Essay by Eric Worrall
“… We had bigger things to worry about, like whether drag queens should have been allowed to read books to children …”
Baby, it’s hot outside: A fearmonger’s guide to dressing for the apocalypse
By Sandy Powell
Updated March 11 2024 – 12:13PM, first published 11:30AM…
It is the year 2074 and we are at the end of another glorious half-century of climate extremes that have kept us on our toes; nimble and spry and ready for the next challenge. Those of us who have survived at least.
As I was digging the weekend’s accumulated ash and filth from around the front door of my burrow this morning I thought about a time, 50 years ago, when we didn’t live underground and were mildly surprised by the warming weather.
It was a beautiful time when we still used that antiquated term “drought” as though the rain would at some point return to a stable and reliable pattern in the coming years.
We were aware of climate change, of course, and had been for half a century, but that was a thing that far off future generations would have to prepare for, not us. We were simply too comfortable to make any substantial changes to our lives.
And why would we? We had bigger things to worry about, like whether drag queens should have been allowed to read books to children and whether the tax cuts we were giving billionaires were big enough.
Perhaps that is too cynical; people were struggling to afford to feed and house their families and had just lived through, what was then, a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and were reasonably inward looking in their concerns.
…
Granted this is an attempt at political parody, but the logical inconsistency of this future climate fantasy is just irritating.
If “we still used that antiquated term “drought” as though the rain would at some point return to a stable and reliable pattern”, how can there be any vegetation left to burn? Surely it all burned away and never re-grew ages ago, because there was no water to irrigate the new seedlings, or they all got washed away in the infrequent but brutal mega floods. Dust I can believe – Australia is a very dusty place, even super floods wouldn’t be able to remove all the dust. But dust and ash, not so much.
If somehow the ash and dust got there anyway, despite the lack of rain and vegetation, and everything is covered in dust and ash, all that investment in solar panels was a big waste of money.
Ah but sometimes it rains – so who in their right mind would live underground, and risk getting drowned in a flood? Better hope those fossil fuel driven water pumps work properly. Maybe you live underground until it floods, then climb a tree? Ah I forgot, all the trees burned down long ago.
Describing Covid as a “once in a lifetime pandemic”? Well Covid is still here – but where are the lockdowns? Does anyone still believe the lockdowns were anything but a massive government overreaction?
And if the world of 2074 is an apocalyptic dystopia, who would care who got tax cuts way back when?
Reading this ill considered attempt at political parody was just painful, like trying to watch a badly scripted Hollywood movie which gets all the science wrong. But I guess you have to have an engineering mind, to feel irritated by such obvious inconsistencies, or to understand the absurdity of bumbling Western “solutions” to climate change.
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