Americans are watching as a powerful heatwave has stretches from California to Texas, with its peak expected this weekend – Copyright Gyeongbuk Fire Service Headquarters/AFP Handout
Well, it’s official. Someone on the internet has decided these are fake heatwaves. The measurements are being done wrong. Never mind rivers drying up and continents in weeks of record temperatures. There are no heatwaves. So there. Nyah.
The really important thing is that non-meteorologists have decided the temperatures are wrong. This news has received millions of hits according to the BBC.
Can’t you just see the impressive sight:
A group of highly trained professional ignoramuses circle around the weather reports, looking for clues. Fearlessly agreeing with each other, they detail a subtle process of not being able to tell the difference between 45C and 30C. The world must be told!
If you’ve ever been in 45C, it’s like opening an oven door. It’s a bit hard to miss. …But I suppose that with sufficient dedication you could do it.
This is where denialism has gone. Never mind the deaths last year. Canada was on fire; no problem. Asia is apparently imagining its heatwaves. India, one of the hottest countries on Earth, doesn’t know when it’s suddenly a lot hotter. …Because some internet genius says so.
In India, a guy put a wet towel on his head to go out. The towel didn’t make it to the next block before drying out. That’s 45C. I’ve dried wet towels in minutes in the Australian summer.
The bigger picture is even more awe-inspiring. People are capable of believing this utter nonsense. Under all that sophisticated, ultra-cool hysteria, they can ignore the heat. They can believe that somebody is staging a northern hemisphere-wide climatic horror story.
Maybe the idea is to just put things like this out there to find the truly ultra-gullible. It’d be easy enough to do. Just go online and say you didn’t believe there was a heatwave either. You’d get a database of morons in seconds.
That seems a bit complex, though. Why not just start a Society for the Prevention of Facts? It’d be easy enough.
You could have a simple sales pitch:
Do you hate facts? We hate facts too! Join us and no fact will ever come near you ever again!
It was well worth waiting through 4.5 billion years of evolution to see this, wasn’t it?
