Better Cold Than Hot

Every day is important, and yesterday was marked by the fact that, in this Mid-Atlantic region at least, we are assured that from now on, till some time in the Fall, there will be no temps low enough to bring on frost,  and therefore for a number of weeks we can breathe much easier about our trees, crops, and other plants.

At a temp of about 56 F,  today is forecast to be much cooler than yesterday, which is turn was not as hot as the day before, and that makes this post fitting, because,  after finishing the Rembrandt book, for my nighttime reading I have turned to "The Revenge of Gaia," by James Lovelock.  He is a distinguished British scientist, who has probably been the main one in first formulating and then promoting the idea that, from about 100 miles underground where the core of molten rock and metal ends, to about another 100 miles up, where the air gives way to outer space, the skin of the Earth  is a living, breathing, and self-regulating creature called "Gaia," like any lion, tiger, raccoon, or human being, and we, taken collectively, far from praying to it, have been exceptionally unkind to it.

I had already gotten from other sources a lot of the stuff that Lovelock talks about in this book.  Still in it he hammers away at a bunch of points that are not so obvious and are worth thinking about.

One of the most interesting is his contention that, given a choice, Gaia, without whose good graces none of us would be very happy here, or alive for that matter, likes cold much better than it likes hot, and this means that all along in the past two seasons, by going through so much discomfort because of being almost constantly cold, I was actually much better off than I had thought,  and that if I really want warm,  along with everybody else I am likely to see much more of that in whatever number of years are left than anyone would want.   The fires in California promise that. 

As counter-intuitive as it seems, Lovelock claims that there's more food for the earth's small creatures and therefore  the bigger ones  in cold climes than there is in the tropics.   That's why the waters in the tropics are so clear and blue, compared to those nearer the poles.  The colder seas are darker, because they contain more nutrients for the plankton and therefore the fish, while the waters approaching the equator are, comparatively speaking, just deserts.   They're beautiful, as deserts on the land also are, but they're still sparing with things to keep a bunch of us going, eating-wise.  

Lovelock also mentions that, where living things are concerned,  the Ice Ages have actually been the Good Times,  compared to the interglacial periods between, such as the one we're in now, despite the fact that during the Ages so much land was covered with ice miles thick.   Many might think that that was indecent, because the glaciers sat squarely atop spots that were so sacred and invaluable  that  they had been reserved for  glories like Moscow,  New York City, Chicago, London, and Paris, though the truth is that  as those places were housing none of the great paintings as yet, that was really  no sort of a loss.     And elsewhere there was actually more land available for the non-sea dwellers than there is now,  because Gaia had stored up in the form of the ice above ground a lot of the water that otherwise would have gone toward broadening the  oceans and so making them a real bear to get across, as today.  Therefore in the Ice Ages  there was also more vegetation to cover all that added acreage, and there wasn't nearly as much in the way of deserts, on land or in the seas.

Cold is also preferable because, as Lovelock says again and again, the Sun has become too hot for the comfort of the living things on Earth.

I can see that, for it seems to me that just in my brief blink of an eye in being around, the Sun has gotten  noticeably  hotter and brighter than it was not so long ago.  

Lovelock tells us that, if it can be believed,  when the Sun and the Earth first started out, the Sun was, for our comfort zones, way too cold, though presumably it was just as close.   But being an ultimate  nuclear power plant without concrete sheathing of any kind, it kept on getting brighter and hotter as it aged, until about two billion years ago,  the temps it furnished were  just right for good living, and Gaia didn't have to work too hard to keep her household pets alive and evolving.  But the Sun didn't stop there, and today, as it figures to do through the rest of its career, it continues to turn up its thermostats.

   Faced with that, Gaia has had to exert itself more and to use  more and more strategies to keep us and all living things, including itself, in a reasonably contented state, and one of the main ways it does that is to pull down carbon dioxide (Lovelock likes to say "pump down," but when you say "pump" I want to see something tangible, a real machine instead of just a concept)  from the atmosphere where it had been serving as an effective  greenhouse cover, and  instead Gaia turns up its ice-maker.    The name of the game, as it needs to be in so many human enterprises, is "regulation," and Gaia uses that to  keep things cooled out and to prevent the Earth from meeting the fate of Mercury, Venus, and Mars, in becoming  a basically burnt-out and forever dead planet.  

And so, by sending up carbon dioxide and other greenhouse coverings while pulling very little of it back down, we as a  species, and just a single one at that,  are at bad cross-purposes with Gaia and consequently with ourselves, for another of Lovelock's points is that for the nearest term, the greatest threat of all this increased heating is to the thing of which we are so proud, civilization.   And  there is no issue, in the short run as well as the long, that matters more.

I am trying to promise to get into the habit of looking at being cold in a different way, though I don't know how much my physiology will permit that.   It could be that too many of my ancestors stayed behind in prickly but balmy Africa a little too long, before being jerked out of there by their throats.

It's just that it feels so forlorn and lonely, not to mention painful, to be cold.