Sunday, December 16, 2007


Another month gone by. Sint is back to Spain and Christmas is upon us. Getting the tree in today and needing no excuse to drink port of an afternoon. Outside the grachts and sloten are frozen over after our first decent night's freeze in a year. Cautious mumblings of White Christmases and Elfstedentocht are being kept under wraps.
I'm even reasonably optimistic that we'll manage to score that Wii for the kids for Christmas...

In the world outside there has been a Climate Change agreement to act. It was vague and wishy washy of course, but there was at least an agreement, even from the US. Mind you, if all the delegates had agreed not to travel all the way round the world to Bali, that might have saved some exhaust gases. Cheeky buggers - ever since Kyoto they seem to have been determined not to go to some poxy little industrial city again. "We did Rio last time, how about Bali this year?"
Surprisingly, the Northern hemisphere is pretty wintry right now. After last year's non-winter, everyone got scared, and there's the worry now that the North Pole will be ice free in summer in just 5 years. I think that's probably overly scaremongering, and came as a result of the very hot year we had between October 06 and September 07. If anything, feedback loops and chaos theory would tend to suggest we may well go the other way for a period - and it wouldn't surprise me to see a very cold event. Certainly the US is getting hammered with ice storms and blizzards, the Alps have had very early snow and the Mediterranean is getting alot of snow too.
I just hope that doesn't breed complacency.

Right. Gonna read the papers...