January 2026
The world is changing. Nature doesn’t make value judgements; it simply reacts to circumstances. Christians believe that God provides. Correct, because nature is the tool set and the resource base. What occurs, is nature’s reaction to circumstances. ‘We reap what we sow’. This proverb describes a reaction of nature to conditions occurring due to our virtues and mistakes. We are sadly generating a greenhouse from carbon emissions. But we must take collective responsibility for stewardship of planet earth. Naturally, we must also react.
In nature, such things do naturally happen, but with many times smaller impacts, e.g. volcanic eruptions. Also, natural crises due to meteorite impacts. Volcanos produce gases released from magma as it rises, they then produce:
1. Water Vapour (H₂O): The most abundant volcanic gas, typically accounting for more than 60% of emissions and sometimes exceeding 90%. It is largely harmless apart from generating lightning and floods.
2. Carbon Dioxide (CO₂): This gas typically makes up 10% to 40% of emissions. While essential to the atmosphere, initially, it poses a significant local hazard because it is denser than air and can collect in lethal concentrations in low-lying areas, causing asphyxiation.
3. Sulphur Dioxide (SO₂): This is the third most common gas, often comprising a small percent of the emissions. It has a pungent odour and irritates the eyes, skin, and respiratory system. In the atmosphere, it reacts with moisture and sunlight to create volcanic smog (“vog”) and acid rain, and in large eruptions, the resulting sulphate aerosols can even have a short-term cooling effect on the global climate.
Before mammals and us, Earth was dominated by plants, reptiles, amphibians and fish, also invertebrates and micro-organisms. They lived and died and remained buried beneath the moving sediments of the planet. They decayed naturally into a sludge that became crude oil. Then humans appeared. The first oil wells were dug, and the oil refined from the mid 1850s in North America. Since then, the production of burnable oil has escalated to the vast industry that now pervades the modern world and fuels many different industries, but particularly travel. The outcome is the increasing concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other products of combustion, mimicking some of the effects of scores of volcanic eruptions. This caused the current increase in global temperatures, particularly the oceans, leading to climate change. As the evaporation of global water accelerates, the amount of energy in the atmosphere is raised increasing air movement and the total volume of water in the sky. This in turn leads to more precipitation (rain), floods, and stronger winds. The only way to reverse this process is to refrain from burning fossil fuels. The human population passed 8 billion on November 15th, 2022, together we must decrease the use of fossil fuels. Small positive changes from many can lead to success!
Insects such as fleas spend the winter in the direct company of their endothermic host animal, which could be a bird or mammal. Reptiles such as lizards and snakes or amphibians such as frogs and newts, like invertebrates such as slugs and spiders are exothermic. They are entirely dependent on the external temperature for active life, so they will go into dormancy, i.e. hibernate. Some spiders have adapted to humans and are happy to live in peoples houses all winter such as the domestic house spider (Tegenaria domestica). This is the one that is sometimes seen running across the floor in a warm sitting room on a winter’s evening. Or else there is the cosmopolitan cellar spider (Pholcus phalangioides), sometimes called daddy long legs. These tiny animals with long spindly legs hide in ceiling corners or behind furniture and make long random cobwebs which catch small insects such as mosquitos and house flies.
Few mammals hibernate. Bears (Ursus sp.) do, reducing their body temperature from 37.7℃ to about 31℃. Dormice drop their body temperature to that of their surroundings optimally between 1 and 4 ℃, where the least amount of energy is consumed. Their heart and breathing rate drop by about 90%!