Here’s the popup message solicitation you get when you visit the website for the first time:
Climate change is melting the North Pole and it’s no longer safe for Santa and his Workshop. So our dear old friend is packing up the sleigh to find somewhere else to live.
You can help! Move your mouse over this website to find gifts you can buy Santa to help him set up a temporary Workshop and protect the North Pole for his return.
Of course, you’re savvy enough to know we won’t be sending actual gifts to Santa. You will receive a tax receipt for 100% of your purchase and proceeds will be used by the David Suzuki Foundation to support our critical work to protect nature and the environment from threats like climate change.
Buying these green gifts and personalized ecards on behalf of hard-to-buy-for friends or relatives on your holiday list is a great way to show you’re thinking of them — and the planet!
Sincere thanks,
The David Suzuki Foundation
This is nothing more than a thinly veiled revenue generator for the foundation.
No shame, no scruples, just send money. Is it any wonder informed people are doubting the climate change issue when presented with crap like this?
h/t to Mike Bromley in Canada who writes:
Canadian geneticist-turned-environmentalist David Suzuki targeted children in his latest outburst of emotionally-charged enviro-gab, this time scaring the fun out of Christmas by warning that Santa’s home was melting. In a post-black-Friday period of climate-ethical circus generation, this takes the cake. This is beyond reprehensible.
Here’s what the North Pole looks like today:
UPDATE: Here’s a clip from 1972 showing Suzuki comparing humans to maggots in his own words. Looks like that must have been his Che’ Guevara period. (h/t Daily Bayonet)
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@ur momisugly Getting Warm:
Are you denying…
And that’s the point where I stop reading any more from arrogant toss pots like you. Your opening words betray such a controlling and fragile ego that to consider for a split second that there might be alternative explanations is beyond your capacity. Have you ever been humble enough to simply accept that you DON’T KNOW? That your climate gods don’t know either? Nah, I didn’t think so.
Tip: next time, why not try opening with “Do you disagree with the theory/hypothesis/assertion/findings that…” or something similar. Then an intelligent, polite discussion might commence.
Suzuki needs money! It’s good environmentalists vs. the evil Big Oil companies.
And lots of money is required to keep up the fight. (Reminds me some tele-evangelists.)
David Suzuki: The twisted logic, and ethics, of nature’s opponents
http://www.straight.com/article-551661/vancouver/david-suzuki-twisted-logic-and-ethics-natures-opponents!
@Getting Warm
I might be a fan if your posts were a bit more interesting. Which of the points raised by commenters here did you regard as straw men? Have you actually read any of them? Can you bear to? Can you respond to any refutation of your recycled arguments with more than a ‘Gish gallop’ and a link to some wiki page which no doubt consists of the same set of weak assertions you have made trotted out by several other alarmists in unison (which doesn’t make them any more logically valid)? I will check it by the way, but tend to feel if you are unwilling to tackle an argument head on then you probably can’t. Just because you would like commenters here to have raised straw man arguments does not mean they have. Now come on, put more effort in, rid me of my pestilent doubts 😉
Wil says:
November 30, 2011 at 11:03 am
David Suzuki lives in British Columbia – now get this. This is the same province that dumps 125 MILLION liters of RAW SEWAGE into the Pacific ocean a day from Victoria, BC. The same province with the most boil water advisories in North America. The same province that’s killing its KILLER WHALES with lumber and other chemical runoff from industry. The same province that destroyed its salmon population. The same province that damned its rivers thereby depriving its salmon of its spawning grounds. The same province that has CLEAR CUT 1/3 of its provincial timber in sensitive areas. And the same province that showed up at Ottawa’s door begging the Federal government to bail them out of their massive provincial financial debt.
You can’t make this stuff up!
_______________________
Wil,
This reads like a Suzuki script. Long on emotional sound bites, and short on fact, context, proportion and perspective.
We’re not happy with him either, but, ” The same province that’s killing its KILLER WHALES with lumber….” Really?
Chris
Getting Warm says:
November 30, 2011 at 2:39 pm
Dear Fans of getting warm,
Thank you for the army of straw men that you have thrown at me.
You forgot one of my favorite — Why do they call Greenland green!
Arctic melting only speeds up warming and methane release.
================================================================
Dear Getting Warm,
You alarmists never cease to put me in awe of your rationale. I’ve shown you where the earth hasn’t got warming in over a decade. But, you insist that it is still warming. I’ve also acknowledged that when comparing minimums, we’ve had almost a 50% reduction in the ice. (Again, it isn’t melt…. please try to understand the dynamics of what is happening up there.) But, you say “Arctic melting only speeds up warming and methane release…..”
When I look at the temp records and the recent reduction of ice. You’ve posited something that is demonstrably untrue. Even if you hold that the earth is still warming, you can’t possibly believe the warming is accelerating. Are you that detached from reality that you would believe references at the bottom of a Wiki page over your own lying eyes? Do you now believe Hadley, RSS, and GISS are all conspiring to show cooling? (For those that haven’t look lately….. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:2002/plot/gistemp/from:2002/trend ) GISS will have a negative decadal trend after the New Year if La Nina continues and Hansen’s algorithm doesn’t kick into overdrive.
Happy New Year!
@RockyRoad 1:27 p.m.
“Purveyors of fiction really shouldn’t rely on other symbols of fiction as most people will see the obvious similarities.”
So true!
If there is such a thing as beyond inexcusable, I think I’ve just seen it. Kids are exposed to enough media garbage without having this brand of story-telling aimed at them.
klem says:
November 30, 2011 at 11:38 am
My wife continues to donate money to the Suzuki foundation and the WWF. She is a climate skeptic and I advise her that there are a gazillion worthy non-profits out there who could make better use of her gifts, but she still does this. It causes me much bewilderment.
How can she donate when she is barefoot in the kitchen? I am confused.
Just kidding.
Roger Knights says:
November 30, 2011 at 11:30 am
I was very pleasantly surprised to see someone dredging up one of my old comments to feature so prominently in their argument and I thank you in all sincerity for doing so. Over the years I’ve always assumed that the primary function of my comments here and elsewhere was to allow me to vent the metaphorical steam that arises between my ears whenever I’m exposed to concentrated doses of climate blather and that in general they would be largely ignored. It’s nice to be able to think that this is not always the case. I feel I should point out that the value of my comments must rise or fall based solely on the quality of the logic and argumentation included as I am not now nor have I ever been a practicing “scientist”. No resort to argument from authority is in order when quoting my words, but I like to think that they stand on their own merits. That R&W paper is a personal favorite and I have commented on it a number of times. The one you chose is probably the best of the bunch. I have often hoped that Anthony would someday be able to cajole Dr. Rigor into doing a guest post here. Although I suspect what he would offer wouldn’t be entirely supportive of my admittedly very personal interpretation of his work, he has operated for years at a school which is pretty much “The Belly of the Beast” for consensus climate science in regard to the Arctic and has seemingly been able to retain much more than a semblance of an open mind. Although the end result might be my amateurish contributions spirally down in flames, I think it would be terrific to see an overview of the Arctic from his perspective in this kind of venue.
Anthony, are you listening? I’m more than willing to take my chances.
David UK, James Sexton,
Do I believe you or 100’s of respected scientists who have devoted their lives to studying the North and publicly publishing their science? Let me see???
Since I have been accused of being boring here is everyone’s favorite U of Fairbanks researcher, Katey Walters. It is illuminating:
Canadians are quite familiar with Dr. Suzuki. He used to have a column in our local daily paper and throughout the 1980’s (unfortunately I didn’t save any of the articles) he predicted, that on our present course, the earth would be uninhabitable by 2010 due to warming.
Roger Knights says: November 30, 2011 at 11:30 am
Regardless of the precise extent of ice-volume reduction, there are two reasons it doesn’t necessarily indicate an alarming degree of unnatural global warming—or even any at all.
Further to that point, there is abundant evidence that wind and atmospheric oscillations have a major influence on Arctic Sea Ice. In this October, 1 2007 NASA article;
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html
Son V. Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that “the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
“The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century,” Nghiem said.”
This 2004 paper “Variations in the Age of Arctic Sea-ice and Summer Sea-ice Extent” by Ignatius G. Rigor & John M. Wallace, states that;
“The winter AO-index explains as much as 64% of the variance in summer sea-ice extent in the Eurasian sector, but the winter and summer AO-indices combined explain less than 20% of the variance along the Alaskan coast, where the age of sea-ice explains over 50% of the year-to year variability. If this interpretation is correct, low summer sea-ice extents are likely to persist for at least a few years. However, it is conceivable that, given an extended interval of low-index AO conditions, ice thickness and summertime sea-ice extent could gradually return to the levels characteristic of the 1980′s.”
http://seaice.apl.washington.edu/
This 2007 paper “Rapid reduction of Arctic perennial sea ice” by Nghiem, Rigor, Perovich, Clemente-Colo, Weatherly and Neumann states that;
“Perennial-ice extent loss in March within the DM domain was noticeable after the 1960s, and the loss became more rapid in the 2000s when QSCAT observations were available to verify the model results. QSCAT data also revealed mechanisms contributing to the perennial-ice extent loss: ice compression toward the western Arctic, ice loading into the Transpolar Drift (TD) together with an acceleration of the TD carrying excessive ice out of Fram Strait, and ice export to Baffin Bay.”
http://seaice.apl.washington.edu/Papers/NghiemEtal2007_MYreduction.pdf
This 2010 paper, “Influence of winter and summer surface wind anomalies on summer Arctic sea ice extent” by Masayo Ogi, Koji Yamazaki and John M. Wallace, published in Geophysical Research Letters states that;
“We have shown results indicating that wind‐induced, year‐to‐year differences in the rate of flow of ice toward and through Fram Strait play an important role in modulating September SIE on a year‐to‐year basis and that a trend toward an increased wind‐induced rate of flow has contributed to the decline in the areal coverage of Arctic summer sea ice.”
http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d2/masayo.ogi/2009GL042356.pdf
Let’s not forget that Santa was originally an employee of Coca Cola.
Maybe he needs the money because he’s been sacked and replaced with polar bears
I think there is a consensus among the experts that Mr Claus exists. OK, so the experts are all under 7yrs old, but they are the experts and as such their views are paramount. There may be no actual evidence he exists but the experts have models that prove it. Whatismore, his existence is the only possible explanation as to how gifts apparate on Christmas morning.
There are some people (a tiny minority) who deny his existence but they are all in the pay of Big Oil. Big Oil, you see, hates Mr Claus because he has a mode of transport that doesn’t require their products and if it ever gets out how that works, Big Oil et al will suffer significant losses. So they pay professional naysayers to deny Mr Claus’ existence and the media prints their bought-and-paid-for views as fact even though they don’t have a skerrick of credibilty.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070911092139.htm
Walter said this summer’s fieldwork indicates that methane hotspots, such as the one she and the crew experienced, can come from various sources, not just thawing permafrost. Her next goal is to identify and quantify the sources of the methane hotspots around Alaska.
“It is unlikely that this methane plume was related to permafrost thaw,” said Walter, adding that the methane boiling out of the lake was more likely related to natural gas seepage.
——————————————————-
I believe that Katey Walters has learned that there’s money to be made in playing up the, IF this happens, Oh My God! We’re doomed! factor.
On Suzuki, and predictions:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/09/28/dan-gardner-the-essential-error-of-david-suzuki/
Reminds me of the marooned.jpg included in the FOIA2009 release.
So David Suzuki, Phil Jones, Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth are all sitting in a circle at the North Pole. Santa emerges from his workshop, clearly in a hurry, jumps into the sleigh and screams at them:
“I’m late! Quick! Which way is south?”
After a moment of confusion, they all point in different directions. This causes still more confusion as they all change their minds, point in different directions again, and then huddle and start talking about how to coordinate a consensus.
And now you know why Santa is laughing all the time. ho! ho! ho!
GettingWarm;
Sorry bud, it isn’t that you are “boring” per se, its just that you’re not contributing anything worth debating. Who should I believe? You or hundreds of scientists who have dedicated their lives blah blah blah…. Do you deny that blah blah blah….
We already have lots of trolls that have trotted out nearly those exact same words over, and over, and over…. and over, again. We’ve debated them on the facts, and they’ve retreated with their tails between their legs. Consider some of the dead on points that have made to you that you manage to ignore. For example, how is it that those spikes in CO2 you claim cause warming did so 800 years after the warming? Does CO2 time travel in addition to its other magical properties?
We’re eager for something new, something factual, something that might cause us to reconsider what we believe. Instead you trot out the same tired lines that are devoid of any meaning and have been said over and over and over again already.
Clearly you, like many other trolls, believe in recycling.
In all the years I have contributed to WUWT, I have never once insulted anyone. On this occasion I feel the need to. The cretin called Suzuki could not even allow his moronic bigotry to mention the word “Christmas”. This idiot talks about “Happy Holidays” because he is so PC that any reference to religion, other than AGW, must be an anathema to his warped thinking.
Suzuki, let me explain. Christmas is about a celebration of the birth of Jesus, the giving of presents, reflects the gifts the three wise men gave to Jesus; it is about the pleasure of giving, not the greed of receiving. This is a concept totally alien to those who would beggar the world just to make sure the lies they peddle continue to bring in the money.
Suzuki, for what it is worth, people like you make me feel physically, intellectually, spiritually and morally sick.
My dyslexia is terrible these days, I thought it said Satan’s Workshop!
Then explain why atmospheric methane has been in decline?
There is a new resource for researching newspaper articles from the last 300 years, here:
http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
I used “arctic” for a search term and got about 84,000 results.
You can search for free, but must pay to view.
GettingWarm says:
November 30, 2011 at 4:32 pm
“Do I believe you or 100′s of respected scientists who have devoted their lives to studying the North and publicly publishing their science? Let me see???”
“Devoted their lives”. Are they all on a plane with Mother Teresa? I guess the million plus in gravy that Hansen took in was all passed on to charity.
Many of us skeptics were former acceptors of the claims of the IPCC and the warmist scientists but we have reluctantly become skeptical as we have had a closer look at the scientific works and political machinations of your vaunted “respected scientists”. I say reluctantly because it gives us no pleasure to see science desecrated by the behavior of certain climate scientists with a “cause”.
Remember when CO2 increase was the dominant forcing in global temperature? Now in desperation they are talking about natural climate cycles temporarily hiding the effects of CO2 increase. It used to be that an additional 10 years of good observations would nail down CO2 as the villain. Now Trenberth I think it was moved the goal posts out to 17 years (is that when he retires with a good pension?). How long do you think they can sustain the CAGW story in the face of the divergence between observations and hypothesis. How long before the public decides it has been had and figuratively (maybe even literally) tars and feathers the perpetrators of the scare.
@neil Jones
Thanks for the link but that should be
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/11/new-eu-research-confirms-roman-warming-period-in-arctic-regions-warmer-than-modern.html
The last “L’ was missing.
I noted in particular the “[Little Ice Age] from which the [Arctic-region waters near Greenland] has yet to recover to Medieval Warm Period conditions.”
The abstract for the cited study
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/nov/15nov2011a4.html
goes on to say “it still has a ways to go to equal the warmth of the Roman Warm Period or even the Medieval Warm Period, which in many locations was also warmer than it is currently.”
As for Suzuki’s propaganda, PFFT! Just tell the kids it makes more sense for Santa to be based in the South Pole. At least there’d be hard rock under him should the ice melt.