May 26th, 2022Kyle’s Rant

BY THE narrowest of margins the better of two weevils have won the race, we have chosen one white balding 50-something-year-old chump over another.

And that’s just because they dropped the sharpest barb at the right time during our emotional crisis and tilted our view just enough to put them in power.
The cardboard voting boxes and weird poll things have all been packed up along with the how-to-vote cards and taken to the recycling centres, and depending on your persuasion you are feeling happy or sad. Either way it’s time to get comfortable, plug your headphones into the music, belt up and hang on for the next three years.
It’s now Friday, May 20 and I have no idea which bozo to vote for and I have just written the preamble as our sub-editors require my column well before it’s time to count the votes. I hear a collective gasp, not about the fact that I pre-wrote this column, but because yes, we are old-fashioned, and we still use sub-editors to proof our work, unlike a lot of news outlets.
Anyway, live it up because whatever happens I think we might all be a bit stuffed with climate change is on its way.
Tucked away up the back of the late-night news I noticed a piece on north-west India and Pakistan, which are currently suffering days of 45 plus degrees. I researched this a bit more and found a piece from The Washington Post that read:
The enduring heat, which began in March, has altered life for millions in the region, placing a strain on outdoor workers, shortening the school calendar and cutting crop yields. The Met Office analysis examined how climate change was increasing the risk of such heat, using the record-setting event in April and May of 2010 – which 2022 is set to surpass – as a benchmark. In the absence of climate change, an event like the 2010 heat wave would be expected only every 300 years, the analysis found. But factoring in the effects of increasing heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuel, the researchers now expect record-breaking temperatures about every three years.
So, while we’ve all been fighting for scraps from the politicians’ tables, they’ve been stitching us up with a lack of leadership on the climate, and ultimately the earth has decided that there are too many fleas living on its back and it’s time to give them a good shake. It tried to wipe out a few of us with a pandemic, but we fought back with tech, so now it’s time for a literal fire sale.
Meanwhile we have been watching who won The Voice or who got kicked off MasterChef on what has become the new opiate for the masses, TV.
I am not sure how preventable or inevitable this climate shift is and to that end am not sure if there is much that I can do about it because without slightly larger entities getting involved such as China, America and Europe. I am not sure that wheeling out my impeccably stacked recycle bin every other week will make any difference.
Dark rant over…