The City of Ottawa can no longer afford to take care of their 13 Royal Swans. In a report released tomorrow, staff writes:

Staff say Ottawa can’t afford to build a winter home for the Royal Swans, with the cheapest proposal at $239-thousand.

$239,000? For a swan-coop? No wonder this city can’t balance its books.

Current coop		Proposed coop

And in other sad news, Wendell the Wallabi was found dead just 15 kilometers from the farm where he escaped a few weeks ago after a storm knocked down the fence that kept him on the property. I had known Wendell since he was a wee little baby. He was always sleeping in a sling behind the cash register of a nursery we used to go to.

These misconceptions about our climate have got to stop. The Earth’s climate is of such an enormous complexity that we can’t even begin to understand it. Sure, we have some notion of how things work in general, but there are an infinite number of variables that weigh in on the climate and on the weather pattern at any given location. Human activity, if it is a factor, is just ONE out of that infinite number.

And yet, every time a species dies, an ice floe breaks off, or on a windy day, inevitably the Climate Change (formerly: Global Warming) people come out of the woodwork and blame this one particular variable: humans. read more…