Calgary locked in a deep freeze

Our high was reached early this morning near midnight at -14, and the temperature will remain around -23 for the rest of the day.

With the wind chill though, the temperature will feel more in the range of -35 to -40.

Richard Hopwood: Cold snaps, hot air and some inconvenient climate truths - Yorkshire Post

Indeed, if there is any hope, it seems to lie with the more pragmatic European nations, such as Poland and Italy, who are urging fellow member-states to abandon plans for massive EU-wide carbon reductions on the quite reasonable grounds that now is not the time to pile costs amounting to trillions of euros on to Europe's
hard-pressed economies.

Of course, these nations are not acting without self-interest– Poland relies on coal for 95 per cent of its electricity. Which means not only that 10,000 delegates arrived at the Poznan climate-change conference from 192 countries on carbon-spewing air transport, but also that they were protected from the freezing Polish winter by a fuel most of them would outlaw.

Berlusconi hails EU climate deal

The new deal accommodates two Italian demands that Foreign Minister Franco Frattini described as deal-breakers earlier this week.

In one new clause, the entire climate package will be reviewed in March 2010 after the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 in order to ensure Europe is not isolated, and therefore penalised economically, in its fight against climate change.

In a second major concession to Italy, the Italian manufacturing sector will receive free 'polluting permits' when European industries and companies have to start 'paying to pollute' via an auction system in 2013.