Global warming unthaws warrior mermaids and mermen frozen during last ice age

Global warming has unthawed an entire race of warrior mermen and mermaids in the Arctic, scientists revealed today. At a packed press conference in Boulder, Colorado, Dr. Mark Xyzzy of the National Institute for Cryosphere Exploration and Tertiary Research on Yetis (NICETRY) revealed the details of the discovery: "We've been operating robot research submarines under the sea ice in the Chukchi Sea north of Barrow, Alaska this winter, as part of International Geophysical Year studies on the dynamics of arctic sea ice loss," commented Dr. Xyzzy. "Last week, one of our submersibles caught a remarkable video of a warrior mermaid, armed with a trident, riding past the submarine on the back of a narwhal. We were able to track the mermaid to her home--an underwater merfolk city at the bottom of the Chukchi Sea. The city had been thawed out in 2005 by warm water currents invading the Arctic due to global warming. These mermaids and mermen had been frozen into the underwater permafrost since the onset of the last ice age, 115,000 years ago. We undertook immediate efforts to establish communications with the merfolk, by sending in divers with underwater writing boards who were able to work out a simple symbol-based language. We learned that the Chukchi Sea merfolk are at war with a tribe of rival merfolk in the Greenland Sea. The two tribes have been fighting a heated underwater battle for dominance of the Arctic Ocean ever since global warming thawed out both tribes in 2005. It is the explosions from their undersea battles that have been the dominant cause of arctic sea ice loss since 2005, not global warming, as had been previously assumed. A team of experienced United Nations negotiators is now in the Arctic, attempting to broker a truce between the rivals and save the arctic sea ice from further destruction."


Figure 1. Merfolk negotiator Urgok Nzgradborkan and an exhausted U.N. diplomat take a break after a grueling all-night round of peace talks.

Critics of climate change science immediately pounced upon the news to unleash a new barrage of criticism against the National Intergovernmental and Territorial Panel to Investigate Climate Change (NITPICC). "The computer climate models used by the NITPICC utterly failed to anticipate the record loss of arctic sea ice due to underwater explosions from merfolk battles," commented spokesman Markoff Chaney of the Very Competitive Free Enterprise Institute. The Institute maintains of staff of top-notch scientists who swear that their funding from the fossil fuel industry does not affect the objectivity of their science. "This new "mermaid-gate" scandal proves that we can't trust climate models to say diddly-squat that's right about global warming, nah-nah-na-nah-nah!" taunted Chaney.

The head of NITPICC, Dr. R. J. Donteventrytopronouncemylastname, conceded that his organization had some work to do. "We're working very hard to incorporate the effect of underwater explosions from merfolk sea battles into the NITPICC models," said Dr. Donteventrytopronouncemylastname. "We've also begun to explore the impacts on sea ice should other denizens of the Arctic unthaw. For instance, the possibility exists that plesiosaurs from the time of the dinosaurs may be frozen in the underwater arctic permafrost. Should global warming thaw out these great leviathans of the deep, the turbulence from their swimming motions could cause significant cracking and breakup of the sea ice. We now have a new plesiosaur parameterization module built into our top models to account for this possibility."

Dr. Xyzzy of NICETRY commented, "I applaud NITPICC's efforts to incorporate their Underwater Merfolk Battle Module and Plesiosaur Parameterization Module into the climate models. However, I caution that they might also need to build modules to simulate the effects of astrology, thermography, ice-nine, and the warming effect of hot air coming out of Washington politicians, before critics of the NITPICC models will be satisfied."

April Fools!

Internet radio appearance today
I'll be appearing with San Francisco-based wunderground meteorologists Shaun Tanner and Tim Roche on The Daily Downpour Internet radio show at 4:20 pm EDT today, to talk about weather, hurricanes, and climate change. There will not be the opportunity to call in today. No foolin'!

Jeff Masters