Friday, October 27, 2006

exhale

I finally saw "Inconvenient Truth" and without giving away the surprise ending for those of you who haven't seen it, there was one graph that totally changed the way I am experiencing autumn. Gore was showing a graph of the increase of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, and though the general trend was steadily up, it wiggled up and down every year. He explained that the trees in the deciduous forests of the northern hemisphere released enough Carbon Dioxide with the dropping of their leaves in fall to change the CO2 for the whole planet. Right now the trees in our hemisphere are exhaling. No wonder fall feels different than spring. I mean, they both are transitional seasons, right? It can't just be the quantity of light, because fall and spring do feel so very different. Spring is what it feels like when there is more oxygen in the air, fall is a time with more CO2. The air you breathe in fall is literally different than the air you breathe in spring (and that doesn't even account for the radically different plant matter in the air in each season). This is seriously blowing my mind.

1 comment:

eugene chen said...

I have often felt that different areas of the world seem to have different types of air. Certainly by the sea, in the desert, by altitutde, in the city, etc.

In warmer areas closer to the equator, the air feels more dense and pressured. I tend to feel more sleepy. In areas like San Francisco and Denver where the air feels light, I feel more alert and my mind seems to feel more open.