Yesterday I decried the decision to close most mainland Nova Scotia schools, all mainland universities, and as of 1 pm, when nary a flake was yet falling in Halifax, all Nova Scotia Government offices. The post touched a nerve, and I'll be discussing the issue tonight at 6:30 with Steve Murphy on CTV-Atlantic. I was critical of school boards, Environment Canada, and the media, because all three bear responsibility for our over-reaction to routine storms—or in yesterday's case, storms that have not yet happened. The problem is much broader than storm days however, and the fault goes well beyond those three culprits. We are terrible at making personal decisions about safety and...

09 February, 2016

Here is the map meteorologist Kalin Mitchell used to tell CBC viewers how much wind they could expect during last night's storm: It's full or angry reds, purples, and scary numbers. Wow! The wind's going to be 100 kph in Cape Breton. But Mitchell isn't actually discussing wind speeds, or even maximum wind speeds. His maps shows "maximum wind gusts," the biggest, scariest number he could cite and still claim to be basing his forecast on something real. In a storm, maximum gusts are often 2 to 3 times higher than the actual wind speed. So what actually happened in Nova Scotia at the height of yesterday's storm?  Here's the...

09 February, 2016

Here is a screenshot of all 51 Nova Scotia highway cams as of 2:50 p.m., Monday, February 8, a day on which every school on mainland Nova Scotia west of Antigonish was cancelled: Only four of the 51 cams show any snow cover on the roads they monitor. Three are at the extreme southwest end of the province, where the storm was just getting underway by mid-afternoon; the fourth is in the Cape Breton Highlands. Forty-seven roads were clear; the four with light snow cover posed no problem to professional drivers of vehicles equipped with snow tires. Yet the Annapolis Valley, Chignecto-Central, Halifax, South Shore, and Tri-County regional school boards closed...

08 February, 2016

A yellow-breasted chat that somehow lost its beatings has been feeding on seeds, nuts, and jam set out by birders at Pleasant Hill Cemetery in Lower Sackville. (Photo: Joshua Barss Donham. Click to view a larger image.) The chat is North America's largest woods warbler, normally a rare summer visitor to Nova Scotia. Its usual summer range extends only as far north as southern New York state. This time of year, it should be 4,000 kms. to the southwest of Halifax, in Mexico or Central America. Wikipedia describes the chat as "a shy, skulking...

06 February, 2016

One of the many counterintuitive facts about Sydney's notorious Tar Ponds is that, in their final years, the ponds were a haven for wildlife, especially shore birds and waterfowl. Several factors made this possible. The ponds were fenced to keep people out, and keeping people out is a boon to wildlife. Until the mid-oughts mid-aughts, the ponds served as dumping ground for much of Sydney's sanitary sewage. A profusion of lush shrubs, marsh plants, and wild flowers around the ponds' edges attested to the copious influx of nutrients. While the pond sediments contained a huge volume of moderately contaminated industrial waste, the toxins they contained were mostly not water soluble. Today,...

05 February, 2016

This is a photo of the al-Kindi hospital in Aleppo, Syria, taken in 2012: Here is the same hospital photographed in 2013: The Guardian has published a series of before-and-after photos showing the toll war has taken on the old cities of Syria. Go have a look. Here is the Old Souk market in Aleppo, which Wikipedia describes as, "the largest covered historic market in the world, with an approximate length of 13 kilometres," photographed in 2007. Here's the Old Souk in 2013: We need to keep these photos in mind as we consider Canada's and Nova Scotia's role in responding to the Syrian refugee crisis. There's more. Here's a...

05 February, 2016

There are days it's hard to remember Justin Trudeau and Stephen McNeil belong to the same political party. Justin is so sunny, sunny ways; McNeil can be so Harperesque. Trudeau had not been prime minister three days when his Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development assured government scientists they were free to communicate with the media and the public—thus putting paid to the previous government's muzzling. Last Thursday, the bureaucrat in charge of the McNeil government's communications agency warned the province's civil servants to be circumspect on social media. "Some types of personal use [of social media]," wrote Tracey Taweel, "can result in discipline, up to and...

03 February, 2016

You couldn't soft-boil an egg in the time it took three senior judges of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal to dismiss Richmond County's appeal of the UARB decision trimming its council from 10 seats to five. (See previous posts here, here, and here.) So the UARB decision stands and Richmond County Council will have only five members after the October 15 election. Or will it have six? The Municipal Government Act gives the UARB final say on the number of councillors in each municipality. But an odd wrinkle in the act empowers the council itself to decide if it will have a warden elected from among its members, or a mayor...

31 January, 2016
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