G-g-g-lobal warming.

Boy, it's a good thing global warming is now an undisputed reality. Otherwise I'd be a Kensicle right about now.
Temperature: -17, a shade above zero on the old scale. Windchill is currently -27 and it'll get colder overnight.
For you Nunavutians and Saskatoonies this sort of thing is referred to as "balmy". Here in Southern Ontario, not so much. There are blizzard warnings a couple of hours north of us, snowsquall warnings all around us, but we just have this wind chill warning. For once, Environment Canada's warnings are justified: the news tells me snowplows have been taken off the road up north on account of their operators can't even see their own plow blades.
A watermain on our street broke today...the second time in about eight weeks. Along came a plow and sloshed all that water into the snow at the bottom of our driveway. I was out there almost immediately to shovel, but almost immediately was far too late: by some weird alchemy the snow had turned to something approaching the hardness of the concrete beneath it. The best I was able to do was to level out the driveway somewhat. Sigh.
So: global warming. Or more properly, given the frigidity gripping much of the second-largest country on the planet, "climate change". According to the report issued in Paris last week, it's real, we're responsible...and most alarmingly, it's unstoppable. We're past the pivot point: no matter what we do now, temperatures will continue to increase for centuries.
Nice to know they can predict climate over centuries and still can't even guess what next month's weather has in store.
Oh, I'm not disputing their conclusions. I'd still like to think that most scientists are objective and impartial enough to have arrived at the correct proofs without concern for such things as funding. But I do object to the sudden politimedihysteria, not least because problems "solved" hysterically never remain solved for long. It calls to mind a song by the Canadian group the Arrogant Worms:

Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw
Malcolm soves his problems with a chainsaw
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw
And he never has the same problem twice.

Everybody on Parliament Hill is trying to outgreen each other. Normally I'd suggest this is a good thing, as politicians rarely take any notice of anything environmental. But concentrating on greenhouse gas emissions, when Canada--globally speaking--provides a mere two percent of same and the country immediately to our south, which leads the world in emissions, has no intention of reducing theirs, makes little to no sense. And speak to me not of Kyoto, which Harper rightly called a socialist wealth redistribution scheme. What else can it be, since the developing world can utterly disregard it without penalty? And never mind the craziness of classifying China, on the verge of becoming the world's largest economy, as a "developing" nation.
If we're going to get serious about greenhouse gas emissions, we should all get serious, from America to Zimbabwe. Any development in the Third World should be as green as the First World can help make it. And while we're at it, we should substiantially green what used to be called the Second World--the countries that used to be under the Soviet sphere of influence (and will be again, the paranoid in me insists on adding).

But I remain firmly convinced that, while greenhouse gas emissions are indeed a problem, they aren't the chief environmental problem facing the world today--no matter how many headlines I read.
You don't see much about air pollution any more, do you? Or water pollution, or deforestation, or desertification, or soil erosion, or any other sort of pollution that isn't green house gas emission. What, did we clean all that up while I wasn't looking? Didn't think so. Is any of it somehow less of a problem? Don't think so. But the Kyoto Protocol doesn't even mention any of these used-to-be-pressing concerns. Why is that, I wonder?