The oil painting shared above is titled ‘Coalbrookdale by Night’, as rendered by British artist Philip James de Loutherbourg in 1801.
According to Wikipedia:
The painting depicts the [Bedlam] Furnaces, which belonged to the Coalbrookdale Company from 1776 to 1796. The picture has come to symbolize the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire, England.
Apparently, in 1776, while American colonists were stirring up political revolution on the opposite side of the Atlantic, corporations like the Coalbrookdale Company were creating an economic and technological revolution with the unintended side effect of polluting the atmosphere with excessive carbon dioxide…
Carbon dioxide… which, some say, is having its own unintended side effect: global warming.
The record high temperature for August here in Pagosa Springs happened in 1940, with a temperature of 95 degrees. The daytime temperature last Saturday, August 8, got up to 94 degrees. Darn close, but sorry, no record.
As far as I can tell, my cat Roscoe is not at all concerned about global warming. He stretches himself out on my front porch in the middle of the day, in the full sun, and seems perfectly content.
I sometimes share my own worries with him — the Antarctic ice shelf breaking off, Colorado River reservoirs going dry, the shortage of bagged ice at City Market — but he just blinks his eyes and smiles, as if to say, “Louis, you worry too much about things you can’t control. Enjoy the warm temperatures. Winter will be here soon enough.”
It doesn’t seem fair, that I should have to do all the worrying in the family, while he can lie around and act like nothing’s amiss.
10,000 years ago, the Sabretooth Cats were lying around acting like nothing was amiss. Then, they went extinct.
When you see the Sabre-Tooth Cats in museums, they are usually displayed as if they are about to bite something. But if they were anything like modern cats, they were usually lying around in the grass, most of the time, yawning.
Scientists aren’t sure exactly why they went extinct, but literally hundreds of specimens have been obtained from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. So we know that they tended to be careless about where they walked.
But one popular theory is that their food supply — typically, large herbivores like mammoths and ground sloths — began disappearing about 10,000 years ago, and the Sabre-Tooth Cats soon followed.
Nevertheless, these big cats had roamed the earth — when they weren’t lazing around — for an estimated 2.5 million years. Which is a sight longer than humans have roamed the earth (or lazed around, yawning.) But eventually, they stopped appearing in the fossil record.
I’ve mentioned this precautionary tale to Roscoe, but again, he just smiles as if I’m making a big deal about nothing.
Occasionally, I have this weird thought, that maybe some intelligent life form, many eons in the future, could put Roscoe’s skeleton on display.
The small carnivorous mammal known as ‘Felis catus’ lived approximately 10,000 years ago. It had retractable claws adapted to killing small prey species such as mice and rats. It had a strong, flexible body, quick reflexes and sharp teeth, and its night vision and sense of smell were well developed. It was a social species, but a solitary hunter, typically most successful during the twilight hours…
In the museum diorama, Roscoe’s fossil skeleton would be arranged as if he were taking an afternoon nap on my front porch.
Felis catus became extinct as a result of the global warming events during the 21st century, following the disappearance of the humans that had previously adopted Felis catus as a domesticated pet.
Ideally, this intelligent life form of the future would display my own skeleton in the same museum diorama, earnestly trying to warn Roscoe about our possible demise.
But he wasn’t listening. He was enjoying the sun’s warmth.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.