Just as tediously inevitable as wet shoes and cold fingers, so too is the annual arrival of the natural phenomena known as Politician Says Dumb Shit About Cold Weather In A Bid To Make Dumb Shit Point About Climate Change. And in this year’s performance, the role of Brian Genus is being played by Queensland LNP senator and coal-kissing goon Matt Canavan.
Thanks to a blast of extremely chilly weather that battered much of Victoria overnight and sent temperatures across New South Wales plummeting, it do be cold as hell right now.
The unreasonably cold start to winter has seen blankets of snow dumped across tracts of regional New South Wales. The town of Orange got whacked with around 15cm of the white stuff overnight, with more falling throughout the day.
Meteorological data even shows that Sydney is currently in the middle of one of its coldest days in around 25 years. The peak temperature in Sydney only managed to just slightly top 10 degrees at around 2pm, before dipping back down to single digits.
It’s cold, is the point I’m getting at here.
Matt Canavan, whose Twitter profile picture still features him with bizarrely performative coal dust deliberately dabbed across his face, decided to leap all over this news to make a grand point about… something.
Earlier today, Canavan posted a screengrabbed headline about Sydney’s very cold day, and punctuated that with the caption “climate change.”
climate change pic.twitter.com/CT5pYjL9oL
— Anti-Socialist Matt Canavan (@mattjcan) June 10, 2021
What’s the point you’re making there, Matt?
To play devil’s advocate, there is some chance he’s referring scientific consensus, which asserts that changes to global climate conditions, powered by man-made forces, have an inextricable link to the likelihood, intensity, and frequency of extreme weather events on all ends of the meteorological scale. And that Orange being transformed into scenes from the Siberian Tundra is, indeed, something we’d expect to be more likely as a result of shifting global climate patterns.
However Matt Canavan is a man who, in 2018, told students attending massive global climate protests that “The best thing you’ll learn about going to a protest is how to join the dole queue.”
So the more logical conclusion here is that he’s saying Weather Is Cold, Therefore Climate Change Is No in some puddle-deep extrapolation of the outdated term “global warming.” One of those feats of mental gymnastics that convinces folk that unless the very ground beneath the feet bursts into flame upon contact, climate change cannot possibly exist.
And to that, rightly, there is only one fair counterpoint, and it’s this:
Shut up, dude. Shut the fuck up.
