Last week, as much of the world sweltered under temperatures usually found in a steel mill near the open hearth, an evening breeze blew up an East Boothbay hill.

It cooled a smiling crowd gathered at Bigelow Lab for the regular summer show-and-tell series called Cafe Sci. It is a chance for the marine scientific superstars to explain what they do and why it is important to us all.

This year’s opening performance was not a complex scientific lecture on the food chain and how the tiny critters form the basis for ocean life. Instead, Bigelow presented Rockport’s Bay Chamber Schools Halcyon Chamber Music Quartet as background for a slide show to show how Mother Earth is warming at an alarming rate. Somehow, the soothing strings playing Bela Bartok and Philip Glass made it almost palatable as a nervous audience watched — step by step — how mankind used fossil fuels since the industrial revolution to boil the socks off Mother Earth. Yes, Bigelow soothed the audience with wine and cheese, but they delivered a deadly serious message.

In a nutshell, they show how we are fouling our own nest, soiling our own mess kit, and playing Russian roulette with the future of our children and grandchildren. The culprit? Nearly 200 years of climate change. It began when our great-grandfathers burned coal to power the steam engine, and continues today.

Later, as we drove home and turned on the TV news, this theme was punctuated with accounts of heat waves boiling cities from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, Phoenix and Florida. Day after day, millions of our countrymen, countrywomen, kids and grandkids were forced inside to avoid weeks of 100- to 120-degree temperatures. Many in the Southwest, South and Midwest could cocoon in air-conditioned buildings. For others ranging from China to Europe, the soaring temperatures levied a death sentence to the old, the infirm and the young.

Meanwhile, intense storms are hammering us, like the event that flooded our neighbors in Vermont. For once, everyone was talking about climate change.

Just downstream from the Damariscotta River lies the Gulf of Maine. Like the rest of the planet, it is warming, too. Barney Balch, Bigelow’s senior scientist, has studied and charted the Gulf of Maine for 20 years, and he believes, no, he can show, that the waters off our shore are rising. And, says Bigelow’s CEO, Dr. Deborah Bronk, the rising temperatures are changing the Gulf itself. Near the shore, a cold current from the Arctic flows down through the Gulf of Maine hugging the coast. Offshore the warm current called the Gulf Stream flows north. Bronk says the Gulf Stream is getting warmer, as is the cold arctic current called the Labrador Current, which is not as frigid as it once was and is moving east. The combination is helping to warm the Gulf. That may have an impact on Maine’s fishery.

In an interview, she said her biggest fear would be a massive ocean heat wave, like “The Blob” that appeared in the Pacific Ocean. In 2013, a huge patch of warm water, dubbed “The Blob,” for a movie monster that ate everything, formed off the coast of Alaska and grew until it reached from Mexico to the Aleutian Islands. Three years later, it had raised the water temperatures by 2.5 degrees Celsius, (that is 35.5 degrees Fahrenheit).

According to the magazine Science, by late 2016, the marine heat wave crashed across ecosystems along North America's western coast, reshuffling food chains and wreaking havoc.

“That is a nightmare for me, and we don’t understand why it formed,” said Bronk.

But the Bigelow message was not all doom and gloom. They offered some good news, too. Bigelow scientists are working on ways to combat climate change by limiting the amount of methane gas going into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Much of it comes from cows. When they process food, they burp methane. Bigelow scientists are working to limit cow methane burps by feeding them a concoction made from algae.

“We have patented this process and are working on ways to make it effective,” Bronk said.

So, as the wine and cheese crowd absorbed the serious message from the climate change slides, along with the dulcet melodies of Bartok and Glass, Bronk delivered them a bit of good news. She showed how Bigelow Lab’s scientific horsepower is not only studying the changing oceans, they are also working on ways to combat the world’s number one problem. By discovering an algae salad to help Bossy the Cow and her sisters with their digestion, they may, just maybe, help cool down Mother Earth. And they are doing it right here in our hometown.