It seems our Canadian friends to the North are going to have to watch out that their "beer fridges" don't freeze the beer! It's gonna be a chilly one!
Canada's winter forecast brutal
After years of warmer-than-normal winters that spurred constant talk of global warming, winter this year is expected to be the coldest in almost 15 years and should remind everyone of what real Canadian cold feels like, Environment Canada said Friday.
With the exception of only small pockets of northern Canada and southwestern Ontario, this December through February is forecast to be one of the harshest winters in recent memory across the country, said senior climatologist David Phillips.
Time for those furry hats again (I actually want one....hint to TMEW!). As I type this here in central NH, the thermometer has already dropped below 10 degrees F and as our friend DCE over at Weekend Pundits is noticing, we're getting snow...or is that ice...or is that....heck, it's now winter - I just fired up my Vermont Castings woodstove (and Ivan, our South Rhodesian Ridgeback mutt and one of the 'Grok Furballs, has already assumed the layout position in front of it).
"It is somewhat remarkable that we're seeing the same situation from coast to coast to almost coast - from Vancouver Island to Bonavista, Nfld., we're showing the country as being colder than normal," Phillips said.
"The last time Canada had a significantly cold winter was back in 1994, more than a decade ago, and this may very well rival that one in terms of coldness."
1994 started with a bang of winter weather and Canadians across the country shivered through temperatures as cold as -42C [that's wicked cold!! At that point, degrees become irrelevant; who cares if it takes 15 minutes or 5 minutes for exposed flesh to get frostbite! -Skip] - and that was before factoring in the wind chill.
[snip]
Phillips said the forecast for cold weather is being triggered in part by La Nina, a period of lower than normal temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
Yup, and I wonder (not!) how all the global warming, enviro-wackos all want them (and the rest of us) to react. Here's one guy's take on it:
If you want to save the environment, you can do one of two things. You can just live as you do now, ignore all the scare-mongering and environmental millennarianism, and probably both you and the planet will be just fine until the end of the world — even if that is a million years from now.
Or you can start living like I do, and perhaps even fool yourself into thinking you’re making a difference. I am sitting at my desk right now, wearing a winter hat and scarf and shivering in my one-bedroom basement apartment in Washington.
Last month, my old roommate and I used 210 kWh of electricity, roughly 1/90 of Al Gore’s monthly average. And unlike the Nobel-prize-winning purveyor of environmental panic, I don’t have natural gas or heating oil. I have never owned an automobile or flown in a private plane, and I usually work from home.
I wash all of my clothes in cold water. While shopping for my groceries
online this month (and yes, that saves gasoline by consolidating deliveries), I even bought a few of those new twisty light bulbs that all the environmentalists want us to start using. I had been burning through incandescent bulbs so quickly that I was cannibalizing my light fixtures just to keep a few of the lamps on. (There’s really no need to have
three light bulbs in the same overhead fixture, is there?) My new “green” bulbs are a bit dimmer, and sometimes they freak me out by illuminating more than a full second after I flip the switch. But I don’t mind.
Why do I live like this? It’s really just because I’m cheap as hell and way too busy to care about things like “being comfortable.” I’m also from Northern Indiana, so I have no appreciation for the finer things in life.
I could instead plead environmentalism, but environmentalism is not about one’s personal life, as Al Gore’s shining example proves. Rather, it is about forcing other people to do things. I live a “green” lifestyle because I have nothing better to do. You, or even I, would object to being forced to live like this.
Yet this is precisely how environmentalists want us to live, if you take their policy proposals seriously. If we don’t live voluntarily like beggars, then their plan for us is much higher energy prices, or else massive shortages that leave us no choice. How else can one explain the Democrats’ energy bill, versions of which passed both the House and Senate earlier this year? Neither version contains new positive sources of energy. The only solution being offered is: stop using so much of it! And that isn’t even remotely possible.
The bill’s “oil savings program” would mandate reductions of 10 million barrels of oil per day below projected usage by 2031. It is not clear how this would work (rationing, higher gas taxes, etc.), but that’s a lot of oil — it’s nearly half of what we use each day currently. Despite modest progress with alternative fuels, Americans will almost certainly need more oil in 2031, when the U.S. Census Bureau projects that our population will be 9-percent larger than it is now.
[snip]
Is there a way to reduce emissions and produce more energy? There are a few hopeful signs, but just a few. The Department of Energy reports applications to build 32 new nuclear plants nationwide. There has even been some progress with wind power (although
John Kerry and
Ted Kennedy are still
resisting that wind farm off Nantucket). But there is very little new energy coming, and
Democrats in Congress want to keep it that way. It is no surprise, then that
their bill would cause $1 trillion in lost economic output over the next two decades, according to a new
study by CRA International.
Which gets me back to my lifestyle. For all of my needless austerity, I still emitted more than 3,500 kg of carbon dioxide in October (as calculated
here), almost entirely because I took two plane trips. Great Britain, in its effort to meet its Kyoto obligations, has as its goal to limit subjects to an average of just 8,000 kg of carbon dioxide
per year — and in the future they want to cut that
in half to 4,000 kg per year! There’s no way I’m going to meet that standard.
