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.”
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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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Eric, the same scare was raised a year ago. What is it about Christmas and Reindeer?
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December 19, 2016
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/save-the-reindeer/
This is an excellent evocative poem and seems fairly relevant.
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
W H Auden
The Fall of Rome, 1940
God bless us, every one!
Santa wants to leave Canada? With JT and the Liberals in charge, I can’t say that I blame him.
Merry Christmas from beautiful Jurien Bay, in Western Australia. Top today of 30ºC.
It’s a good life if you don’t weaken. 😉
“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.” [ John FG]
Note that Santa, deer, and sleigh deliver more payload in less time than any other
process, ever. Most of that payload is very valuable. In fact, one can argue that the value is priceless.
Priceless divided by a few tonnes of CO2 is still priceless.
This proves the person who wrote this, one John FitzGerald, is stupendously stupid.
MEANWHILE, in Norway, the Government is telling a Sami owner that his herd of 116 is “too many” (The supreme court in Oslo ordered Jovsset Ante Sara, a reindeer herder of the semi-nomadic Sami people, to slaughter 41 of his herd of 116 on the grounds that a herd of his size is unsustainable and contributes to overgrazing, according to the New York Post.)
Tis the season for tokenism. Nuts
Merry Christmas Eric.
I’ve just had the happiest Christmas of my life here in Perth, WA but I still can’t get used to celebrating Christmas in warm sunny weather (global warming?). To me Christmas weather should be cold and dark (preferably with snow) with the perfect excuse to indulge in our favourite drinks, perhaps a mulled wine or a wee dram.
I’ve always thought that Christmas was an old pagan (probably Norse) mid-winter festival that was adopted by the emerging Roman Catholic church as (in today-speak) a marketing tool and a business development model to convert non-believers into true believers. Just like today’s climate change icons; the polar bear and now (as you have highlighted) the reindeer.
In Scotland, we always believed that Christmas was for children and that the appropriate festival for adults was Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve).
For Auld Lang Syne and Happy Hogmanay to all at WUWT.
Christmas Day NorEaster (a quick-mover), dumping perhaps a half-foot (or more) of powder here in New Hampshire, on top of about 6″ already on the ground. First time in 15 years that we’ve had a snowstorm on Christmas (started early this morning).
Well, if misery loves company at least the polar bears won’t be alone. Merry Christmas, Everyone !
Enjoy your Christmas. If you’re having a “white one” then enjoy that especially.
According to Newsweek White Christmases are an
“endangered species.”
I guess that must be just like Polar Bears and Penguins.
I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had a White Christmas, and I most certainly don’t
expect to experience one. I live in the Southern Hemisphere, where No Snow At
Christmas is not just routine, but always expected. So I don’t really want to
experience one, because, if A White Christmas ever did happen DownUnder,
we will really be deep in it!
And why not, I ask? After all, it was adults with the imagination of kids who developed the idea that climate change was a problem we should be solving.
A merry Christmas and happy New Year to Anthony, Eric, the mods and rockers, contributors, commenters and readers, all. Thanks for your tireless work.
A little known fact about reindeer (and caribou). Their bones are up to 3000 x more radioactive than other mammals such as humans, because of their winter diet of lichens which accumulate natural radioactivity from the air. All natural uranium and thorium decay products. Just saying..
No wonder Rudolf’s nose glows… 🙂
“…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…”
How are these people trying to kid?
‘The far north has been bearing the brunt of a barely tolerable climate, and, as much of Lapland’s population relies on tax subsidies and welfare for their livelihoods, the effects are starting to be felt because the supply of OPM is strained by the cost of gullible warming virtue signalling’
There; fixed it.
Just like on “Jeopardy”, the answer lies within the question.
“What is, Global warming IS the disease to be cured, Alex.