Yesterday’s Editorial was “Hot”!

Today’s is “Cool”.

Around many Christmases/New Years here in the Cayman Islands I have experienced Nor’westers, flooding, etc. especially my early years. I remember one real bad one that decimated the old Turtle Farm before it got expanded to the mega attraction it is now.

With Global Warming we have seen less of them but the recent cool winds reminded me.

It is certainly a pleasant change to have the temperatures in the mid 70’s instead of the upper 80’s, although I can remember one January about 30 years ago when the temperature dropped below 60! We had to put the gas oven on with the door of it open to keep warm!

I found it amusing this morning when I took my wife’s dog Sugar out for her early morning walk around 7am to see some of the schoolchildren wrapped up as if it was a cold windy day in Scotland. There the temperatures hover just above freezing the majority of the time! 60 degrees is a heat wave! Mild!

It is amazing how our human bodies adjust to the extremes and very quickly.

At the bottom of this Editorial you will see an image of a Norwegian man that went viral swimming almost naked on Norway’s Lake Goksjo with a wreath of ice around his neck. He is smiling and drinking what looks like Vodka.

So how was he able to adjust?

It is all due to “Acclimatization”.

According to an article about this phenomenon on the website Gizmodo it says:

“Acclimatization refers to those physiological responses of a deeper origin: the hormonal and metabolic programming that governs not only your tendency to sweat, but how you sweat, when you sweat, and even the amount of salt your sweat carries with it. This temperature-regulation system is controlled in large part by a collaboration between your hypothalamus and pituitary gland, and manages a range of physiological responses. These include the readiness with which you shunt blood to vessels in your skin (which has a cooling effect); the meter and sensitivity of your heartbeat; your body’s overall production of thermal energy; and the allotment of bodily resources to protecting your liver, brain, kidneys, and other vital organs, to list a few examples.

“These are all thermoregulatory tasks your body performs normally, of course, but when we talk about acclimatization, what we’re actually referring to are the adjustments your body undergoes to optimize the function of those tasks with respect to your environment. Allow me to belabor this point: A bodily mechanism like sweating, in and of itself, is not an example of acclimatization; your body adjusting to warmer temperatures so that it sweats earlier, more profusely, and at a lower salt concentration – that’s acclimatization.”

“Acclimatizing to heat and cold occurs in a similar fashion, with deep physiological adjustments becoming hormonally and metabolically ingrained over long stretches of time. That’s not to say you have to be born and raised in the Spanish Pyrenees (or, in the case of the man in the image below, Norway) to handle living in the cold. Generally speaking, the longer you spend in an environment, the more adept your body becomes at performing under its particular conditions (plunging, semi-nude, into the frozen slush of a Norwegian lake, for example); but numerous studies, conducted from the early 1960s onward, suggest that 10-to-14 days of exposure to relatively higher or lower temperatures is enough to begin reaping the benefits of acclimatization.”

Therefore if we have these “cold” mid 70 degree temperatures for 14 days we will not find them cold.

However, I like these temperatures at the moment because I haven’t felt them for 14 days.

Yea man, it is cool.