Northwest Passage.

I had to pick a new radio station to wake up to and for some reason, it seemed to be a good idea at the time, I picked the NPR station. I guess I was hoping to wake up to classical music, instead I wake up to NPR news. (Music doesn't start until 9:00am) I had forgotten how bad it was. Some of it is just what news they decide to share with us, which is slanted at best. Then there is the political news, which is hard for me to stomach any time, and is so biased as to almost be propaganda instead of news. My favorite stories, however, have been a couple about the sliver of a waterway that has been gradually opening up in the Canadian Arctic.
Arctic Warming Unlocking A Fabled Waterway by Jackie Northam
This was the first I heard, but the one that stuck with me. I heard more this morning. Apparently, the fabled Northwest Passage is coming into being and governments are already starting to worry about this, and who is going to control it, regulate it and how the region can be commercially exploited even though it is still "Bloody fucking cold" up there all the time, and super hard to get oil and gas out of frozen ground. Really? This is what you think is news? They choose to run stories about about a sliver of water no one can get a boat that's not an ice-breaker through at the present, for maybe a month or two a year before it freezes back up? Had these guys been around, they would have bemoaned the melting of the glaciers that dug out the great lakes, or uncovered New England.
Then again, it does fits into their narrative. It is an illustration, a "hard fact" if you will, of "Global Warming," sorry "climate change" my friends now say, sort of like all the pictures you see of Polar bears stranded on ice floes. They even had a guy on, an expert don't ya know, talking about, how on this year's trip to the Arctic the ice looked the same, but it felt different than last year. It had a different texture. It was softer ice, warmer ice. I had to wonder. Did it come in different flavors too? Snow Cone anyone? Was it grape, instead of blue raspberry? I may leave the station on just so I know what my liberal friends are listening to, or for the entertainment value, if I can stomach the political coverage. Their interview with Barney Frank nearly made me sick to my stomach. Besides, I really want to keep up with this Northwest Passage thing. The season could get longer this decade. Or the ice texture could change some more. Besides we really need to settle who is going to have the controlling presence in the region. Apparently, everyone except Canada thinks it should be international waters. Silly Canada. This is why I find it so amusing. No one contested the water before. Everyone was happy to let Canada have the water when it was frozen. Now that it's melting, everyone wants it. It isn't the Panama Canal folks, not yet anyway. The U.S. of course is needed to be a stabilizing influence in the region. Yeah, we all know how hostile and combative those Canadians are. But, I guess since we all know the science is settled, every shipping company in the world is sure that someday it will be like the Panama Canal, open year round and big enough to haul many tankers through. I guess it is pretty, but not pretty enough for me to want to take an ice-breaker cruise.
You know, ice melts, it can freeze again too. Just ask those Alpine villagers whose villages are now being uncovered by retreating glaciers, or those Norse in Greenland who had to abandon their settlements when the ice encroached. Oh, did I forget to mention, they are fighting over Greenland again. It's warming up as well. Ah me, I think I'll go see if I can find some pictures of that snow in Auckland.