Scotland’s weather: Springtime shivers as Arctic snap to continue - Scotland - Scotsman.com

SCOTLAND was hit by sub-zero temperatures and parts of the Highlands were blanketed with snow as winter returned at the weekend, with forecasters predicting the cold snap will continue through the week.

Overnight temperatures fell to as low as -5.5C at Kinbrace near Wick in the early hours of yesterday, and -4C in Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire.

Ontario - Bloom is off after deadly frost

ANCASTER Some local fruit farms have been wiped out by a devastating cold snap that threatens to drastically cut the harvest and bump up prices across the province.

Climate sceptic ad backfires

Canadian writer Donna Lamframboise — author of a critical book on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — withdrew from the conference, saying her reputation had been harmed. "Being collateral damage in someone else's ongoing marketing experiments isn't my idea of a good time," she said in a blog post.

And economist and climate sceptic Ross McKitrick called the ad "fallacious, juvenile and inflammatory".

But prominent Australian sceptic Bob Carter, an adjunct professor at Townsville's James Cook University and an adviser to the Heartland Institute, said that while he would have cautioned against such a provocative billboard if asked, he now felt that advice would have been wrong.

He said the reaction to the ad from the "the usual 'liberal' media sources" had been "amazing, immediate and over-the-top", and that he would still speak at the conference.

"The complete failure of the liberal media to apprise their own hypocrisy on the issue is simply amazing," he told The Age.

"The mainstream media resolutely ignore the many press releases from Heartland ... that are concerned with sober assessments of the science of climate change, are perfectly happy to bandy around words like deniers, criminals and worse as applied to independent scientists, yet have a fainting fit when someone applies that technique to their own beliefs."

BusinessDay - CRISPIAN OLVER: Africa at cutting edge in carbon markets

Carbon credits have declined in value by about 70% since January 2008, with the current price of carbon credits at an all-time low of less than €4 per ton of CO². This is far below the level experts believe is required to drive the investment needed to combat climate change.