hankfully, it's my second consecutive white Christmas here in Chicago. As if we don’t already have enough to worry about this time of year, the future prospect of revelling in white Christmases in northern North America may be numbered. These days, seeing snow cover in December cannot be taken for granted anymore, even here in the upper Midwest. Its presence this winter presents a tentative sense of relief, since the last few winters here have been unseasonably mild. Earlier this year, spring came in February, and trees and flowers were blooming by March. One of the most common queries I've received since my relocation from the west coast to here has been 'How's the winter there?' Well, it’s certainly not the legendary Chicago winters that I’ve heard so much about all these years. Because all my life I lived in places where the changes of seasons have been relatively mild, I was ready for dramatic seasonal metamorphoses. As a matter of fact, I was looking forward to the onset of an subarctic wonderland, punctuated by occasional tempests of dramatic blizzards and whiteouts in negative temperatures. Alas, I was greatly disappointed. A refrain I keep hearing from neighbours went along like, 'Winters here just aren't like what they used to be.' Other longtime Midwesterners have told me that it's just not that unusual to be shovelling snow by Halloween. Within less than a generation, the winter season seem to have shortened by more than a month. I don't think it's mere coincidence that we in the northern hemisphere have been experiencing increasingly horrendous summer heat waves and record high temperatures in recent years. In our age of tangible global warming, imagine what our world would become in another fifty years.

peaking of global warming (some media outlets and various members of the Bush Administration have started to use the more innocuously equivocal phrase of 'climate change'), it angers me that as North Americans, we have collectively essentially ruined the planet for the rest of the world, by simply being the greatest contributors of emissions (e.g., 25% of the world's emission of carbon dioxide by less than 5% of the global population) that cause the greenhouse effect. Not only have our nation's energy policies worsened the lives of billions around the world ('Hey, who took our winters away?!'), but we have also destroyed the earth as we know it for future generations to come. We have failed as custodians of the planet, and most North Americans don't really seem to mind-- especially when judging by their actions. They continue to drive enormous cars everwhere. They even deprive their fat kids of their exercise by driving them from their enormous homes to their schools and back. It's a bit like rearranging deck chairs on a sinking, polluting cruise ship. More immediately egregious, they have managed to put twice into office the man Ken Livingstone once called 'the greatest threat to life on this planet.' It's not much better elsewhere in the developed world.

George W. Bush knows that the majority of the North American public couldn't care less about Kyoto, and he took the politically expedient course of action. In denial of this ultimately self-destructive addiction to fossil fuels, nobody can really be bothered with even the near future. Would enormous barriers, dykes, and levees be built quickly enough to protect coastal settlements against rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms? The glaciers are quickly receding. Seals and marine mammals are beaching themselves. Black bears are increasingly seeking food in human neighbourhoods. Polar bears are drowning. Rainstorms and floods are becoming stronger than ever, while droughts plagued the planet more than ever before. Countless species and their habitats are threatened. Understandably, Thom Yorke is circling the drain. All these are just tip of a shrinking iceberg. Rising sea levels have already forced communities living on low-lying Pacific atolls for millennia to abandon their villages. Arctic communities whose lives are dependent upon the seasonal cycles of ice formation in the seas for hunting and travel between communities are struggling with decreasing periods of having reliable ice formation. Yet up until now, none of these people have contributed much to greenhouse gases. They have been generally innocent. Why should we as North Americans destroy their lives when they haven't touched ours? Global warming is not just a debatable theory as American mainstream media would have you believe; it's already a painful reality for millions right now. With our wasteful consumption of fossil fuels and energy in general, most of us, American soccer moms as well as our myopic leader, somehow doesn't think that we have any responsibility to curb the alarming trends. Is it greed? Is it selfishness? Simple mean-spiritedness? Mere stupidity and short-sightedness? Pathological inability to see beyond a few months from now? Human nature? Does it all even matter since the Rapture will take everyone away?

t's probably all of the above. Judging from disheartening headlines, it seems that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress are doing their darndest to make sure that everyone in the northern hemisphere will experience the kind of weather that he's used to down in Texas. Call it 'George Bush weather.' It seems that in my lifetime, kids will start asking their parents, 'What’s a white Christmas?' You know whom to thank.

25 December 2004