I trust you’re all familiar with the Onion news, right? Good. In that case you’ll get it as you read my parody on the following “article” from
America’s finest news source, the Onion:

If The Heat Doesn’t Kill The Elderly, I Will
Jul 13, 2005
By Rudolph Milner

It is now high summer, and the sun is broiling the American Southwest, sending temperatures soaring upwards of 110 degrees. The heat has struck hardest among the elderly, dozens of whom have died of heatstroke, heat exhaustion and dehydration. If you, like me, are a right-thinking person, your mind recoils in horror at this fact: The old and decrepit are dying by mere dozens?

Fifty years ago, a heat wave of this magnitude and duration would have claimed the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of shriveled-up old codgers. The streets would have been littered with their withered carcasses. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. By providing today’s elderly with unprecedented access to air conditioning and situating them in safe, supervised retirement communities, we have thrown Mother Nature’s natural-selection process completely out of sync. And don’t look for winter to solve the problem, either: Even more old people have heating than have air-conditioning, and more and more are getting it every day.

Like you, I had high hopes for this summer. Like you, I am deeply disappointed in the low death toll among the elderly…

Call me warped, but I have to confess I got a good chuckle or two from this piece of pseudo news. Still, as much as I envied the Onion’s ability to make light of a serious issue like human mortality, I felt they were unfairly picking on the elderly when it’s actually the whole of the human race who deserves lampooning. Therefore, in the spirit of fairness to decrepit old codgers everywhere, I’m going to hereby restate this piece and edit out all the ageist rhetoric in hopes it will come across a bit more senior-neutral:

If the Global Warming Doesn’t Kill the Humans…

It is now high summer, and the sun is broiling the American Southwest, sending temperatures soaring upwards of 110 degrees. The heat has struck humans by the dozens, some of whom have died of heatstroke, heat exhaustion and dehydration. If you, like me, are a right-thinking person, your mind recoils in horror at this fact: Homo sapiens are dying by mere dozens?

Fifty years ago, a heat wave of this magnitude and duration would have claimed the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of humans. The streets would have been littered with their carcasses. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. By providing today’s humans with unprecedented access to air conditioning and situating them in safe, supervised communities, we have thrown Mother Nature’s natural-selection process completely out of sync. And don’t look for winter to solve the problem, either: Even more people have heating than have air-conditioning, and more and more are getting it every day.

Like you, I had high hopes for this summer. Like you, I am deeply disappointed in the low death toll among humans…