I am told that "ful" and "qaqocc" are readily available at Maltese greengrocers. That should come as no surprise - you would not expect them to sell beans and artichokes at the bookstore would you? Yeah sure. The only problem is that "ful" and "qaqocc" are normally to be seen around Easter. They are both eagerly awaited products which flourish in the Maltese and Gozitan countryside around April. Only thing is that we are in January. This should be the month of freeze and cold... no?
Apparently Malta has shifted from Autumn to Spring without so much as a Winter Sneeze. The jackets and pullovers will stay put together with the "bocci tal-kamla" awaiting another winter that may never come. The sun is out, the sea is relatively calm and there are no cold cold days of bone rattling humid cold.
Which could be cool. Only there are some other signs that are slightly worrying. I had packed enough to survive an expedition to the North Pole when I left for New York. I had been told that Christmas and New Year in the Big Apple are generally on the freezing and snowy side. My ski tops stayed in the suitcase and I got no chance to show off their skin tight qualities. Naaah. Instead we got the hottest December in New York since 1887. Still not worried? How about the snow and ice that froze wine fields around Los Angeles, California two days ago? Another freak event?
Seriously. I am normally the last one to listen to all the treehuggers warnings about dying wood, expanding holes and the general warming of the planet. I must confess that until this winter my attention span when it came to talking to Gaia's ills was not exactly up to scratch. Somehow it is difficult to listen to a round bespectacled hippy with an eco-sack strapped around his shoulder and the tell tale signs of cannabis consumption. It does not exactly convince me.
But no snow in Luxembourg and summer in December in Malta?
Somehow the phrase "Global Warning" does not seem to be so much of a funny pun anymore.
P.S. Notwithstanding the accompanying image I have NOT yet viewed Gore's documentary. This post was inspired by real, tangible events and not by any green propaganda machine.
5 commentaires:
Although I'm not a weather forecaster, the current weather conditions seem to be consistent with what would be expected in an El Nino year:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2753.htm
A couple of weeks ago I was watching a daytime programme on Rai and the guests were three military meteorologists.
Contrary to all the self-guilt that we constantly hear on the issue, they said that even if our toxic gases weren't contributing to the greenhouse effect, our planet would still be warming up on its own.
These cycles are apparently perfectly natural. They are hard to notice simply because it takes a couple of tens of thousands of years to transition from one state to another; well beyond our lifespan.
I mean, how would you explain the cause of ice ages that happened thousands of years ago? Humans (if they existed, and certainly without any industrial facilities) producing large amounts of liquid nitrogen to effectively cool the whole planet?
Nature has its own agenda, and some things are better left to their own ways.
Next thing we know is idiots claiming the whole global warming issue is a punishment by God/Allah/Whoever for whatever "sin" mankind has committed. What is sad is that such claims always surface whenever the human race tries to find an explanation to issues which it was never really meant to understand.
Carpe diem.
The biggest mistake the climate change movement made is calling it 'global warming'. That's why scientists aren't marketers (it's obvious, I assume, why the opposite isn't true).
Kenneth: There's a near-unilateral scientific consensus that humanity has rapidly accelerated the natural warming and cooling cycles of the earth. I'm not going to lay out the details of the argument here--Al Gore's film is an excellent introduction. If you watch that and remain convinced that the cycles are totally natural, then all power to you.
If you'll permit me a plug, one of my clients runs a climate change website: www.desmogblog.com.
If we have rapidly accelerated the cycles I cannot tell -- not having seen the film and lacking any knowledge on the subject beyond the very basics -- but the general belief is not that we are accelerating the process, but that we have caused it in the first place.
According to those meteorologists I mentioned, the latter is not the case but I stand to be corrected.
There is a consensus on the issue. Not a near-consensus. The idea that global warming is indeed happening and that humans are causing it has never been disputed by any scientist in a peer reviewed publications. What we have is the energy lobby paying pseudo sientist to exploit people's doubts on the issue and try to sell the idea that this is still up for debate. In fact that's what their PR depts did. They found out the loopholes in people's thoughts about the issue and exploited them, putting question marks etc.
Check out http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?page=news&newsid=12592
There is also an interesting site, which i don't have a link for, that exposes GW deniers for who they really are, revealing who finances them...
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