Climate change ate my homework

Cancer. Pollution. Mental disorders. Inflation. And of course famine and poverty. All of these seemingly different plagues on humanity have one thing in common: climate change is making them worse. Apparently.

A few days ago, when I saw this headline, stating that Gas cookers as toxic as ‘second hand smoke’, study reveals, I thought that can’t be it. It must be worse. Gas stoves must be worse than second-hand smoke.

And what do you know, I must have become clairvoyant because this is what I found next: Gas stoves may produce higher levels of cancer-causing chemical than second-hand smoke, new study finds.

Gas cookers are but one of the many facets of climate change, however. And when I say facets I actually mean “destructive, apocalyptic tentacles that have spread around the whole planet stifling the life out of it. Literally.”

This is the impression one could get from reading news such as the latest from Texas (many thanks to Tammy Nemeth for sending the report my way), where it seems people are enduring, in no particular order:

blistering temperatures

extreme temperatures

scorching temperatures

a stalled heat dome (which features)

the sun beating overhead

more than 100 heat-related incidents

(a) heat wave (that) settled into Texas

Ah, I remember the good old days when summers in the lower part of the northern hemisphere were pleasantly cool, with temperatures averaging a balmy 25 between June and August.

I mean, I’ve never been to Texas but the weather must have changed dramatically because, well, climate change. And I totally do not remember how for the last 30 years, come late June or early July and the first reading of 30 degrees C, state media down hear start issuing warnings on a daily basis for the elderly and people with poor health.

The warnings come down to: avoid going out between 10 am and 6 pm, drink fluids, and if you cannot avoid going out during the hottest part of the day, try to stay in the shade and wear a hat.

I’m sure 30 years ago is when climate change really got to work wrecking our lives because why else would those state media issue these warnings, right? They may have issued them earlier, too, but I can’t vouch for that. I don’t remember further back.

Yet imagine such warnings being standard practice for many decades instead of just three. Imagine health authorities — and everyone else —being aware that summers in the lower part of the northern hemisphere tend to get quite hot and this could be dangerous for some people. Imagine, if you dare, that heat in the summer is something normal, while still potentially dangerous.

Now, that would turn the whole climate change monster narrative on its head and we can’t have that. And when I say “we”, I mean “climate change monster slayers”, by the way. No, we can’t have that so we bang the drum of extreme temperatures, explaining that even though it’s normal to be hot in the summer in the lower part of the northern hemisphere, lately it’s been getting too hot.

Indeed, it got too hot for some and things ended fatally. Per the above report: “Last week, a Florida man and his 14-year-old stepson died after hiking in extreme heat at Big Bend National Park in far West Texas, where temperatures soared to 119 degrees (48 degrees Celsius).”

My first thought when I read this was “Seriously?” My second thought, unoriginally, I admit, was “No, seriously. Seriously?” Let me tell you about my experience with 40+ temperatures. And I know the Texans among you, of whom there are many on my subscriber list and I appreciate every one of you, will laugh but bear with me.

Back in 1996, my mum and I went to Dubai. It was April and the temperature in Sofia when we left was about 15 degrees. When we got off the plane in the early morning in Dubai, it was 42 degrees. I was 18 and the time and I felt like I’d been run over by a steamroller. I crawled into the hotel room and refused to leave it until the evening. I didn’t even need to be told to stay indoors.

Most people don’t need to be told to protect themselves from temperatures that cause physical discomfort. Those that do would probably ignore the warnings anyway and do what they’ve decided to do, come what may.

Of course, that hiking tragedy was not attributed to bad judgment. It was attributed to climate change, although I bet someone would try and argue that climate change causes bad judgment, too. I mean, it causes everything else, so why not this.

But enough about my memories and heat experiences. Because we appear to be in grave danger of something else that climate change causes: inflation. None other than the president of the European Central Bank — the same president of the European Central Bank who last year basically admitted she had no idea where that inflation came from and dismissed it as transitory — said the following:

“Climate change affects inflation and inflation is the beast that all central bankers, whether they wear a green jacket or not, want to tame and discipline.” Can you hear the hissing of the whip already? From transitory to a beast in under a year. Talk about a rude awakening.

Yet the successful solution of any problem begins with identifying its cause and Madame Lagarde has done just that. It’s climate change. Yes, she put it delicately, using “affect” rather than “cause” but it’s clear enough that the effect of climate change on inflation she talks about is not of the positive kind and the nature of that effect must be causal because what other kind of effect could climate change have on anything, if you think about it?

So, once we have the cause of the problem, we can get down to the solution, which, obviously, is stopping climate change. Because this is, of course, totally possible and not only is it possible but it can be done in 12 years — remember all those 2035 bans and deadlines.

We can absolutely bring back the good old times when the climate of the Earth was static and unchanging. But we may have to resort to some dramatic moves beyond wind and solar, and reducing energy consumption. We might have to explore something called “climate geoengineering”, which involves reducing the amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface.

In fairness, our brave climate leaders are approaching the topic with caution. Per this Bloomberg report, the EU is looking into climate geoengineering while acknowledging it could turn out to be actually dangerous. Let’s take a second to praise that moment of mental lucidity.

Now that the second is over, how long do you think it would take those brave leaders to establish that blocking out the sun, albeit partially, could be the lesser evil? I wouldn’t want to name a number but I am willing to predict that it may happen at some point, seeing as climate alarmism has reached fever pitch lately.

When I challenged the safety of experimenting with the atmosphere, a fellow Twitter user sent me this, noting it as evidence that altering the atmosphere was cheap and proven to work, at least when it comes to bringing temperatures down. Apparently, all it takes is a big enough volcanic eruption.

Alas, even those temperature-lowering events have certain effects that are not exactly beneficial for humankind. Per the Wikipedia article linked above, the release of cooling aerosol accelerated the destruction of the ozone layer (remember the ozone layer and how worried we were about it?) and also may have caused the Storm of the Century in 1993. It’s complicated, in other words. But I’m sure somebody somewhere is thinking “It might be worth a try”.

The most beautiful part of the narrative at this stage is that even when all these, let’s say questionable, attempts to lower global temperatures fail, because they already are failing, a certain kind of people will continue to blame everything from cancer to incontinence, arthritis, and bad school grades on climate change. There is just nothing as gratifying as making people feel guilty for existing. Apparently.