Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Pique n' your interest

Fun in the sun

Greased up sunbathers bask along the shoreline of Rainbow Park, like Galapagos lizards on the faraway beaches of that fabled island. Like Darwin, I wonder what it’s all about, and reflect on the concept of natural selection.

The biggest difference between the two species, humans and lava lizards, is that the lizards actually have a good reason for being out there. The sun and the heat helps them to digest food and keep their metabolisms running smoothly.

People do it because tans are aesthetically pleasing. Even in this age of 10-minute sunburns and climbing skin cancer rates, tans are still considered to be healthy and beautiful. Get too much sun one day, stagger home, and then collapse on the couch, dehydrated and babbling incoherently, and the first words you’ll hear from members of the opposite sex is how healthy you look. Never mind that you feel like you’ve run a marathon when in fact you just lay around all day, at least your skin looks vital and robust.

I’ve never put much stock in sunbathing, as my ingrained farmer’s tan will attest.

For one, I find it boring. If I have something to read, I can manage a few minutes here and there, but I’ve never been good at sitting or laying still.

Secondly, It’s too hot. If it’s warm and sunny enough to consider sunbathing, it’s already about five degrees too hot for me. I’m a winter person, through and through, with maple syrup running through my veins. The heat saps my energy, my intelligence, my good humour and, given enough exposure, my will to live. The few beach vacations I’ve been on were spent almost entirely in the water and in the shade.

Thirdly, I hate that tired and punch drunk feeling you get hanging out in the hot sun, barely able to move, doing next to nothing. I’d rather feel exhausted from a bike ride or a run through the trees than an overdose of Vitamin D.

Last but not least, I tend to burn and blister like a lobster in an incredibly short period of time. Those same beach vacations I spent in the water were usually preceded by a few days spent in the hotel lathered in aloe and Solarcaine. Sunscreen delays the effects, but nothing on the market seems to be able to block the sun entirely.

Once burned, I can generally tan a little better, but even my darkest tan seems to fade in a couple of days, after which point I have to go through the whole burn ordeal all over again.

The worst part about burns are the incredibly observant comments you get from your friends.

"You got a sunburn!" they say. Then they start to poke your skin, bringing out little white circles to show just how overcooked you are.

Well, duh. When you’re burned, you know it. You can feel it. You can almost smell it. You’re face is raw, your lips feel like someone spiked your lip balm with habenero sauce, and you radiate heat like a toaster. This is followed by a sleepless night, some mild shivering, an awkward cold shower, a trip to the pharmacy trying to avoid the stares of the general public, and some discomfort with sheets, furniture and clothes.

That’s not to say I don’t like summer, just that I would rather spend it in the shade than the beach. Fair enough – to each his own.

My only concern is that the sun seems to be getting brighter every year, and harder to hide from. I don’t remember the sun being as white hot and glaring as it seems to be these days.

When I was a kid, it would take hours to sunburn. Now I can get red and raw in just half an hour.

I used to think that the sun was kind of yellow and the sky a deep blue. Now the sun seems more white than yellow, the colour of a camera flash, and the afternoon sky seems to have gotten a few shades paler.

I used to be able to glance at the sun for an instant and see a clear disc. Now I can’t even look in the same general direction as the sun without getting a headache and blurred vision. Even with sunglasses on, it appears that the sun has no shape anymore, just light.

Am I losing my mind – did the sun somehow change? Is it brighter today than it was 20 years ago?

NASA scientists turned their considerable melons to this issue back in 1999 – one year after the warmest year in recorded history, at the end of the warmest decade this planet has seen in at least a thousand years.

Those scientists concluded that the sun is in fact getting brighter, and could be a factor in all of the climate change and warming that is occurring as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. I know the Bush government believes we need 20 more years of study before acting on global warming, but I tend to believe the thousands of scientists that backed the Kyoto protocol.

According to NASA, solar radiation has increased by 0.05 per cent a decade, which means that the sun is 0.15 times brighter than when I was born.

While that may seem insignificant, please keep in mind that this is the sun we’re talking about, not a fluorescent light. Every second the sun releases more energy than humans have used in the history of civilization. From dawn to dusk, the sun bombards us with solar radiation, including UV rays, that is powerful enough to kill every living thing on the planet. If it wasn’t for the filtering properties of our atmosphere – specifically the ozone layer, which is still in decline – we wouldn’t exist.

So what does 0.15 times more sun mean, in combination with factors like the ozone layer and global warming?

In the past decade, the number of reported skin cancers in Canada has increased by more than 60 per cent. It’s now the second most common cancer among women.

The more radiation that gets through the atmosphere, the more at risk we are of skin cancers, cataracts, and immune system diseases. Still, approximately half of Canadians don’t use any kind of sun protection whatsoever according to Health Canada. Considering that it takes anywhere from 10 years to 30 years to develop most skin cancers, and the atmosphere and ozone issues are at their worst, doctors expect skin cancer rates to continue to rise.

Enjoy your lounging, lake lizards. I’ll enjoy my farmer’s tan and the shade.