Rember the joke about...

Air conditioner salesmen in Alaska?

No, really.

The Inuit (Eskimos, as we called them in my day) are buying air conditioners! I'd like to shake that guys hand (except that it was probably Gore, so can I just pass on the hand shaking?).

According to Mr. Alister Doyle of Reuters, Monday, Aug 7, it is apparently so warm in Alaska that the Eskimos need an air conditioner. Reaching highs of 88, those fellows just can't stand it any longer. Check it out at this address:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060807/sc_nm/environment_warming_dc

In case it doesn't work, let me quote a little here:

"Better known for building igloos during hunts on the polar ice, Inuit in the village of Kuujjuaq in Quebec, Canada, are installing 10 air conditioners for about 25 office workers.
"These are the times when the far north has to have air conditioners now to function," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a leading campaigner for the rights of 155,000 Inuit in Canada, Alaska, Russia and Greenland.
"Our Arctic homes are made to be airtight for the cold and do not 'breathe' well in the heat with this warming trend," she said. Temperatures in Kuujjuaq, home to 2,000 people, hit 31 Celsius (88 Fahrenheit) in late July."

Mr. Alyster Doyle uses this as an example of the impending doom that is global warming. Also, there is some reference to my dear mission country of Norway, where some poor vendor is complaining about selling ice cream... or not selling ice cream today because... it is raining.

"Today we've sold almost nothing," said Miriam Eid Bergan, 20, working at an ice cream parlor in Oslo's main street and looking out the window as people hurried past in the rain. "When it's sunny the queue can stretch down the street."

Uh, am I missing something here? Who buys ice cream in the rain, anyway? So, is the fact that it is raining in Oslo the oh-so-sought-after hard evidence that SUV drivers in Texas are causing global warming? It seems I saw a few showers myself when I was there, and that was before the day of the SUV.

Well, not to spoil the ending to this story, but...

maybe the Eskimos didn't necessarily buy the a/c's for the cool air. Mr. Eskimo-Inuit-American-Canadian admits, down there at the bottom of the page, that they bought them more to keep the dust from coming in the open windows and getting all over their nice, new computers.

"Larry Watt, mayor of Kuujjuaq, said one reason for ordering air conditioners was to stop dust from outside blowing into computers. Before the municipality owned computers, the windows could be kept open in hot weather."

And as for Mr. Oslonian and his ice cream stand, it appears he purgered himself when he claimed to have such a long line on sunny days.

"And Bergan in the ice cream shop in Oslo said: "People are buying fewer ice creams here than five years ago ... Maybe they're buying somewhere else or they worry about eating so much sugar."

See, he, too, admits that maybe he overstated his position a little bit, and in the interest of full disclosure, people are really not buying his ice cream, because they don't like the sugar? or maybe they are buying it elsewhere? Or maybe they don't think it's quite hot enough to buy ice cream. Or maybe they don't buy from you because maybe you're a liar? Or maybe they have finally up and moved to America where we can still buy SUV's (if we want).

Or perhaps, they are on business trips... to sell air conditioners to the Eskimos.