The Goldilocks Moment

Gratitude for the miracle of a loving Cosmos, at Midwinter.

For about the past million years, we've been balanced in an "ice age," going in and out of glaciations, via Sun energy. But the underlying carbon reservoir did not change, until we dug it up and burnt it. Now, we've killed the ice age, and we're headed back to early Cenozoic temperatures, i.e. +10ºC. (The graphics below are from James Hansen, 2011 and 2022.)

This is why "doomers" are doomers, and why "collapse" is a reasonable outlook.

Notice how the Earth's temperature has been trending, for the past 50 million years, towards the beautiful "Goldilocks moment" of our present time (which is labeled the "Holocene"). This is as much a miracle as the fact that the Earth resides at a distance from the Sun that makes life possible (a position known as “the Goldilocks zone). Or that the constants of physics have values such that matter can cohere.

We should show gratitude and respect for the tender care offered to us by the living Cosmos. We are given the opportunity to live human lives in an hospitable world!

What does it mean that we have behaved so badly that the system is now destabilizing on a global scale? I don't know, but it seems like an important question to consider, especially in this season of renewal and redemption.