Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Must be Christmas, time for the traditional MSM stories about climate change melting Santa’s home in the Arctic.
Climate change in Lapland: The impact of global warming in the land of Santa Claus
Environmental changes in the far north are having disastrous effects on the region’s indigenous people and tourism industry
Josh Gabbatiss Science Correspondent Saturday 23 December 2017 16:24 GMT
Lapland occupies a happy space in the popular imagination as a winter wonderland, occupied by reindeer, elves and Father Christmas.
The real life Lapland, however, is increasingly facing up to the grim reality of global warming.
Research has revealed the disproportionate impact of climate change in the Arctic, where temperatures are currently rising at double the rate of the global average.
The far north is bearing the brunt of global warming, and, as much of Lapland’s population relies on its polar climate for their livelihoods, the effects are starting to be felt.
…
The Irish Times is worried about the impact of melting snow on sled transport;
Global warming puts Santa’s delivery system at risk
John FitzGerald: Have Eircodes made Santa’s job easier? And other bah humbug observations
Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 06:00
It is proving extremely difficult in the aviation sector to find technological solutions to greenhouse gas emissions that influence climate change. As a result, flying may be the last sector staying with fossil fuels.
However, Christmas each year tests an alternative approach. The sleigh driven by Santa Claus is powered by nine reindeer. Like cows, reindeer are ruminants: when they digest grass and lichen, they emit methane gas. Unfortunately this is a very powerful greenhouse gas. On the face of it, this would appear to be a black mark against reindeer-powered sleighs.
However, we should also consider how much greenhouse gas is emitted per tonne of payload per kilometre travelled, and how that might compare with alternative modes of travel. Given that the sleigh is believed to traverse the entire globe over the course of just one night, the number of kilometres travelled is very high.
…
But maybe the best Christmas gift of all for today’s and tomorrow’s children could be effective action to tackle climate change through implementing the Paris Agreement. May all our North Pole Christmases be white.
Happy Christmas!
Not to be outdone, the Canadian Government thinks Santa will have to move to Antarctica because all the snow is melting.
Santa is moving to the South Pole
What?
Thanks to rising global temperatures, rapidly melting Arctic ice and growing human operations in the North, Santa Claus has signed an agreement with the International community to relocate his village next year to operate in an exclusive zone in the South Pole.
So What?
Santa’s relocation agreement marks the first time that the international community agrees on a common legal definition of climate change that includes refugees as corporations, as well as individuals. This deal is expected to lead to the deployment of a global climate change refugee visa system that in the near future could help to more easily relocate individuals and corporations facing the impacts of climate change.
…
Read more: http://www.horizons.gc.ca/en/content/santa-is-moving-to-the-south-pole
For once its not all misery. Grand Canyon News finds hope in Christmas, with a theory that believing in Santa may help kids develop the imagination to solve climate change.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus, and he’s calling you
GRAND CANYON — Think there’s almost a conspiracy out there to squelch your child’s belief in Santa Claus?
Technology can help you fight back.
For years the big guy in red has had to contend with aggressive pushback from the PC crowd who apparently wish he’d just pack up his sleigh and stay home in the North Pole. Department stores were pressured to nix their Santa stand-ins. Schools changed their calendars to say “winter holidays” instead of Christmas.
And let’s not even talk about the damage done to his image by Billy Bob Thornton’s “Bad Santa” movies.
Santa, being Santa, could keep right on ho-ho-hoing when lesser immortals would’ve sicked their elves on them.
But you?
Clearly, just quoting pro-Santa experts like Professor Jacqueline Woolley, chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Texas at Austin, wasn’t going to cut it.
“Believing in impossible beings such as Santa Claus may exercise children’s counterfactual reasoning skills,” she’s written. “The kind of thinking involved in imagining how nine reindeer could fly through the sky carrying a heavy sleigh may well be the same kind of thinking required for imagining a solution to global warming or a way to cure a disease.”
…
Read more: https://www.grandcanyonnews.com/news/2017/dec/19/yes-virginia-there-really-santa-claus-and-hes-call/
Despite these stories, this year’s effort to weave Santa into the Global Warming myth seems somehow more subdued than previous years. Perhaps heavy snowfall in the North is making it more difficult to believe in the climate ice melt fairy.
Merry Christmas from Australia.
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If Santa plans on moving to Antarctica, he’d better not squat on my homestead, where I plan to be one of the last living survivors of the Waterworld cataclysm that we are promised. I plan on being high up on a mountain slope with my beloved, Rachel Maddow, where we will make mad, passionate love, and begat the future generations that will repopulate the Earth in future yeas, after the planet cools off again, if only I can convince her to become heterosexual, and all the ice melts.
But anyway, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Kwanza, Happy New Year, (aw, hell, you add the rest) to all the readers of WUWT, who, without having ever met them in person, or exactly knowing the reasons, I somehow consider to be my friends. And Merry Christmas too, to the readers of RealClimate, too. May you all be warm and toasty in your PJs with the built-in feet, sitting beside a nice fire, or even one of those cheesy video fireplaces that shows a video of a fire, plays an MP3 of fire crackling sounds and beams out some infrared “back radiation” at you. I hope you all get everything you want in your stockings, er, that is, unless you want some misanthropic Malthusian nightmare to wipe out me and 6.5 billion other people. In that case, I think you are bad, and I hope Santa leaves you (appropriately) a lump of coal.
And just for the record, Santa’s reindeer don’t give a crap about frozen ground for Santa’s sleigh. BECAUSE THEY FLY IN THE AIR!
Not sure that the Reindeer will do so well this year . A video from this hunter shows that there might be a slight problem .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc5dKqoFtKk
But still , merry Christmas everyone
Ouch.
Feliz Navidad!
““The kind of thinking involved in imagining how nine reindeer could fly through the sky carrying a heavy sleigh may well be the same kind of thinking required for imagining a solution to global warming or a way to cure a disease.””
If we can just get them to stop believing in reality, they they will believe in global warming.
“The kind of thinking involved in imagining how nine reindeer could fly through the sky carrying a heavy sleigh may well be the same kind of thinking required for worrying about global warming or a way to cure a belief in moon-landing by NASA.”
There, fixed it for you
Climatists are insufferable, incurable Grinches of the worst sort.
Agreed, Bruce Cobb December 24, 2017 at 7:58 am,
It must be miserable for an emotive person, which many enviro-mentals that I meet are, to live with the oppressive doom and gloom. Let’s hope their hearts, and more importantly, their minds, grow three times their size that day. As narrated by Boris Karloff.
I would like to recommend a book if I may. It is called “Eco-Fascists” by Elizabeth Nickson.
Time well spent.
The second article from the Irish Times does have it right in one regard. “It is proving extremely difficult in the aviation sector to find technological solutions to greenhouse gas emissions that influence climate change. As a result, flying may be the last sector staying with fossil fuels.”
There are a number of reasons for this difficulty. The primary reason is that hydrocarbon fuels have all the right properties for use as aviation transportation fuels. High energy content per mass and volume. But also abundance and low cost despite aviation turbine fuels being the most regulated fuels for quality and composition in the world.
The approval process for alternatives to jet fuel derived from conventional crude oil sources, the only source of jet fuel allowed by ASTM, the British Ministry of Defence, and the US military is extremely onerous. So fuels that are derived from natural gas, coal, biomass or waste streams must be independently tested and approved by the FAA, the military, and all OEM’s (both turbine engine manufacturers and airframe manufacturers). This process took 10 years for approval of synthetic paraffinic kerosene derived from NG and nearly that long for jet fuel made by hydrotreating fatty oils (much the same process as used to make renewable diesel fuel (not FAME biodiesel). There are only a few other processes approved including converting isobutanol to jet fuel (GEVO process) and partially hydrotreating sesquiterpenes produced from genetically modified bacteria (Amyris). Conversion of ethanol to jet fuel is under review but has not been approved yet.
Despite the airlines being pushed to use renewable fuel sources, there are very few of these sources available after nearly 20 years of trying. However, they have reduced their “Carbon Footprint” significantly by just plain common sense and some really good engineering. Adding winglets to the outside edges of wings significantly reduces turbulence as was noted by people that studies bird flight. So incorporation of this minor change saves something like 5% of fuel use. High bypass turbine engines which have been used for a number of years saved something like 20% of fuel use. And more improvements are coming including changes in regulations of flight paths that caused increase flight distance needlessly, especially in the EU where different countries still had different overflight rules which caused diversion of many intra-EU flights to less efficient routes.
So aircraft will be the last to use hydrocarbon fuels, but that won’t happen until those fuels become very scarce. Technology exists to convert any carbon containing material into hydrocarbon jet fuel. And the worlds vast coal and NG resources will support that technology. Then there are methane hydrates that have 10X the energy reserves of all other sources combined but with significant technical difficulties needed to be overcome to recover them.
Merry Christmas and keep flying,
Dr. Bob
Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus – but he’s not quite what you think.
At this time of the year, people’s thoughts turn to Santa Claus. Sadly, many of us dismiss him as a myth, perpetrated by indulgent parents and rapacious storekeepers. After all, they say, how could one man deliver toys to so many homes in just one night – and many of those homes don’t even have chimneys.
The perpetrators of this outrageous denial of Santa have pointed out that, in order to visit every household with children who believe in him, Santa has to make stops at about 90 million homes and deliver somewhere in the region of 100,000 tons of toys. Furthermore, the maximum time available for this, taking into account the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, is 31 hours. (Actually, last year it was 92,453,076 homes and 104,254.3 metric tons delivered in 27 hours and 43 minutes, according to Santa’s records.) The logistic immensity of this task has caused those of little understanding to assume Santa to be supernatural, or just plain mythical. Far from it.
Santa is neither supernatural nor mythical. However, he differs from the rest of us in that he and all his elves and reindeer originally came from a neutron star, but were forced to leave when it started to turn into a black hole. (Earthlings have been leaving Detroit for much the same reason.) Anyone from a neutron star, which is basically a star which has collapsed under its own weight, is necessarily made of condensed matter.
The material of which most of us are made is mainly empty space when viewed from a subatomic viewpoint, but in Santa’s case the empty space has been removed, so that his density is several million times that of ours. For those who are interested, more information will be found in Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward. It is true that Santa is a little overweight – about 285 lb last time he checked – but this only makes him the size of a sesame seed. Santa’s toys are also, initially, made of condensed matter, but more of this later.
One of the advantages of being made of condensed matter is that one’s fundamental processes are based on nuclear reactions rather than chemical reactions. Since nuclear reactions tend to take place about a million times faster than their chemical counterparts, Santa’s whole time scale is about a million times faster than ours. Thus, while Santa’s visit to each household last year averaged just over a thousandth of a second on our time scale, Santa’s time scale gave him almost 18 minutes per visit. Allowing for transit time, the actual time available was about 12 minutes from rooftop landing to rooftop takeoff.
It has often been pointed out that going down chimneys was all very well when everyone had chimneys, but how on earth does Santa manage in a multi-storey apartment block? The answer is really quite simple. Every building has ventilation shafts of some kind, and Santa’s reindeers have years of experience in finding and navigating them. In fact, Santa doesn’t bother to dismount from his sleigh, he just takes the whole rig, reindeer and all, into the dwelling. After all, you would need a magnifying glass to see them.
It is now time to dispel a myth which has gained currency in recent years. Santa does not live at the North Pole. Instead, like all condensed matter beings, he naturally gravitates to the centre of the Earth, sinking through its layers of rock as if they were but mist, which indeed to him they are. Here, at the centre of the Earth, is Santa’s workshop. It has several advantages over the North Pole. The supply of raw material is inexhaustible, he is entirely shielded from politicians and paparazzi so he can get on with his work in peace, and last but not least, it’s reasonably warm down there. (Don’t forget, condensed matter beings have a different concept of hot and cold from the rest of us.)
But if Santa lives at the centre of the Earth, how does he get back to the surface to deliver his toys? To answer this question, one must realize that Santa’s race long ago solved the problem of antigravity, a matter of considerable interest to creatures who evolved on a neutron star with a surface gravity of about 60 billion g, so he and his reindeer have no difficulty in raising Santa’s sleigh to the surface and proceeding around the world at a leisurely pace. They usually use volcanic vents as convenient routes to the surface, which avoids leaving little holes in the Earth’s crust every time they go in and out.
On a worldwide basis there are, on average, 0.8 miles between each household and, with about six minutes available in Santa’s timescale between stops, this works out to 8 miles per hour, or about 8,000,000 miles per hour in our timescale. However, condensed matter reindeer are capable of considerably greater speeds, which gives Santa ample time for resupply visits back to his workshop and warehouse. (You didn’t think Santa loaded all the toys in his sleigh at the same time, did you?)
We now come finally to the toys themselves. These are made initially in condensed matter form by condensed matter elves, and a typical doll, baseball mitt, or whatever, would have dimensions in the submillimeter region, although weighing just as much as their normal matter counterparts. As such, when removed from the antigravity field of Santa’s sleigh, they would immediately sink back to the centre of the earth. Instead, as we all know, they are found lying under the Christmas tree. This is due to the fact that the lead reindeer carries a condensed matter expander unit which converts the toys to normal matter, essentially by pumping them full of nothing. The operating principle has been known to political speech writers for years.
Due to their lack of opposed thumbs, the reindeer have difficulty operating the expander unit themselves, so it is carried in a harness at the front of the lead reindeer’s head with something like a basketball hoop protruding from it. Santa tosses a condensed matter toy into the hoop, and the toy quickly expands as it drops out, ending up several orders of magnitude larger but otherwise similar in all respects to the original. If Santa misses his throw, the toy just ends up back at the centre of the earth, which he regularly visits for resupply.
I would like to be able to report that Santa’s technology is perfect in all respects, but alas, nothing is perfect. The expander unit tends to overheat and will get quite hot after it has been used a few million times. This can make working conditions rather uncomfortable for the lead reindeer. Indeed, on one famous occasion a faulty expander unit glowed red hot most of the night. Were it not for the courage of the lead reindeer, who suffered a badly singed nose as a result, many children around the world would have been disappointed. Yes, we should all be grateful to Rudolph for his courage that night.
Lol
I think you covered just about everything with this!
Utterly brilliant!
It’s methane with reindeer. The bulls fart and the ladies poof as they run across the tundra. If the greens were educated they would gave Santa some sympathy as his sleigh glides behind those rascals. Not unlike Kramer feeding Beefarino to a carriage horse. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ugazcvzOM0Q
Looks like we might have a white Christmas here in Milwaukee’s northern burbs – very light snow started up about 9:00 AM and currently coming up on (11:30) it’s slowly turning white.
I guess they can’t get enough polar bears to starve or die for the agenda so they need to find some other species to use to pull at your heart strings… Just another sign of climate insanity…if one way doesn’t fit your view, try the same thing on something else and expect different results…
Churchill Manitoba, recent scene of a BBC polar bear blub story by the delicious fur trimmed Kate Humble , is minus 31 degs C right now.
Yep. The narrator claimed the polar bears roaming the place were starving because of you know what. But the bears were rather fat and that was for everyone to see.
The sun is just poking up in a perfectly clear blue sky. Christmas morning in NZ (GMT+13).
May the racing rats stay away for just one day
Happy day all
Michael C
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
https://goo.gl/images/BKuezo
How Slimate Clience and the NFL Kneelers are Related
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/12/24/how-slimate-clience-and-the-nfl-kneelers-are-related/
More CO2 will encourage more lichen and grass to grow, their primary foodsource. The marginally warmer Arctic tundra areas with thawing permafrost will allow the reindeer to expand their range.
So the biggest problem won’t be too few reindeer.
The bigger problem in the coming years will likely be too many reindeer and all the population problems that has when predators are too few.
Chalk-up another lie to Climate pseudoscience.
Hey!
If our kids won’t know what snow is, who cares? As long has they about “Raindeer”!
“Rudolf, the wet-nosed raindeer,….”
Merry Christmas to all you folk at WUWT
https://youtu.be/56OrIcAoU68?t=20
Yes, Merry Christmas!
He wasn’t born December 25th, but he was born. And accomplished all that he was born to do.
Something to celebrate year-round.
May everyone have a good season
And may the world continue to prosper under HIS gifts of warmth and plentiful carbon deposits.
Hey, MSM: Slash CO2 and the reindeer won’t have as much to eat.
(If this weren’t the holiday season, I’d really blast those stupid idiots for being abject liars!)
Not “far” north, but a ways up there, or here, from my prospective, -37.4 C in my backyard this morning, NOTHING IS MELTING, and has been frozen for several months, and will stay frozen, not to mention constant night for a large area, for several more months, until the sun finally makes its way back up here.
A fascinating place to live. If ever I were to move, further north is the only direction I’d go. I’m sure the darkness is tough to get used to, but I’d be willing to give it a try.
I read that indo article a few days ago, mind boggling nonsense.
Maybe these journos should be sent up north in their city clothes to document this thawing of the arctic circle. -38\39c will set em right.
More future doom nonsense based on absolutely no observations of any kind, just an extrapolated GHG forcing value, essentially that is it, nothing more, it is all they have at this point.
“The real life Lapland, however, is increasingly facing up to the grim reality of global warming.”
^^ Is a patent falsehood.
Record-breaking winter season for Lapland tourism
Snow is more popular than ever. About 600 charter flights are landing at Finland’s three northernmost airports in the months ahead.
By
Thomas Nilsen
November 21, 2017
New hotels, glass igloos, log-huts, snow constructions and ice cottages. Lapland seems prepared to welcome tens of thousands of tourists starting now in late November. Santa Claus is still an attraction, but newcomer of the year is the Snow Man.
Located just on the Arctic Circle the Snowman World Glass Resort opens on December 1st with a row of glass apartments, each ensuite sauna and an outdoor hot spa on the terrace. Nearby, the resort offers everything you possible thought doing in snow, including ice slopes and ice-skating.
For now, 580 charger flights have announced landings at the four northernmost airports in Finland, Finavia reports. That is 50 more than last season. The flights include 190 to Rovaniemi for the Christmas period, 108 to Ivalo, 64 to Enontekiö and more than 200 to Kittilä airport near the two ski-resorts Levi and Ylläs.
Already before the peak-season started, Finavia, Finland’s aviation agency, reported a growth in passengers to Lapland more than double the country’s average.
For the first nine months of 2017 Ivalo airport had an increase of 21,2%, Rovaniemi 20,1% and Kittilä with 30,9%. The average for all airports in Finland, including Helsinki, was 8,4%, Finavia’s passenger statistic reads.
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/travel/2017/11/record-breaking-winter-season-lapland-tourism
All that CO2!!! How dare Finland try to melt the planet!
…and from Norway, thanks to Spaceweather.com …
http://www.spaceweather.com/images2017/24dec17/santa_strip.jpg
Note the stunted pine in the foreground.
Notice the CO2 glowing in the atmosphere, in the background.
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE, FROM THE YORKSHIRE DALES!
http://www.manbottle.com/pictures/redneck_christmas.jpg
So is he taking Santa to the taxidermist along with the reindeer?
with this spectacular sunset from the north of England Happy holidays to all
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/12/24/10/478ADD7100000578-5209943-image-a-2_1514110257916.jpg
Ah, the Angel of the North, very X massy. The angel is locally known as the Iron Flasher.
Temperatures in Lappland are forcasted to below -5 F during the comming week.
Temperature in the Lap town Inari is -20C right now.
The best Christmas gift of all for today’s and tomorrow’s children would be to forget about the false CO2 meme, Global Warming, and Climate Change and return to Rational Thought on Real Problems.
Merry Christmas to All!