German public health authorities dispense lunatic heatwave pointers, advise against mobile air conditioning units

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An ominous Heat Dome has settled over western Europe.

It is literally 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) as I type this, and if you were an alien from Pluto listening to central German radio you’d have to conclude that these temperatures are at the very limits of human survivability. (It’s substantially warmer further west, but the hysteria is the same everywhere.) Meteorologists are running short of death doom colours to depict the dire state of our temperature emergency …

… and former Covid Minister Karl Lauterbach has declared that “many people will die” and denounced “right-wing conspiracy theorists” for not taking sunny summer weather seriously enough.

Meanwhile, in what has become a fixed seasonal ritual, German public health authorities and state media have begun circulating lunatic emergency advice for how to stay cool in this life-threatening heat situation.

Their pointers:

• Open windows only at night, early in the morning, and late in the evening.

• Otherwise close all windows and draw all curtains so you can be both uncomfortably warm and profoundly depressed.

• Safely ensconced in your stuffy dark apartment, unplug all electrical devices, including your internet router, because these can emit heat even in “standby mode.”

• Also roll up all of your carpets to stop them from storing heat.

• Hang up wet laundry in your dark apartment to cool the air via evaporation, but do not hang up too much wet laundry or the air will become excessively humid which is even worse.

• The one electronic device you might possibly consider plugging in, is a fan, to cool your skin. To enhance the cooling effect, put a bucket of all the ice that you have emptied from your unplugged freezer in front of the fan.

• What you should not plug in, is any kind of portable air conditioning unit, because the Federal Environmental Agency believes that they will actually make your room warmer when the exhaust air finds its way back into your apartment.

This is the modern German government in a nutshell: “The heat is going to kill you, stay inside with the windows closed and the curtains drawn and do all this other weird, crazy and unheard-of stuff to escape the murderous heat, but whatever you do, don’t do the one thing that will actually substantially reduce interior temperatures, because reasons.”