Great Weather !!!

Publié le 10 novembre 2006 par Matt

Article en Francais ici !!

(Article written in French the 1^st week of October)

Hi there !!

Some more news about Matt. And a little bit more than only about Matt…

I had a nice Australian Weekend last week. Spring has sttled in Sydney and it’s really enjoyable and nice. The local weather is definitively the best ally of the huge quantity of beaches Sydney has… We can also feel that Summer is going to be very hot; at some moments of the day when sun is right in the middle of the sky (it would be around midday then…), temperatures are rising quickly and the atmosphere is quiet suffocating. At The Same Time, Planet Earth is warming up… And since I’m talking about temperatures, we can talk about it a bit more… The amount of scientists agreeing on the fact that we have a huge responsibility towards the recent Global Warming of our planet doesn’t really leave space for doubts… And it’s neither a good think for Earth, nor for us…

My week was starting rather gloriously because I got married on Monday. A fake wedding, I have to admit that but it was still a wedding. Bianca a good friend who’s leaving for 3 months in Kenya was the lovely bride… She wanted to arrive there as a married woman; they say it’s safer because of some weird story of Masai warriors getting married with white wives…;) (Watch the movie “ The White Massai”) More seriously (or maybe not…), I focused on figuring out about my trip to Aouth America… Where to go? What to do? How much money will it cost? How much do I have? I was dreaming about a journey from Buenos Aires through South America, Central America and ending in Martinique or Guadeloupe… At The Same Time, Polar bears are threatened more and more, as their homeland, the Inlandsis or Ice Sheet is melting. American director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), James Hansen released an article about this melting last month. It’s very interesting and unfortunately, very scary as well…

Wednesday was a very happy day for me… Even more than Monday and the wedding. After weeks trying to do a bit of exercise, I did it!!! I went to the swimming pool for 45 mn and then half an hour of sauna… It felt really good, and since I had the feeling I was getting a bit chubby, it was useful! Especially for my little receptionist… (She’s coming later on in the post…) At The Same Time, the Typhoon named Xangsane was killing 76 persons in the Philippines and making it’s way to Vietnam (Update: more than 80 death in the Philippines, at least 30 in Vietnam and some very costly damages on infrastructures in both countries…). Cyclones and Typhoons are hitting our planet more often than ever before, especially in some areas (South East Asia, Central America); flooding in Tropical regions and drastic drought in others are some more signs of climate changes happening to our planet. (WWF)

Thursday morning while I was going to work, I stopped a couple of minutes to say hi to my friend Samantha, the nice receptionist of the Red Cross Centre of Chatswood (for those of you who missed the 1^st episode, go here Since last week, she inherited of a name… Under pressure from emails and phone calls from all over the world who wanted to know more about her, I told her about her involvement in the last “At The Same Time” post, and she found it very funny… I am now welcomed every morning by a wonderful “Red Cross” smile… (Update : Since I don’t work in Chatswood anymore now, I don’t have this smile anymore… But I’m still in contact with her…;)) At The Same Time, a Chemical Tanker coming from Morocco was suspected of having polluted the Atlantic Ocean by discharging it’s cargo residues and other wastes about 280 km South West of Penmarc’h (Finistere, France). A study done in 2000 by WWF (www.WWF.org) estimated that only in the Mediterranean See, this kind of pollution (Discharging fuel or chemical residues, wastes…) was equivalent to 1.5 millions of tonnes of petrol per year which represents 20 times what the Prestige tank released in the see when it sank in 2002… Polluting the Oceans is also polluting Earth, even if we don’t really see it in our everyday lives… (LeMonde – FRA; WWF)

The weekend was a long weekend in Australia, so everybody was happy on Friday… Monday was Labour Day a day-off at work, fair enough. But Australians are smart people, because not only they moved the real Labour Day (1^st of October, so Sunday) to a Monday so that they have it as a real day-off, but also because compared to Europe where Labour Day is May 1^st, they moved it to October so that it’s during spring… Clever those guys ;). In addition to all this, we had the Footy finals last weekend. AFL (a small description of this great Aussie sport here) and NRL (Rugby with 13 players) Finals. NRL is boring; I don’t see the interest in this sport so I won’t talk about it. But the final of AFL between Sydney and the West Coast (Perth)… What a game! I would need some extra time to escribe it… A lot of suspense, a lot of goals… But the Sydney Swans lost. At The Same Time our planet is still getting warmer and warmer… Global warming is now a real issue in our everyday lives, and with the boat which brings me to the beach, the electricity I use for me computer, planes I’ll use to travel the world, wastes I produce everyday , I AM contributing to global warming MYSELF… And so are you! You can go and check your own ecological footprint on this well done website. It tells you what are the consequences of your actions on earth. Really interesting website, and as usual, scary…

Now you’re asking me: What shall we do? I’m not really a big fan of those over-negative comments telling you that we have to live as humans were living during prehistoric times, eat grass and light ourselves with candles… Even though it would certainly help a lot the world situation regarding global warming, our society is how it is, and I believe it’s better to adapt it so that it’ll be in harmony with nature instead of destroying it… Because it would mean destroying human beings in a sense… So what we shall do is change our habits, adapt ourselves.
If you don’t have a lot of free time, remember that some small and simple things can make a difference: turn of the lights when you leave a room; don’t use plastic bags, bring your own bags when you shop; ride a bike or use public transports; take shower instead of baths…

If you have a bit more time, go and check those websites, they are full of useful hints: