According to the best scientific data currently available, both the average and the mean temperatures of Hell have risen 3.8 degrees since 1955. Although an increase of this size may seem insignificant, especially to those not spending eternity there, the reality of the situation is quite different when experienced in concrete terms. For example, occupants of Hell who in 1955 were standing night and day in boiling pitch up to their knees report that, owing to the expansion of pitch at higher temperatures, they now must endure the torment all the way up to mid-thigh, or even higher, during Hell’s warmer seasons. Condemned souls who have to lie on their backs chained to a flat rock while a white-hot sheet of iron is lowered to within inches of their faces have stated that the rise in Hell’s ambient temperature now makes the iron seem much closer to their faces than it actually is.

Illustration by Zohar Lazar

Former Vice-President Al Gore, who was among the first to raise concerns about this problem, convened an interdisciplinary gathering in December of 2008 to discuss some of Hell’s climate issues and how we might begin to address them. To encourage the widest possible range of views, Mr. Gore invited a mixture of climate experts, satanic functionaries, representatives of industry, people from the faith community, average citizens, advocates for the aged, and a large number of the souls of the damned who are dealing with these changes on a daily basis. Owing to travel restrictions on some of the participants, the convocation took place deep in a smoldering, sulfurous Hell-mouth below a subbasement in the Sony Building. The following is an edited transcript:

MR. GORE: Thank you all for coming today—is that rotten-egg smell bothering anybody? We’re working on getting some fans to ventilate that out of here—and I’d like to start right in with a question for those of you who have temporarily ascended from the innermost bowels of Hades. You know what it’s like down there, while many of us still don’t. First off, I think we’d all like to know: how hot is it?

MR. MAGUS: Thank you, Mr. Gore, for convening this distinguished assembly, and I’m honored you invited me. My name is Simon Magus and I am, or was, a Samaritan sorcerer of the first century consigned to everlasting perdition for the sin of simony, the selling of church offices or preferments (a sin, for what it’s worth, named after me). I’ve been in Hell for going on two millennia now, and, to be honest with you, I haven’t noticed that much of a difference. I’m told it’s hotter lately, and I guess I’ll take your word for it. But where I am, down in the Third Chasm, it’s incredible. I mean, flames fall on our bare feet constantly, the rock our bodies are stuck in is practically on fire—it’s Hell, basically, so it’s very, very hot already. I just worry that we might be making a big deal out of nothing here.

MS. BIELUSKA: Can I respond to that?

MR. GORE: Please, go ahead.

MS. BIELUSKA: Mr. Gore, I am the shade of Amber Catherine Bieluska, of Lakewood, Ohio, and I would like to disagree strongly with the statement that has just been made. I am in Hell for a lot of minor things, the biggest one being that I never paid the sixties band that played at my third wedding, and I’m supposed to be enduring only mild agony in First Circle Plus, which is as high in Hell as you can go, and my own personal suffering and atonement have got so much worse just in the past few years. Where I’m at, it’s always been more stuffy than really hot hot, but recently it’s become so damp and humid, and, with the incoming spirit traffic and all the particle pollution from that, I feel my own punishment, which was totally unfair to begin with, has been made much more horrible through no fault of my own.

MR. GORE: Thank you, Ms. Bieluska and Mr. Magus, and we’ll be coming back to you shortly, but now I’d like to turn to one of the country’s leading authorities on terrestrial and infernal climates, Dr. James Hansen, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Hansen, tell us, are we “making a big deal out of nothing”?

DR. HANSEN: Thank you, Mr. Vice-President, and I extend greetings to all you folks, former folks, and Satan-serving fiends who have taken the time to attend this vitally important event. I wish I could say we were making too much of Hell’s growing problems, but I’m afraid the news in that area is very grim indeed. As you may know, more human beings now occupy our planet than have occupied it at any other time in all of history or prehistory—some six and a half billion souls, and counting—and when these people die, as they’re all going to do, we can anticipate that all but .0001 per cent of them will not be going to Heaven. Granted, a lot of these will stop at Purgatory, but the rest will descend directly to Hell. We expect that the sudden influx of souls will put a huge strain on Hell’s carrying capacity and make large regions of it virtually uninhabitable.

Now, we are accustomed to thinking of the basic affliction of Hell as the burning brimstone—and, yes, brimstone is a significant part of the package, with its horrible odor and disgusting yellow color and the way it sticks to the skin and so on. But brimstone is essentially just sulfur, a rather expensive commodity when compared with, say, coal. And the fact is that owing to cost considerations low-grade soft coal—so-called “dirty coal”—is currently providing more than ninety-three per cent of the energy for the fires of Hell. At the rate of growth we’re seeing now, consumption of that amount of coal for all eternity is simply unsustainable. As you know, I have recently been involved in an international committee looking into Hell’s long-term energy picture, and we have recommended that Hell convert as soon as possible from a coal-based soul-scourging system to one that relies on clean-burning, plentiful, and inexpensive natural gas. Now, I am aware that this idea has not been popular among the dark powers and principalities, but—

(Here the tape of the proceedings is interrupted by blasts of deafening static from the electromagnetic emanations of the demons, tempters, subtempters, satyrs, and gargoyles who begin to burst through interstices in the Hell-mouth’s crusted floor, flying redly past the speaker’s dais and among the participants looking on from folding chairs. An unholy discord and din, with howling and gnashing of teeth untranscribable. Now a molten whirlpool appears and advances gurgling until it reaches Mr. Gore and sucks him from view.)

“Hello? Hello? . . . Is this thing on? . . . Hello, this is Al Gore, and I’m fine, my pant cuffs are singed and the bottoms of my shoes are smoking a little, but I want to emphasize that I am O.K. I am going to continue to talk into this lavalier microphone clipped to my shirt collar in the hope that those of you up top can still hear me. What has happened is that I seem to have slid down a chute type of deal into the vestibule of Hell itself. It’s uncomfortably warm here, no question about that, and there are big red neon signs saying ‘You Are in Hell—Get Used to It!,’ and now I see a robed spirit figure walking toward me and—hey, wait a minute! Is that . . . is that Mickey Mantle?”

“Welcome to Hell, Mr. Vice-President, and, yes, you are correct, I am the spiritual remnant of what used to be Mickey Mantle—baseball legend and executive. I have been consigned to this place not for anything I did on the diamond but for some of my off-the-field antics, as detailed in such books as ‘Ball Four,’ by Jim Bouton, and Billy Martin’s ‘Number 1.’ If those books had not been written, my sins probably would have escaped notice—but, hey, I’m not complaining. So far I’ve been enjoying my assignment as Hell’s official greeter, and I’d love to take you on a look around. May I?”

“Lead away, Mick!”

“All right, Mr. Vice-President—watch your head as we go down this hot-lava staircase here, and over on your zzzt left you can see the zzzt where teachers who were zzzt mean to zzzt in elementary sch_zzzt_ must suffer zzzt zzzt zzzzzzzzzzzt . . .”

(At this point, Mr. Gore descended beyond the coverage area and began to break up. The colloquium adjourned for a ninety-minute lunch, after which the transcript resumes.)

SATAN HIMSELF: Could everybody please take their seats? Surrender your souls to me and worship and obey me? Thank you. I’m told that Sony will need this space back by 5 P.M., and there’s still a lot left on the agenda, so we have to move along. Some of you might not recognize me without the big cape and the collar that goes all the way up to my horns, and my tail is tucked into my right pant leg, but I’m Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Abaddon, Baal, Old Nick, Mr. Blackburn, Randi Weingarten, or whatever name I’m being given these days. Mr. Gore has thoughtfully suggested that while he’s finishing his tour I rise from my foul throne at the absolute lowest depths of perfidy and corruption to address you about the troubling situation we’re facing in Hell today.

Right now in Hell we are hurting. That’s the single most important take-away I would like you to get from what I have to say to you this afternoon: we are hurting. Hell is being pressed to and beyond its limits to such an extent that we are having trouble simply performing our jobs. Every day, I must make hard choices from among an inadequate supply of options. People in the land of the living are constantly requesting that this or that other person “rot in Hell,” and we’ve always tried to accommodate that, and as a result we have literally tens of billions of individuals—tier after tier after tier of them—sitting there rotting, and we have had to put in new tiers and still they are all over the place. And is anybody besides us giving any thought to maintenance? To the necessary monitoring of the rot? To staffing? I’m a detail-oriented type, I’m actually in the details, and recently that’s been where I’m falling down, and it’s hurting my most important attribute, which is my pride. I like my helper devils to have the best titanium pitchforks, and that’s been impossible for us under current conditions, so they’ve been having to just sort of poke the wretched sinners with their long and pointy fingernails. That’s only one example.

Because of ongoing constraints, I am sorry to say, the operation of Hell is no longer even close to what it should be, and important areas of quality are being degraded. I hate with my most ancient and implacable hatred of all that is good to have to say this, but unfortunately it’s true. So, for me, the whole increase-in-temperature thing, while important, is pretty far down on my list of concerns. I can stand at the exact center of the sun, temperature twenty-eight million degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s like a summer breeze to me. Far as I’m concerned, warming is not the problem; it’s the over-all decline in Hell’s capabilities. Right now, with the resources we’re being given, we are not punishing souls for their specific transgressions anymore, we’re just warehousing them. And that’s a shame.

So when you look at your kids asleep in their beds after you return to your homes this evening, I want you to ask yourselves, “What kind of Hell am I leaving for them, and for my grandchildren?” Once we’ve all thought about that, maybe we can set aside personal concerns and begin to act in the larger interest of Hell. But now I am being informed that my time is up. Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you have any idea who you are talking to? May I do my demonic laugh before I go? ♦