Good riddance

You know, I tend to have a bad habit of talking about gloomy or depressing things. My motivation is good: I think that the more people who know about something bad, the more likely it is that it will get fixed. But still, it's a downer. So, for a change I thought I'd share a few items of information calculated to lift the spirits. Firstly, there seems to be good news ahead for all those people, like myself, who can't stand polar bears. Perhaps you find their cubs annoyingly roly-poly, or you think they're too fat-looking - or perhaps you've lost a relative to one of them. Well, help is on the way in the form of man-made climate change. Within thirty years, there'll be no ice at the North Pole in the Summer and the annoyingly pallid bears that live there will be long since extinct. Good riddance to bad bears, I say.

Good news too for anyone who's sick to death of hearing their richer or more adventurous friends go on about how great it is to go scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Well, fortunately for us most of the world's reefs are dying even as I write these words. And not just Australian reefs - soon enough there won't be any anywhere. So stick that in your pipe, irritating holiday show-offs.

And finally a little bit of humorous news. You know the popular belief that lemmings throw themselves off cliffs? Well it's just not true. They don't commit suicide; it's just that every four years they do pack up and migrate en masse, giving rise to the myth. The funny bit, though, is that they'll all be dead soon too and it's our fault. Humans are heading off a cliff and taking the rest of the world with them and it's the lemmings who get the reputation for being suicidally stupid. Ahh, you've got to laugh, haven't you!