Barrel Strength

Summer is an exceptional condition in Canada. Most of the world, most of the time, is sweating in what we would call sweltering heat. Here a milder version of that heat lasts six weeks, if we are lucky. I stepped outdoors this morning in shorts, shirt, and barefoot. I stepped on green grass. The grass was moist, the air humid. The trees were langorously breathing, sending cooler air upwards as they evaporated groundwater through their leaves. The air was a pleasant 78Fahrenheit. A gentle breeze was coming in from the south. It was not even hot by Virginian standards. It felt warm to me. The climate was not trying to kill me, for a change.

How exceptional it is to live in a place where it is above freezing for only six months of the year! I assure you, fellow Canadians, there are parts of the world that have never known glaciation. Where I stand on my lawn, 10,000 years ago it had the same temperature as the Greenland ice sheet, and two thousand years from now it will be that cold again. I look at those swaying green trees with the long appraising gaze of a geologist, where ten thousand years is the shortest meaningful stretch of time. I will be gone in another 40 years, but the landscape I look at will be northern taiga in another thousand, Baffin Island in another two thousand, and high Arctic in another five thousand.

Enjoy the heat while you can, Canadians and fellow northmen. We are nearing the end of the curent warm phase of the Milankovitch cycle.

I encourage you to read up on it. Then you will know we are living in a warm interlude in an ice age.