Heatmiser's coming to town...actually it's El Niño
"I'm Mister 'Green Christmas'. I'm Mister 'Sun'." (Credit: Rankin and Bass Productions)
I was out and about yesterday and my goodness it was warm. It got me thinking of having a 'Green Christmas' rather than a 'White Christmas' and that inevitably made me think of Heatmiser from Rankin and Bass' stop-motion Christmas Special "The Year without a Santa Claus".
My 'Star Wars' confession
I have a confession to make. I watched the original Star Wars movies for the first time last Christmas. I had seen them; they were on TV all the time when I was a kid. But I never sat down and intentionally watched them from start to finish. I remembered snippets: Han cutting open the tauntaun on Hoth, Leia killing Jabba the Hut with her slave-chain, the Ewoks celebrating in their arboreal town. I remembered R2-D2 and C-3PO. But the scenes were all jumbled together and in the wrong places and the wrong order.
My partner, B, was horrified when I admitted that I hadn't seen the films, so he went out and bought the DVDs, and we watched them on Christmas Day.
I was delighted by the movies. I grew up with Star Trek (with Picard), and I was used to clean, uniformed officers. I liked the grittiness of Star Wars compared to Star Trek. I marveled at the range of alien races and the breadth of landscapes. From dry, dusty lands to icy wastes to lush temperate rainforests. I'm glad I got a chance to watch the originals all in one go. The story was exhilarating, and I had loads of fun.
Precarious Ecological Moment
Image Credit: Public Domain Image from- A monograph of the Hirundinidae: or family of...
Saturday Morning Cartoons: Birds, Dinos and Climate Change
Image Credit: By The Photographer (Own work) , via Wikimedia Commons
This week in Saturday Morning Cartoons, we've got traveling birds, roaring dinos and the perils of climate change.
While COP21 was happening in Paris, scientists kept churning out climate change research
The UN Conference on Climate Change ran from November 30th to December 11th, 2015.
With United Nations Conference on Climate Change drawing to a close, I wanted to compile a round-up of the climate change news released since the start of the conference.
Before I begin with the news, I found a few non-news related tidbits about the conference. I found this map of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). It provides insight into the various climate regimes within the convention. I also found this article about climate activism and what drives climate change efforts . And finally, this report came out of COP21, and it describes the benefits and trade-offs of low-carbon energy (for the full report, click here).