Sunday, November 10, 2013

Nordic Maritime, Finland

Finland has been rather neglected on this blog, yet it has some awesome issues..so I thought that for today's Sunday Stamps entry, I'll show these two Finnish items...I think that Titanic as a ship theme is rather over-estimated (not that there aren't some great Titanic issues..some of which I proudly own :))



Here I have one FDC and one cover with a mini sheet...both coming from the Finnish "Nordic Maritime" series. The above FDC was issued in 2010 while the cover below comes with a mini-sheet issued in 2012 (yeah, those are coffee stains)
For the set on the FDC, "Top of the World", Finland chose to depict the award-winning Maritime Center Vellamo, the Finnish Wooden Boat Center, and the Tarmo Museum Ship in the Kantasatama Harbor in Kotka.



on the cover, the miniature sheet honors both The Finnish Lifeboat Institution (an organization for voluntary maritime rescue associations in Finland) and The Finnish Border Guard.)

for more sails around the world, check out today's Sunday Stamps

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Preserve the Polar Regions and Glaciers, Serbia

this Sunday Stamps' theme is Arctic and Antarctic...and by some sort of inertia I went looking for Polar Glaciers...and then I was, but wait, how can I be sure if this is actually portraying the Arctic or Antarctic...I mean, you have glaciers in Patagonia as well...but well, I decided to interpret this a bit broadly =)



so here I am happy to present this Serbian FDC issued in 2011, on the topic of "Preservation of the Polar Regions and Glaciers".
Sometimes I find it funny that countries like Serbia for example, issue such 'polar's stamps...I mean, it may have somewhat like polar temperatures during winter, and I know that the so-called global warming is a global issue indeed, but still...I am not complaining, on the whole contrary...Serbia has such fantastic stamps that it is a pleasure to own this cover...I just never found the logic behind the decisions of issuing some particular themes...on the other hand, Macedonia is not issuing anything...not even Lunar stamps...go figure...

Anyways, this is what the Serbian Philately Service had to say about this issue.

"The Universal Postal Union in Bern is the initiator of a philatelic campaign, which is dedicated to raising awareness of the endangered state of the polar regions and glaciers in this era of global warming.
A glacier, as a product of glaciation is a moving body of ice. The development of the glaciation process occurs on altitudes with negative balance of insolation and radiation. The glaciation process falls into 'climate processes' and its beginning and ending depend on great climate changes - cooling, that is, warming. Those changes occur gradually and very slowly.
There are two main regions of glaciation process - the polar region and the high mountain regions - as well as two main types of glaciers, the continental and alpine. On Earth, 99% of glacial ice is contained within vast ice sheets in the polar regions (Antarctica, Greenland), but glaciers may be found in mountain ranges of every continent except Australia. Ice from the glaciers is the largest source of fresh water on the planet. It is assumed that if polar glaciers and ice sheet (which contain 2.5% of world's water resources), melted, the sea levels would rise up from 0,5 - 2 metres. During the past fifty years, around 7000 km² of ice sheet have desintegrated.
Since the middle of the 20th century, the global warming is a consequence of higher concentration of greenhouse gasses, which has increased as a result of human activities such as the combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation.
The Kyoto Protocol is a protocol toe the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or FCC) aimed at reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. The Protocol entered into force on February 16, 2005. Since June 10, 2001, the Republic of Serbia is a member of the UNFCCC.
On September 24, 2007, Serbia ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

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