Tuesday, March 13, 2007
ICE IS COLD
Some intros write themselves:
A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.
Generally, stories that begin this entertainingly tend to quickly diminish in subsequent paragraphs. Here, however, the fun – unlike certain frozen explorers – never quits:
The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment …
Then there was the cold - quite a bit colder, [organiser Ann] Atwood said, than Bancroft and Arnesen had expected.
They went to the North Pole … and they were surprised by the cold. Well, who can blame them, what with all this warming talk? Maybe they’ll sue Al Gore.
“My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold,” Atwood said.
They. Were. In. The. Arctic.
Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.
You don’t say. And now, a punchline of such sublime delusion it’s impossible to imagine it being said with a straight face:
“They were experiencing temperatures that weren’t expected with global warming,” Atwood said. “But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability.”
(Via many readers and commenters, all of whom would have enough sense to predict coldness upon visiting Arctic areas)