Christmas break

I will be heading up north for the Christmas season again this year starting next week.  Blog posts will probably still happen but they will likely be sporadic in frequency.

I posted this before but it deserves a repeat; it is by far my favourite Christmas song.



I have in the past been called 'a cold blooded snake' due to my resistance to emotional scenes but every time I watch this video it makes me cry like a baby.  Something about the way he sings

I'll be seeing my dad,
my brother, my sister my gran and my mom,

just tears me up.

In other Christmas news the Canadian government gave the world a dubious Christmas present by officially pulling out of the Kyoto accord.  Canada was utterly failing at its Kyoto commitments and was going to have to fork over ~$9 billion to make it up in carbon credits.  That is actually a really large sum for our budget and the government obviously didn't want to either have to slash services, raise taxes or engage in even more deficit spending.  Not that this excuses their behaviour as they could have just done the right thing and lived up to their commitments instead but when you elect right wing folks on a platform of bigger jails and more weapons you get what you ask for; we asked for incarceration and destruction instead of conservation.  This map from wikipedia shows countries in the world by agreement on Kyoto and paints a pretty sad picture of my chunk of the world.

And that right there is one of my biggest sources of pessimism on the world's ability to prevent climate change.  The dark green countries are trying but mostly failing to keep to their commitments, light green ones are actively increasing emissions with no binding restrictions and orange and red countries have refused to be involved.

Picture from Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_protocol