Inaugural 2013 Awards

“Deck the halls with howls of folly, fa la la la la laa, la la la laa!”

There’s no better way to get the hysteria across than attacking Christmas, so the first two inaugural ACM Bah Humbug Awards go to…

Sarah Zielinsky – Smithsonian Blogs – for her piece entitled: “Six Ways Climate Change Is Waging War on Christmas“

Sarah channels the spirit of Scrooge by explaining how all our favourite elements of Christmas are slowly being destroyed by “global warming” – reindeer, white Christmas, hot cocoa, maple syrup, Christmas trees and, of course, Santa’s home at the North Pole:

If Santa really lived at the North Pole, he would have drowned long ago. But any fantasies we have about him making a home on floating sea ice will surely die within the century. The extent of summer sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking, and it could be gone entirely within decades. The U.S. Navy predicts an ice-free summer Arctic as early as 2016.

“We really are heading towards an ice-free Arctic in the summer,” Andreas Münchow, an Arctic scientist at the University of Delaware, told the Guardian. “It just takes a freak event eventually, in the next five or 10 or even 20 years…. The long-term trend is that the ice is disappearing in the summer in the Arctic.”

Unfortunately, she carefully avoids the fact that Al Gore predicted the end of Arctic ice by, er, 2013.

Greenpeace UK and Jim Carter for “An Urgent Message from Santa”

I am sure the character Jim Carter plays in Downton Abbey, Charlie Carson the butler, wouldn’t have any time for environmental hippies, for as he says in Series 3, Episode 8:

“I’ve never been called a liberal in my life and I don’t intend to start now.” (source)

Please send your suggestions via the comments for further worthy recipients.