Dutch Ice Skating on Their Canals

Dutch Ice Skating on Their Canals

Yup, this global warming thing is causing a revival of national identity. From the January 16, 2009 International Herald Tribune:

For the first time in 12 years, the Netherlands' canals froze this month, bringing the Dutch, who like their tulips in neat rows, a heady mix of pandemonium and euphoria.

Hundreds of thousands of skaters, their cheeks as red as apples in the freezing temperatures, took to the ice, and hospital wards were filled with dozens of people with fractured arms, sprained ankles and broken legs.

Train engineers were ordered to go slowly to avoid hitting skaters who clambered across railway tracks to get from one frozen canal to another. Even the minister of defense, an avid skater, fell and broke his wrist. His ministry announced that the national defense remained in safe hands, even if one of them was in a cast.

In the 19th century, when Hans Brinker, the hero of the novel in which he tries to win a pair of silver skates, coasted along Holland's ice, the canals froze almost every year. But water pollution and climate change have made this so rare that today a boy of 15, Brinker's age, may never have seen a frozen canal, or at least remember one. Until, that is, this year.

"For us, it's in our genes," said Gus Gustafsson, 68, a retired insurance executive, explaining why he and his wife had rushed out to buy new skates and take to the ice under a cloudless blue sky. "It was like a frenzy that came over people, including lots of kids, like my granddaughter, who is 5." With thousands of others, they skated northeast toward the cheese capital, Gouda, then toward Utrecht.

With an influx of immigrants, the country has been struggling to maintain what it considers its Dutch soul, and Gustafsson was one of many here who thought the skating experience enabled the Dutch to reconnect with their identity. "There were only Dutch people on the ice," he said. "I saw no people of Arab descent."

Record cold in the Deep South, too. This January 16, 2009 Associated Press report tells us:

Forecasters said temperatures in the upper Midwest could turn into the coldest in years as Arctic air keeps spilling southward from Canada. The cold snap has claimed at least six lives and contributed to dozens of traffic accidents. One death involved a man in a wheelchair who was found in subzero temperatures stuck in the snow, a shovel in his hand, outside his home in Des Moines, Iowa. He died at a hospital.

The cold weather has gripped the Midwest and Northeast for days, but as it crept farther South, some were growing worried. "We're afraid people will die in this kind of weather," said Anita Beaty, who works with the homeless in Atlanta, where temperatures dropped below the teens, some 20 degrees below normal lows in January. About 900 men packed a shelter that normally houses 700. Freezing temperatures threatened to kill picturesque Spanish moss hanging from Gulf Coast trees. Wind and choppy seas frustrated efforts to free an endangered right whale tangled in fishing gear off the Southeastern coast. And it was too cold to bet on dogs in West Virginia: A greyhound track shut down because of a predicted high of 7 degrees. Then again, the cold was testing even the heartiest winter-weather states. On Friday morning, it was minus 10 in Cleveland, minus 6 in Detroit and minus 11 in Chicago. In upstate New York, areas near Lake Erie received up to 2 inches of snow per hour. Quentin Masters wore two coats and long underwear to mail a gift at the post office in downtown Syracuse

....

It was so cold in Milwaukee that ice thawed at skating rinks. The subzero temperatures froze the ammonia tank needed to make ice at the indoor Pettit National Ice Center. Workers fixed the problem and two hockey rinks and the Olympic oval were expected to be ready for skaters later in the day.

And there is talk that it may snow on Inauguration Day in DC. I'm hoping that at some point Obama starts to talk about the dangers of global warming...but a shivering fit prevents him from finishing the sentence.