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TAKING PIANO lessons can open new lifestyle doors beyond discovering that adults can still learn how to play the ‘mother of all instruments.’
IT’S A NEW season but a road game loss against the Vancouver Island Raiders offered a familiar lesson for the Okanagan Sun.
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TUESDAY September 10, 2013 The Central Okanagan’s Best-Read Newspaper www.kelownacapnews.com
Unpredictable weather is the new normal Judie Steeves STAFF REPORTER
Just hours after a one-in-10-year heavy rainfall hit the Kelowna area last Friday morning, a world-renowned expert on water and climate policy, Bob Sandford, told those at the annual general meeting of the Okanagan Basin Water Board such extreme weather events are now the norm. “A warmer atmosphere can hold more water so storm water systems must be designed for a new normal,” he said. “Major flooding events are increasing.” Current infrastructure was designed for an earlier time; a time when less extreme weather events were considered extreme and were rare, he said. “The past is not a guide for the future,” he added. “We need to manage water in a disastrously changing west.” A resident of Canmore, Alta., Sandford witBob Sandford nessed this June’s flooding of that city, Calgary and High River due to a combination of heavy, prolonged rain and snowmelt. He says climate change is melting polar ice at an unprecedented rate, making the jet stream erratic, and de-stabilizing normal weather patterns around the world, rather than simply warming the planet. “You must learn from Alberta’s experience. Clearly no one is prepared. They’re using 20-year-old flood maps which are no longer relevant,” he warned. Everyone must become involved in adding resiliency to our hydrologic systems, he said. He suggested enlisting nature to help, by protecting and restoring all aquatic ecosystems wherever possible and respecting them in the future. “We have to break out of our water and energy waste cycles. We don’t have unlimited time to act,” he warned. He had lavish praise for the OBWB, which he said is doing great work in this region in support of enhancing resiliency in the Canadian hydrological cycle. Unfortunately, he said when there are budget cuts, monitoring is reduced, so the data is no longer available for relevant forecasting models.
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CANVASSER Tiffany Walsh (right) discusses the campaign to decriminalize marijuana in B.C. with Adam Turner and Shyla Cornish in downtown Kelowna on Monday.
▼ LEGALIZE MARIJUANA
Petition campaign strikes up signatures Alistair Waters ASSISTANT EDITOR
A province-wide petition initiative, similar to the one that resulted in the referendum that scrapped B.C.’s former Harmonized Sales Tax, has started. And names are now being collected in Kelowna. Local representatives of Sens-
ible BC, the organization spearheading the initiative to have a referendum held calling for a ban on the use of police resources to enforce simple possession of, and use of, marijuana by adults in B.C., started collecting signatures in downtown Kelowna on Monday. Local spokesman Mark Conlin was at the W.A.C. Bennett
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Clock on Queensway Monday afternoon collecting signatures. “The use of Bennett Clock as a backdrop highlights our firm belief that its time to bring a sensible change to our cannabis laws in B.C.,” he said. “With the outright legalization, just south of us in Washington State, we are losing out on a huge windfall revenue potential 1
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of this pre-existing industry. Instead we’re leaving it to organized crime. We need to change this now.” He said local volunteer canvassers will be located at various locations throughout the Central Okanagan’s three provincial ridings.
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