Finishing 2007 in the not-so-Great, not-so White North

It is with a great amount of phlegm and hacking that I greet the New Year, but that is a personal matter unrelated to international affairs. This Xmas Holiday I found out that if you travel for days to get to the arctic in December, you can now find an absence of winter unknown to any of my ancestors from those climes. It is warmer up there, and strangely enough more extreme because all of this warmer air and water makes the winds blow absolutely out of control. I also found out that the old arctic communities of Scandinavia are dying out (after a thousand years of history) to be replaced by a combination of summer vacation resorts and offshore oil pumping stations.

One day up there, my cousin took me hiking to a small town I used to visit as a child. It was now abandoned. It's church, school, houses, and shops were perfectly intact...only there was no one there and all the windows had been boarded. In the twilight that is an arctic December noon, and with a howling wind, I shivered not from cold but from imagining much more of the world looking just like this some day.

So the world looked strange from its top this Xmas.