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.
…
Read more: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8551006/a-fearmongers-guide-to-dressing-for-the-climate-change-apocalypse/
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.
More mindless gibberish on Sandyās part.
50 years ago, all of these same apocalyptic prospects were being feared as the ultimate result of runaway global cooling. Cooling!
Archived as parody ridiculae. Weaponized for future counter use.
āwe were aware of climate change.. but that was a thing far offā.
As in never.
Rising CO2 levels are already reducing drought impacts. Consider:
ā Covid-19 killed ā0.1% of world population
ā The 1918 flu killed ā2%
ā WWII killed ā2.7%
ā The near-global drought & famine of 1876-78 is believed to have killed about 3.7% of world population
Thankfully, that doesn’t happen anymore, and the rising CO2 level is one of the major reasons.
As you can see in this graph, drought incidence is diminishing only slightly:
But drought impacts are diminishing more rapidly. That’s because:
-ChatGPT 3.5
Well, if you wilfully destroy all of civilisation’s infrastructure, of course you end up living in a burrow or a cave.
You are fools that caused your problems with your idiotic anti-science anti-CO2 agenda.
Let’s see – survivors, living underground, or in caves, or mud huts as a result of the necessary reductions in standard of living to deal with global warming, or underground because we didn’t. Hmm, at least the latter will be warmer.
I, too, prefer not to live in a glaciated world.
The climate has always oscillated between extremes, over the past century the Australian climate (including Canberra) has been no exception.
The data show that over the past century the annual rainfall over Australia (and Canberra) has increased so simply extrapolating as alarmist fondly do she is more likely to be fully occupied keeping the lush garden from getting out of control.
Actually, I think Sandy is a “he”.
Also gets the same crap posted in other regional rags on the South Coast of NSW and in Tassie.
Maybe Sandy identifies as a ghhklerkgldkgkkdfgth (I’m paraphrasing Biden).
I do not recognize that as one of the official 8 billion identities.
While there is a female with bright red hair (most photos) the author of this seems to be this guy: Sandy Powellās Profile | The Advocate (Tasmania) Journalist | Muck Rack
What a bunch of drivel
Meanwhile the BBC offer this load of bananas …
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68534309
How long before Auntie gets the treatment she deserves and Matt McGrath isn’t let near a keyboard ever again?
That’s EVERY Hollywood movie. Don’t ever trust Hollywood for scientific accuracy, astute politics, or romantic advice.
I think that MythBusters had regular content covering the upside down world of Hollywood Science such as firing a handgun at a gasoline tank on an automobile will result in a massive fireball, catching an arrow with your hand, or punching a fist through a windshield.
We recently had a live-demo of what a human designed deadly chimera would do if unleashed upon the world, and discovered it only resulted in massive debt, more poverty and more Communism, not in Tom Cruise saving the day.
Don’t forget DIESEL powered trains that explode into huge fireballs after an “accident” or mishap of some sort.
Complete nonsense.
One of my fave mad movie tropes is that sea level rise will result in the world being inundated until only the peaks of the Himalayas are dry land. I’m thinking particularly “Waterworld” (1995) and a Star Trek Deep Space 9 episode. How much water do scriptwriters think there is in the world and where is it presently hiding???
Not is the water covering everything except the peaks of the Himalayas, but cities that were once coastal, when diving to cities that were formerly coastal, there will be enough light to make out all the buildings without artificial light.
How many times does a lead (or even full metal jacketed) bullet hit a metal rail or even a concrete wall and send off sparks?
Also in TV and movies, if a bullet hits something wood, it always throws splinters from the point of impact. A real bullet would leave a hole, like one made by a drill, the diameter of the bullet. Any splinters would come from the exit of the bullet. (Assuming it went all the way through.)
There was a new movie on Tubi last week. The description of it was so ludicrous that I had to watch the first few minutes just to see how badly they would mess up the science.
The scenario was an underwater earthquake near Iceland that interrupted the Gulf Stream. As a result of this interruption, the waters around Iceland immediately began freezing. The freeze was so intense that people in boats in the waters that froze, also froze solid. In a matter of seconds.
It took a couple of decades, but they finally managed to outdo “The Day After Tomorrow” in terms of blowing the science.
but they finally managed to outdo āThe Day After Tomorrowā
Maybe, but what about The Core?
Or, if you’re old enough to remember Crack in the World?
Journey to the Center of the Earth proved that The Core was not scientifically accurate.
(Sort of. Maybe…. which had the bigger box office?)
I don’t remember Crack in the World.
But I am old enough to (vaguely) remember seeing the original King Kong vs Godzilla when it was first released in theaters.
(That was back when a movie theater only showed one movie at a time.)
Sort of OT.
But has anyone noticed that past and present stories, movies that fall into the category of fiction (sci-fi or otherwise) seem to follow and then go beyond the current discoveries?
Frankenstein’s Monster. Electricity was a relatively “new” thing.
50’s B movies were about atomic radiation or space ships and aliens.
Later a few based on pollution or toxic waste. (Swamp Thing?)
Today, It’s all “Climate Change”.
Some might be fun to watch as entertainment.
But “science”? No more reality than Frankenstein’s Monster.
Big difference is that Mary Shelley didn’t write her story to promote or condemn electricity.
She just wanted to write a horror story.
There’s more backstory but I’ll leave the reader to look it up.
(Hints. The year without a summer. Her story begins and ends with the “Monster” climbing over ice.)
I cannot be writing this, as I died of famine in the early 1970ās. Or was it cancer from trace chemicals? Ghosts have bad memories?
I thought you froze to death from global cooling in the 1970’s.
Meanwhile in the real world and looking to the near future-
“The amount of solar will sooner or later begin to exceed the actual capability of the network,” Sean Elphick from the Australian Power Quality Research Centre said.
He said companies that generated and distributed electricity generally did not store large amounts of electricity, so the surplus of power provided by household solar systems during the day when demand was low was of little benefit.
That means feed-in tariffs ā which have steadily been decreasing ā will likely end all together as more household solar systems are installed.
“The energy spot-price can sometimes be negative during the day, so it’s possible there will be minimal or no tariffs at all,” Mr Elphick said.
How the electricity grid will cope with increase in rooftop solar and the future of tariffs (msn.com)
Yeah well we know there’s hardly any storage for the fickles but the 2 hour batteries make plenty providing FCAS to fix the problems the fickles have caused with their fallacy of composition.
As for no tariffs it’s worse than that for rooftop solar as switching your inverter off means exactly that. (they call that thhrottling but it’s more full choking). So you don’t even get the benefit of consuming your own solar power then and it’s happening already in South Australia. SA Power Networks have even upped the voltage for non-smart meter households to trigger them to shut down too with a solar glut (mild sunny weekends) as the installers must set the inverters within a narrow shutdown range for exactly that purpose.
Currently consumers cop a daily service charge of $1-$1.50/day (depending on retailer plan) but that’s not a true cost. The commercial generator/distributors also cop a large charge to use the grid and storages cop another to draw from the grid so ultimately rooftop solar will have to pay such two way transmission fees. That charge is currently hidden in the kWhr rate/s so rooftop solar owners will be really pissed when that charge is ultimately levelled on them at some stage.
“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 āsolutionsā to climate change.”
Engineering dyslexia in action.šøšø
FJB
“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 āsolutionsā to climate change.”
People believe the movie 2012 is accurate, correct, and true science.
Does anybody know if The Day After Tomorrow was supposed to be set before or after 2012?
Story is reportedly set in 1999.
But if we had built all those solar farms, this nightmare wouldn’t have happened, dontcha know….
A large puddle of insanity in the middle of the picture above seems to have dripped down into Ms. Powellās prose at the top of this posting. Iām being very careful where I touch my screen so as not to contract anything that will turn me into an imbecile (assuming it is not too late).
Leftists obsess about imaginary problems they invent and patronize anyone who addresses the real problems they create because of their deviant morality and bizarre policies.
-Catastrophic, imminent climate change that isn’t actually happening isn’t a problem.
-Grooming children by exposing them to deviant sexual behaviors and trying to normalize them is a serious problem.
If you don’t stop the social problems that leftist policies engender, there will be no society left to suffer the imaginary problems of “climate change”. They’ll destroy each other as they descend into barbarism.
How silly. Plants don’t water, simply use Brawndo, it has electrolytes and is what plants crave.
You saw Idiocracy!
If this came from Australia, here’s a more likely scenario:
It’s 2074, and the CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa has topped 530 ppm for the first time since measurements began almost a century ago. This increased CO2 concentration has rendered crops more drought-resistant, and farms have spread inland from the coasts farther into the Outback, at an average rate of about two miles per year. Beyond the range of arable land, grasslands have spread farther inland, some of which are now used as grazing land for cattle, which was desert at the turn of the century.
Closer to the east coast, forests are growing so fast that they present a larger danger of wildfires in case of a lightning strike, so that the Australian government has recently moved to allow the cutting of mature trees for timber production.
The Great Barrier Reef is still flourishing, despite earlier predictions of bleaching that never materialized. Harvests of shrimp, oysters, and clams are also up 20% over the past 50 years, with no sign of depletion of the oceans.
A comparison of tide gauges now with photos from 2024 shows that sea level has risen about 10 to 15 cm, depending on location. Sea walls are under construction in three cities, but other plans were shelved, since sea level has risen more slowly than previously predicted. While ice on the Antarctic peninsula has continued to melt, resulting in a threefold increase in the penguin population there, the East Antarctic ice sheet has gained 15 meters since the turn of the century, which has slowed down sea level rise.