My sister finally came north for a week — she couldn’t take the oppressive heat in South Carolina anymore.

However, I thought, until recently, that our biggest weather story of the summer had been the many, unusually hazy days we have had caused by wildfires burning in Canada and in the West.

Then came Maui. That changed the conversation. When a town in an idyllic place like Hawaii can be consumed by fire, it brings everything home. You can’t go through a summer like this without discussing climate change.

A recent article in the Economist did that.

Though the article stated clearly that the earth has been warming at a faster rate because of human-caused greenhouse gases, it also framed the discussion in the context of the history of the earth in which human life represents just a very small, almost immeasurable moment in our planet’s multi-billion-year history.

The article did bring up some interesting facts which I had not known before, one being that “two-thirds of the Earth’s land is in the northern hemisphere, and land warms up faster than water does, so northern summers are the hottest times of the year for the planet as a whole.”

The article also traced methane levels in the atmosphere since about 1970. Methane levels rose over most of that time, “mainly because of the rising use of fossil fuels and agriculture. They flattened off at the beginning of the 21st century, but are now growing faster than ever.”

The complexity of what is happening, however, goes beyond fossil fuel and agricultural use. For example, there was a tremendous eruption of an underwater volcano in the Pacific which occurred in January 2022, an event that I had not known about.

It threw “millions of tonnes of sulphur-dioxide gas into the stratosphere” which actually resulted in a reflecting of sunlight and cooling of the planet by about .5 degrees centigrade. However, because it came from a subsea source, it also blew about 70-150 million tons of water vapor into the atmosphere contributing globally to the warming of the planet at the same time.

The underlying story is that whatever human impacts are, Mother Nature keeps doing things on her own that also affect climate and the weather. Is it possible that the smoke from this summer’s fires could, perhaps, have at least a temporary effect of shielding us a bit from the sun and cooling the planet a bit? We don’t know yet.

In that regard, the article highlighted something I had never heard of before–“solar engineering” also termed “sunscreen for the planet.” If human activity has contributed to the warming of the planet, could human science also invent something that could help cool it? The idea suggests the possibility of injecting some kind of protective, reflective field into the stratosphere to help shield us from the sun.

In this whole discussion, what this “summer of fires” has taught us again is that we live in a very complex place–a world of some 8 billion people trying to find our way to ensure that this planet can continue to thrive and survive. It is not just an American problem.

Perhaps a better way to express the challenge we face would be to embrace the vision of the poet Alexander Pope: “Hope springs eternal from the human breast!” Though complex it may be, mankind must work together in efforts to help maintain a sustainable world. There is really no other choice.

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.