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December 11, 2008

Santa’s global warming problem

Carl Keith Greene

Looks like we may have a break in the cold weather coming up next week. At least that’s what it looks like as I write this piece of prose.

It’s Monday and the high temperature is expected to reach 50 degrees or better and stay in the 40s for the rest of the week.

Lows about the time you’re reading this will be in the low 20s and we will have gone through some showers and wind and even snow.

But that’s the bad part. The good part is that the extended forecast, at least a week ago’s extended forecast, calls for mostly clear skies with highs in the upper 50s and lows only down to the lower 30s, but mostly in the high 30s.

It’s about time that we have some warmer temperatures. What with global warming and all, this cold December weather has been rather disappointing.

If the globe is warming so much, why are we getting these 20-degree overnight temperatures?

Could it be that global warming is just a myth? Is it some sort of cruel trick to make us think that the oceans will be rising as the polar ice caps melt?

Did Al Gore come up with this as a plan to take over the world?

I wonder.

Actually, I do believe in global warming. There is too much evidence that it is really happening for even a cynical writer like me to believe that it isn’t.

Now I don’t believe that I’ll actually see the Atlantic overcoming Manhattan Island in my lifetime, but it makes me wonder if maybe eventually that will happen.

We have evidence of past ice ages on the earth, so there really could be an event in which the earth can simply warm up, and it’s probably been warming up since the last ice age.

What worries me is the North Pole.

What would happen if the North Pole were to disappear into the Arctic Ocean?

What would happen to the elves and reindeer?

Would Santa have to move to Greenland or Iceland to keep at least close to the top of the Earth? Maybe he would head for northern Canada or Russia.

Of course, with the wrinkle of his nose he could simply move to the South Pole.

That would put him and the elves in a nearly home-like atmosphere. But the trip from the South Pole to the nearest land mass might be so far that he’d have trouble getting food for the reindeer as they leave on Christmas Eve. After all, it takes lots of fuel for those critters and maybe now they stop for their first yuletide feeding in Canada or Russia first.

Leaving from the South Pole would require those first fuel stops in southern Africa or southern South America, quite a long hop in comparison to the current one.

And, of course, it would require Santa to load his sleigh backward, since he’d be delivering from the south to the north instead of the other way around.

What’s Santa to do if the North Pole dissolves?

Maybe he’ll hire UPS or one of those delivery companies to make his stops for him and leave the reindeer and sleigh at his headquarters.

So what will we do with global warming? I don’t know.

I just hope the place warms enough so I don’t have to worry about the cold anymore.

© MMVIII Carl Keith Greene

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