Five Gold Rings

Two Christmases ago we visited my cousin Penny and her husband Tim on Vancouver Island. They took us to Butchart Gardens to see the Christmas light display and the theme was 'The Twelve Days of Christmas'. It was stunning. The five gold rings were floating in a lake, huge golden circles of light.

Of course Vancouver continues to prepare for the 2010 Winter Olympics, the symbol of which is also five rings.
I have heard Vancouver many times called 'the most beautiful city in the world' and yet those who are in a position to make such decisions insist on putting in more eyesores.
Our skytrain is not a patch, not one pixel of a patch on the London Underground or the Paris or Montréal Métro, but it's what we've got and we're getting a new line on it, the Canada line. Of course it's all above ground. Visually less than stunning but apparently earthquake proof.
After the recent gales and snow and what have you, the power company, BC Hydro, have finally announced that they will be investing in putting more cables underground.

For some reason it has taken Canadian authorities 16 months to tell the world that a big old chunk of ice, a small island of it in fact, had broken away from the Canadian Arctic ice-shelf and looks set to make a nuisance of itself when the spring thaw comes.
In the Guardian's article, Dr. Vincent from the University of Québec is quoted as saying that,
"he had never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice and suggested the break-up indicated that climate change was accelerating"
further,
""This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead.

"We think this incident is consistent with global climate change. We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role.""

Ok, and they knew about this 16 months ago and yet here, as I have just said, we are still piddling around with a Mickey Mouse public transport system, we are still inundated with TV ads for SUVs (like 4-wheel drives), we still see popular TV police programmes showing single people being moved around in Hummers (stupidly large vehicles the size of a tank).
What the frell does it take? I'm serious, when will people stop talking out of their backsides about how it'll never happen and take individual and personal responsibility for this Earth?

Last quote from the Graun, the University of Ottawa's Dr. Copland,

""What surprised us was how quickly it happened," he said. "It's pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that, for one they are going, but secondly, that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it's all at once, in a span of an hour.""