Go to hell -- wait, it's here

An interesting map I came across:

 

The idea of hell as really hot got a big boost from John Milton, with the fallen angels and the burning lake.  Dante's hell is dark and rains a lot, like a November afternoon in Glasgow, definitely something you could survive.  When you get to the worst bit, Judas Iscariot is sharing a block of ice with Brutus and Cassius (medieval Europe thought highly of Julius Caesar).  Folks in the Pacific Northwest would probably welcome some of that today.  

Greta Thunberg, who spends more time thinking about this than most of us, tweets, "Heat records are usually broken by decimals, like a tenth of a degree.  And not in June...This heat-wave is just getting started..."  It doesn't sound like she's looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.  (It's 76F in Stockholm today.)

Earlier this month Louie Gohmert inspired a lot of jokes when he asked if changing the orbit of the earth or moon could effect climate change.  Utterances from Gohmert tend to be dumb, so many people failed to see that, as Philip Bump pointed out, he was being ironic:  It's not in the government's power to do any such thing, so why even pretend we can address planetary warming?  At the time I assumed he was working from the 1961 Val Guest film The Day the Earth Caught Fire.   Simultaneous nuclear tests at the North and South Poles by the US and USSR (each unaware of the other) change the earth's orbit and send it hurtling toward the sun.  On reflection, he can't have seen it or he'd be lobbying for such testing.  After all, there's a 50-50 chance we could rocket off toward Mars instead.

I think I can personally line up bipartisan support for a federal law prohibiting TV reporters from frying any more eggs on pavement.   Enough is enough.