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Melbourne City Council has employed Chief Heat Officers to fight the, um, heat.

The council, which declared a climate emergency in 2019, will empower two staffers to battle the hotness.

Hot warriors are necessary, Lord Mayor Sally Capp explained, because by 2050 Melbourne will experience around 16 days a year where temperatures reach more than 35 degrees.

Yep, 28 years from now Melbourne will experience — wait for it — five more days of 35+ temperatures than it does currently.

If you’re 50 this year, by the time you’re 78 there will be five really hot days a year that are a bit hotter than they used to be.

If that doesn’t scare you into ditching your steak for bugs and trading your Ford Mustang for a Nissan Leaf, nothing will!

Heavy Responsibility

One of the city’s new Chief Heat Officers told the Herald Sun:

“Our city and its environment have felt the impacts of heatwaves and decades of drought. Everyone is at risk during a severe heatwave.”

She’s right of course. Air conditioners can help with “severe” heat, but you need electricity to power them, and Green policies ensure we don’t have enough of it.

I guess that’s why we need Chief Heat Officers, although I think the name needs to be strengthened. The heat isn’t going to take any notice of an “officer”. They should be called Chief Heat Commanders, to give them more authority.

I’m not exactly sure what these officers on heat — sorry, Freudian slip — Heat Officers will do to attack the warmth. Perhaps they’ll walk around fanning people.

Or maybe they could hold shade cloth over all the bike paths to keep the cyclists cool.

There was an episode of The Simpsons in which Mr Burns covered the whole of Springfield with a giant umbrella. That could work.

What about they just stop the sun from coming up in the morning? Or they could develop a climate change vaccine that promises to keep people cool.

The shot won’t actually stop anyone from getting hot, but everyone who has it will thank the science and insist that they would have been so much hotter had they not been jabbed.

Here’s something I am sure of. The Chief Heat Officers will have purple hair and 17 pronouns.

More Pressing Issues

Personally, I think the council should ditch the heat officers and employ hot officers who just walk the CBD being hot. That would bring people back into the city.

Anyway, whatever they’re doing, it’s already working. It’s forecast to be 14 degrees in Melbourne today. Way to go, Chief Heat Officers!

Just on that, do they take winter off? Or do they become Chief Cold Officers?

When I was in Melbourne earlier this year the temperature was fine, but the city could have done with a Chief Graffiti Officer or twenty.

A Chief Police Officer wouldn’t do any harm either. There are a lot of mentally ill people getting about in the Melbourne CBD these days, most of whom are council members.

The city is well and truly cooked.

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Originally published at The James Macpherson Report.

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Image: Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center