So, Australia is on fire again. Or at least, it is about to be. If you looked at the news today, you saw that a massive "heat dome" is parking itself right on top of the bottom right corner of the country. They call it south-east Australia. I call it a frying pan.

The Bureau of Meteorology—those are the poor folks whose job it is to tell us we are doomed—says that records are going to get smashed. We love smashing records, don’t we? Usually, it’s for sports or drinking beer. But this time, the record is for how fast a human being can melt into a puddle on the sidewalk.

Starting Saturday, it is going to get hot. And I don’t mean "beach day" hot. I mean "the air hurts my face" hot. We are talking about South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and parts of Queensland. The forecast says some places inland are going to see five straight days above 40 degrees Celsius. For my American friends who refuse to learn the metric system because they think counting by tens is communism, that is over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. For five days. In a row.

Think about that for a second. Think about the sheer misery of it. You wake up hot. You go to work hot. You come home hot. The walls of your house hold the heat like a sponge holds water. You turn on the fan, and it just blows hot air around like a convection oven. It is miserable. And yet, people still live there. They build houses in the middle of a desert that wants to kill them, and then they act surprised when the desert tries to kill them. It is the definition of human arrogance.

The experts are calling the fire danger "catastrophic." That is a big word. It isn't just "high" or "severe." It is the top of the scale. It basically means, "If a fire starts, do not try to be a hero with a garden hose. Just run." But you know what people will do. They will stand on their roofs with a bucket of water. They will refuse to leave their stuff. We are so obsessed with our stuff that we will risk burning to a crisp just to save a flat-screen TV.

And let's talk about the irony here. Australia is famous for digging black rocks out of the ground and selling them to the world to burn. The whole economy is built on stuff that makes the planet hotter. And now, the planet is returning the favor. It is almost funny if you ignore the part where everything burns down. The politicians will come out and give speeches. The Right will say this is just a normal summer and we should stop whining. They will tell you to turn up the air conditioning, which is powered by the coal that caused the problem. It is a perfect circle of stupidity.

The Left isn't much better. They will tweet about it. They will use the fires to score points and yell at the other side. They will hold signs. But at the end of the day, they are just as addicted to the comfort of modern life as everyone else. Everyone wants to save the planet, but nobody wants to turn off the AC when it is 40 degrees outside. We are all hypocrites. We are all just monkeys pressing buttons, hoping the banana keeps coming, even while the cage is on fire.

This "heat dome" concept is terrifying. It is a high-pressure system that just sits there. It traps the heat. It squashes it down. It stops the wind from blowing it away. It is nature putting a lid on the pot and turning the stove to high. And we are the lobsters. We just sit there, clicking our claws, waiting to turn red.

The news says these temperatures could break "all-time records." We treat weather like the Olympics now. "Oh look, we hit 45 degrees! That's a Gold Medal in suffering!" We should not be celebrating this. We should be terrified. But we aren't. We are bored. We scroll past the headline about catastrophic fire danger to look at a video of a cat falling off a table. Our brains are broken.

So, if you are in Victoria or New South Wales this week, good luck. Drink water. Don't light a match. And maybe take a moment to appreciate the absurdity of it all. We built a civilization in a place that catches fire every year, and we just keep rebuilding it. We never learn. We just sweat, complain, and wait for the next disaster. It is the human way. Stay cool, or don't. The sun doesn't care either way.