Global Warming!

This article is for everyone except a bunch of people in Nova Scotia, because;

a) They already know they don't have power, and

b) They can't read this anyway! (no power)

Just under 5,000 Nova Scotia Power customers were waiting for the power to come back on Tuesday morning, after a winter storm battered the Maritimes Monday.

Most of those lost their power in windy conditions overnight. But about 35 customers in the Digby area have been waiting for their electricity to be restored since Monday.

By 7 a.m. crews had reduced the total number of outages to below 2,000.

Nova Scotia Power said crews should be able to restore power to everyone later on Tuesday morning.

A handful of flights were cancelled at Halifax Stanfield International Airport. Regional flights from St. John's, Saint John and Moncton did not arrive. A flight from Newark was also cancelled.

Some flights to New York, Newark and Philadelphia were also cancelled Tuesday morning.

Greenwood received the most snow Monday with 22 centimetres falling. The highest wind gusts were at Grand Etang in western Cape Breton, clocking in at 152 kilometres per hour.

Both Shearwater and Ingonish Beach recorded 59 millimetres of rain.

(Need I remind you of the 130 cm of snow we got here in London two weeks ago! -Ed.)

AND AS IF THAT WASN'T ENOUGH!

With all the white stuff and nasty weather we have been putting up with over the past several weeks, I know a lot of people don't consider the amount of ice polar bears need to live as being very high on their list of important things, but it seems all is not lost for the polar bear, despite the rapid melt of Arctic sea ice that they need to survive, researchers reported Wednesday.

Contrary to pessimistic assertions that polar bears are doomed because summer sea ice has melted past the point of no return, a new study concludes that significant curbs in carbon emissions would effectively cool the planet, rebuild ice and save the Arctic habitat and the bears in it.

“This is very much scientific evidence that there is hope,” said Steve Amstrup, a retired U.S. Geological Survey polar bear expert who led the study published in the journal Nature.

“If people think that there’s nothing they can do, they will do nothing. Here we’ve demonstrated that we can conserve polar bears. If we can do that, it has much broader ramifications.”

Polar bears have become a symbol of climate change fears because they depend on vast stretches of year-round sea ice that has become scarce in summer and fall months.

Warming trends are amplified in the polar regions, largely because of a self-reinforcing “albedo” effect that accelerates the impacts of solar heat as reflective white snow and ice are replaced by dark water surfaces and landscapes.

Amstrup was part of a team that concluded in 2007 that two-thirds of the world’s 22,000 polar bears — including all those in Alaska — would likely vanish by mid-century if current carbon and warming trends continued.

While that prediction remains valid, the new study found that ice conditions have not gotten so bad that they cannot be repaired, Amstrup said in a telephone interview.

“Our results seem to be pretty conclusive that there doesn’t seem to be a tipping point in summer sea ice,” said Amstrup.

Amstrup’s team used mathematical models, checked against real-world data about polar bear populations and summer Arctic ice trends, for their report.

They also considered the slight rebuilding of summer ice pack after 2007, the year ice coverage reached its lowest point since satellite records began in 1979.

“What we projected in 2007 was based solely on the business-as-usual greenhouse gas scenario,” Amstrup said.

For a scenario in which polar bear populations are likely to remain in place through the century, the study assumes global atmospheric carbon levels stabilizing at 450 parts per million.

Currently, atmospheric carbon levels are at about 388 parts per million, according to the most recent information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Observatory.

Under present trends, atmospheric carbon levels are expected to reach or exceed 700 parts per million by the end of the century.

Ensuring that global carbon levels are no more than 450 parts per million by century’s end would require aggressive actions, said one environmentalist involved in climate and polar-bear conservation issues.

“It’s very daunting, but within the realm of possibility,” said Brendan Cummings, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity.

By QMI Agency