Source: Satirical Press
In breakthrough news today, The United Nations announced they had found The Global Thermostat to control the Earth’s temperature.
With 45,000 people searching for the controls in Copenhagen at the Bella Convention Center, commentators were shocked when it turned up instead in a closet in the basement of the World Meterological Organization (WMO) headquarters in Geneva.
“It’s a landmark day for human-kind” said Rajendra Pachuri, Chairman of the IPCC.
Barack Obama stood for a standing ovation that lasted 23 minutes and said: “It gives us all hope”.
Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia: “We wouldn’t have found this without Obama’s magic touch. Obama rolled up his sleeves in Copenhagen, and the ancient Sumerian map fell out of his shirt.”
Tim Flannery, an Australian environmental spokesman, said: We must make sure this thermostat does not fall into the wrong hands. It must be managed by an unelected, unaudited government with infinite powers. Nothing else is safe.
Pachuri went on to explain the degree of control the IPCC expected to be able to have:
“Now we’ll be able to keep the global 30 year rolling average within a 2 degree range. At this stage we can’t promise to maintain any specific temperature for any given year. For example we are unable to guarantee Olympic meetings or World Cups will have fine weather, but with further research that may be possible.”
“We’re looking at a budget of $100 billion dollars in the next three years to set up The Intergovernmental Guardians of Climate Control. We plan to convene the working groups every year for eight weeks starting in Barbados in January 2010.
Nations wishing to apply for adjustments to the thermostat need to file a comprehensive application in 14 languages, in a form expected to be 4,000 pages long.
Within 30 minutes of the announcement, new social networks were springing into action on Twitter and Facebook. One, Ice-Age Now (IAN), was lobbying for The Thermostat to be switched down to glacial levels. He said skiers, skaters, and polar bears have been deprived of their full potential since the upper paleolithic era 15,000 years ago. “For most of homo sapiens’ history, temperatures have been a lot lower. It’s time we faced that”. Critics pointed out that he owned property in Texas, which would dramatically improve in value as the ice forced all Canadians to move south, and also that “about 4.56 billion people would starve to death”.
Russians were reported to be trying to hack into the WMO to raise temperatures.
No one could explain how the Sumerians would have known about the Global Thermostat, especially since they lived 3,500 km away (2,200 miles) from Geneva. But paleoclimate experts noted that the Sumerians had flourished during the Holocene Optimum, which was warmer than today, and that possibly the discovery of the ancient thermostat had been key to the development of human civilization.
Over the last 30 years janitors had stored progressively larger vacuum cleaners leaning against the switch, resulting in the climbing world averages.
A janitor had accidentally bumped it last week and was possibly responsible for the blizzards that struck Copenhagen and London this week. Training in Global Temperature Control has been added to his Duty Statement.