I am probably America’s most prolific consumer of sugar-free popsicles. I chew ice so often that my family got me a special machine that makes small, soft ice so my habit would be less loud and annoying while we’re watching TV. When my kids tell me to chill out, I take it literally. When my wife asks me if I want to Netflix and Chill, she means watching a movie and having some more popsicles. My favorite Neil Diamond song is Love on the Rocks (and that ain’t no big surprise). Even my personality could be described as cold. I’m a fridge magnet, so I’m part of the problem. From our food to our bodies, humans like things cool. But the cold, hard truth is that refrigerators and air conditioning are part of a vicious cycle that’s damaging the environment. The more we chill, the more the planet heats up. The more the planet heats up, the more chilling we require. But wait, aren’t our products becoming more efficient? Yes, but the more efficient they become, the more widely they are used. David Owen in The New Yorker: How the Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe.

+ I’ll stop the world and melt with you: The irony of all this chilling is that it is leading to more warming and that warming is melting the world’s ice. And that melting releases more carbon into the atmosphere which leads to more warming. Joshua Yaffa in The New Yorker: The Great Siberian Thaw. “Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, akin to unplugging your freezer and leaving the door open, only to return a day later to see that the chicken breasts in the back have begun to rot. In the case of permafrost, this microbial digestion releases a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientific models suggest that the permafrost contains one and a half trillion tons of carbon, twice as much as is currently held in Earth’s atmosphere.” (Humanity is on thin ice…)