Whither the Elves?

According to a somewhat startling report in The Independent today, “for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.” Of course this has nothing whatsoever to do with anthropogenic global warming. Nope, nothing to see here, move along… Perhaps Kate has a picture of a badly situated temperature gauge or some fabulous graph illustrating how small a fraction of a million is, or… look, over there — a shiny rock!