With regard to climate change, Bermuda simply cannot take the chance that the world's scientists are wrong.

More locally, it seems clear that the Island's responses to bad weather continues to be uneven. This is especially true of the Causeway, where the closure policy put in place after four people died there in Hurricane Fabian has the potential to cause havoc for individuals. Many East End residents feel that not enough attention is paid to where the prevailing wind is coming from before closing the Causeway.

At the same time, the Emergency Measures Organisation needs to do more to keep up with the times.

If people were actually able to find the EMO website (and good luck doing that through the Government portal), they would have found information relating to Hurricane Bill last August and a list of airlines that still includes the now-defunct Zoom.

Of course, the Government website's home page did post some news releases, but overall, this isn't really good enough.

When the EMO holds its post-mortem on the recent storms, it needs to look at these questions in detail.

Shelved report

The Bermuda First Report got its day in Parliament on Friday when MPs debated the controversial report.

But the debate was overshadowed by Immigration Minister Sen. David Burch's criticism days earlier when he said the report's authors had never bothered to interview him or his Ministry before making sweeping recommendations for changes to Immigration laws.

That does seem to be an astonishing omission, made more so by the fact that one of the report's co-chairman was the Premier, who might have been concerned by the fact that one of his key Ministers was ignored.

That fact, unfortunately, will go a long way to reinforcing the notion that this report was never anything more than a very expensive paper exercise. No doubt it will now join its many predecessors of the last 40 or so years to moulder on a shelf in the Government Archives.

That's a shame, because although the report was never going to justify its price tag, there were some good ideas in it which would have gone some way to reversing the economy's downward trend, and at least deserved more discussion than the rather disconnected debate it received in the House.

Instead, Bermuda's economy seems certain to continue its inexorable decline.