We are now officially in the era of global boiling, according to the top grumpy guy at the United Nations, Antonio Gutteres. I’m somewhat confused as to what constitutes global boiling, as most official charts avoid the years previous to 1960. What is so magical about 1960?
At any rate, I figure if you’re going to determine the baseline conditions necessary for global boiling, you should take a long, hard look at the centuries preceding the modern era. Maybe all the way back to the dinosaurs. I bet they had a thing or two to say about global boiling before the ice age caught up with them.
When I was a kid, we used to go down to the desert on the California-Mexico border. Talk about heat. Those days were something beyond global boiling. They were more like global-blast-you-with-a-blowtorch, and then blow some sand in your face for good measure.
El Centro in the summer. It was like living in an oven. Everyone came out at night, when things cooled off a bit. You ran from air conditioned car to air conditioned house to the pool and back again.
My dad was farming down there at the time. Most of the work during the summer was done at night. Even the guys stealing tractors would steal them at night. It was hot work to begin with, so I’m sure they appreciated both the cover of darkness and the cool temperatures as they drove your John Deere across the border.
If you wanted to, you could always drive across the next day and check in with the local police department. They were usually pretty quick about finding the missing tractor, which seems suspicious, now that I think about it with my jaded adult mind.
Anyway, global boiling as an official measurement unit seems a bit imprecise. Of course, once it enters public discourse, and it certainly has entered, judging from how many different talking heads on TV are now sagely nodding and parroting “Yes, we are in the era of global boiling, so kiss your heinie good-bye!” that means the metaphorical door is open for other measurement units, such as global basting, global broiling, global sauteeing, and global-shrimp-on-the-barbie.
I never realized how culinary-centric the United Nations is, but Gutteres throwing around the term global boiling does renew my faith in their kitchen abilities. But, perhaps I’m misjudging their new direction. Perhaps, instead of wanting to end up on Top Chef, the grand poombahs at the UN want to usher us into an era of sacrificing virgins in the volcano, along with various goats and coconuts and perhaps several Teslas for good measure.
I might have a tiny bit too much faith in their narrative abilities, wondering if they’re going to go down the road. But, you have to admit, it would make for great television if the UN convened their annual general assembly by solemnly declaring “This is the year of wombat, a year of global boiling, which we shall celebrate by taxing everyone 6.2 cents for every cubic yard of carbon dioxide they exhale, so be it!”
Everyone would then clap and cheer, and then the Secretary General would announce break-out sessions to study the efficacy of Swedish virgins versus New Zealand virgins tossed into volcanoes in order to assuage the weather predictions and/or the climatologists at MIT.
I daresay the climatologists at MIT, if stereotypes have any ounce of truth in them, would be more than happy with any sort of virgin, as long as they were homo sapiens.