I hope that Santa Claus ignored the advice of last summer’s global warming alarmists (GLOWARMS), and kept his sleigh, rather than trading it in for a jet ski. Remember, they told us to book vacations at the North Pole, because we were making too much CO2, which was turning the Arctic into a tropical paradise. They told us that polar bears could never survive without their needed ice, although I’m not sure exactly why polar bears need ice for survival.
Yes, they like ice, because it makes it easier for them to hunt seals, but these white, furry, creatures also spend much time on land. They also know how to swim, and have been spotted more than 100 miles from land or ice, and that’s not counting the ones living at the San Diego Zoo. There’s a reason that the genus and species of polar bears is Ursus Maritimus, meaning sea bear, in Latin. They are the only bears classified as marine mammals.
Rather than go on and on about the normal range of polar bears and their adaptability to changing polar conditions, suffice it to say that polar bears are increasing in population, sort of like how the Arctic ice is increasing in thickness and area.
Unfortunately, a bunch of narwhal whales heeded the advice of Owl Gore and other deranged GLOWARMS, and set out on their annual migration near Baffin Island, the largest island in Canada, not far from Pond Inlet. After all, didn’t NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies just announce that October was the hottest on record, before qualifying it by saying, that is, if you use September’s temperatures instead of October’s? Yes, it did, sort of like when Goddard’s Dr. James E. Hansen announced that the 1990s was the hottest decade of the twentieth century, before someone reminded him that it was actually the 1930s that earned the distinction. The institute also announced that August of this year saw the largest sea ice retreat on record, and the narwhal whales, avid readers of fiction, decided to go with that information.
Apparently, the sea ice regathered its forces and staged a new assault, trapping about 200 of the whales in the ice, much to the delight of hunters from nearby Pond Inlet. Normally permitted to kill only 100 whales per year, per the Canadian department of Fisheries and Oceans, a spokesperson said that the whales were probably going to die anyway, so permission to cull (a euphemism for kill, I suppose) the entire 200 was granted.
Once again, who do we believe? NASA now officially admits that many scientists have different views on climate change, and also acknowledges that water vapor, not CO2, is the most significant greenhouse gas, something others have been preaching to the choir of skeptics for some time now. The other parishioners hear the sermon, but miss the message, and now insist that the CO2 is causing the water vapor. Whatever. . .
My daughter makes no claims to being a climatologist, but she says it’s cold down there in South Carolina, just across the river from Augusta, Georgia. I tend to agree with her, because it’s 26 degrees down there, four degrees colder than here in New Jersey.
As children, we always hoped for a White Christmas, perhaps just to make it a bit homier for Santa and his reindeer, but who’da thunk our Thanksgiving turkey just might turn out to be a snow bird?