Cheers: to wetlands. Wednesday brought a sudden downpour from the remains of a storm named Gordon, with St. John’s having the rainiest Sept. 12 since records started being kept in 1874. (It was also the city’s wettest day since May 30.) In all, 59 mm of rain fell, most of it in a window of about an hour or so. (Bay Roberts saw 73.8 mm.) And as one social media user put it, “So grateful for Lundrigan’s Marsh, Penney Cres Wetland and Pippy Park in East End of St. John’s as I drove east-west and back again in rain.” Too often, wetlands are seen as wasted opportunities for development, when in reality they are crucial parts of natural flood control, especially as more and more ground is covered with pavement. You never know when you’re going to need a sponge.
Cheers: to a wonderful summer. Hot, with unusually long strings of sunny days — only June was truly grey, cold and disappointing. But …
Jeers: to ocean warming around the province. Fisheries scientists saw ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Region this year climb to higher levels than they’ve seen in the last 20 years. “The (surface) temperature is progressively getting warmer and warmer, and also the warm area has been moving northward from the Gulf of Maine to the Scotian Shelf to the Newfoundland Shelf,” DFO scientist Dave Hebert told the CBC. “What’s amazing is you can see the progression. It’s now all the way over to Newfoundland.” And it’s not just a single year event: the U.S. Northeast Fisheries Science Center reported in late August that, “Surface and bottom water temperatures collected over time indicate that a significant, sudden and persistent change, called a regime shift, may have occurred in Gulf of Maine water temperatures, with the last eight years the warmest in the time series by a wide margin.” In case you didn’t know it already, those rising temperatures spell trouble for the fishing industry: fish species live within particular temperature ranges, and move or disappear if conditions aren’t right for them.
Jeers: to cannabis and its effect on … your vacation. A top U.S. customs official says that people who work in or finance business in the cannabis industry may find themselves banned from entering the United States — for life. Regardless of Canadian legalization, “We don’t recognize that as a legal business,” said Todd Owen, executive assistant commissioner for the office of field operations for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency. Remember those occasional stories about unsuspecting Canadians having sealskin products seized when they crossed the U.S. border? Just imagine how many people are going to run afoul of drug prohibitions, one way or another, once cannabis is legal here.
