I just took my dog for a walk on yet another perfect Island day. As I said a couple of days ago in “Timewarp buzz,” the weather here is so even and temperate that it seems almost to make life cartoonish: thrills and chills are suspended, then banished to another place — it’s all just breezes and flowers. However, I’m not a complete ostrich, I read the news, and I see that our global climate is going crazy. Even here. In British Columbia’s forests it is so dry that major out-of-control fires threatened population centres and caused evacuations. Think of it: BC forests without rain. Meanwhile, on the Eastern part of this continent, rain is out of control — I keep reading in various blogs about all the rain back East. It has caused flash floods that wreak economic havoc: in Quebec, recovery is expected to cost $7mil. In Europe, heat waves are killing people, and forest fires rage out of control in Portugal. French and German nuclear reactors are shutting down, in part because their water is too hot to release into rivers. Spain warns that the price of poultry will rise because the heat increases the maturation time of the chicks. (In those lovely factory hatcheries. Imagine smouldering in a heat wave with your beak hacked off and no space to turn around in.) Fires blaze in Brandenburg and forests are closed to the public. Tourists are cooking in Paris. (Maybe the supermarkets should sell the tourists and let the hatchery chicks loose?) We’re seeing desertification. England is going to see its hottest temperatures ever, breaking a previous record set in 1990. Finns are too hot.
But naturally we need more study of the matter before we implement any pinko-weirdo-voodoo Kyoto Protocols.
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