When Santa Drowns

Dear parents,

With the holidays approaching, there’s a problem you’ll need to keep in the back of your mind, and you might want to take a few moments to think about it so you’re prepared to answer your children’s questions. The issue is this: due to global warming, at some point in the not-to-distant future, the north pole is going to be all water. That means the the ice supporting Santa’s workshop is going to crack, and he and the elves will slowly sink to the bottom of the sea.

If you think this is far-fetched, just take a look at the evidence. This year, arctic temperatures are 36 degrees above normal, the amount of ice is at an all-time low, and dropping almost 8% per decade. (You can watch the last 30 years of change on this NASA video.)

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of lying to children, so perhaps the best solution is just admit Santa is fictional and phase him out altogether; but traditions die hard, perhaps we can just change his image, maybe give him a nuclear submarine to keep him afloat, kind of Saint Nicholas/Captain Nemo mashup.

The most obvious choice may be to move Santa to the South Pole. It’s got that same wintery feel (for now), and more importantly, Antarctica is a continent, so even if all the snow and ice melts, there’s still solid ground underneath. Plus penguins, everybody loves penguins.

One difficulty remains, however. While the antarctic does have penguins, it doesn’t have reindeer, and climate change is being particularly hard on them. In the past few years 80,000 have died due to lack of food.

So maybe the problem isn’t really Santa, it’s explaining how we humans are allowing Rudolph to starve to death.