Tag Archives: Climate Change

Treekeepers, a Look into Forestry and the Role of Tree Planting as a Solution to the Climate Crisis

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Reading Lauren Oakes, “Treekeepers: the Race for a Forested Future”, was a bit of a bi-polar experience for me, with periods of amazement and hope, interrupted by depression and hopelessness….To be fair this wasn’t all a result of the book, as there’s no way I could separate out my reading experience from the roller coaster ride of social, political and economic upheaval that characterizes our current ‘Anthro-Trump-pocene’ period…and the ‘reality’ that climate change is taking on a ‘life’ of its own, no longer a simple linear response to our irresponsible Carbon burning, resource consuming, habit. Oakes is a conservation scientist and a science writer. She is also a mother searching for a way out of the impending crisis that awaits us if we continue on failing to act intelligently, respectfully and with enough urgency, that we can avoid the worst outcome of what is definitely bearing down on us. Oakes spent 4 years interviewing ‘experts’, yes that dubious group of would be influencers, whose work is to head off climatic disaster through the use of the conservation, renewal, restoration and expansion of Earth’s reduced and still declining forest base, the natural systems and cycles that have supported life’s development, what role they could play in forestalling what appears to be on our way and even ameliorating the damage already done. What she tells here is the story of an evolving approach to a ‘solution’, one that has been rife with misunderstanding, conflict, misinformation campaigns, innovation and setbacks, a process that is not just redefining the problem and its potential solution, but the processes and ‘mechanics’ of how we might do this. Trees, once presented as a silver bullet, in a simple replacement program, are not and cannot staunch the Carbon ‘bleeding’. They do, however, still remain an important component of a larger program. Continue reading →

Political Chaos, Wildfire and Drought: We have a choice, but not a lot of time

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I don’t usually repost what I’ve put on my FB page, but the world just keeps getting crazier politically, so much so that our new reality is being lost in the chaos. Now is not the time to give up. As bleak as things may seem to be becoming…it will be far worse if we don’t do what we can to implement a course correction.

If you want to keep your head in the sand, if you believe in the stagnant and bleak Trumpian promises of a return to a ‘golden’ past, if you truly believe that the MAGA movement contains all of the answers we require…don’t read any further. It will only upset you.

Picture from a Spokane, WA area newspaper of one devastated residential neighborhood.

As I write this the world is literally burning. Round it up and there are 2 million acres in Oregon alone either already burned or in the process of doing so this summer, with several months still to go in our ‘fire season’. There are multiple fires each over 100,000 acres. In Washington state Spokane continues to burn. In Bordeaux region of France hundreds of thousands of residents were evacuated while others were because of a fire threatening Madrid, Spain. Most of Europe is undergoing it’s fourth major heat wave with thousands having died as a result. As the drought in the American West and western Europe deepens the flow of rivers and the level of reservoirs across the Western US drop to or near record lows, all while demand for water keeps increasing. There is so much excessive heat and fire around the globe right now that it would overwhelm the news cycle to report it…so we only hear about those most local. Some are publicly claiming it to be a result of a singular ‘super-El Nino’, while most climatologists see this as the new normal, with much worse extremes to come, on an over heated planet. Continue reading →

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, a Review

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Global climate change, in our current political climate, has been relegated to a secondary status. There is so much ‘shit’ hitting the fan right now that it gets largely lost in mainstream media coverage. The science that supports it, continues, although at a slower rate. Our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy has slowed along with the republican denials, their actions to ‘deBidenize’ America, cutting funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act, ‘seed’ monies to fund needed infrastructure investment, along with their cuts to the funding of research into the supporting science and technologies. The topic has been rendered into one of ‘belief’ as if its consequences will have no real world effects, a simple argument of the uninformed, like ‘Ford beats Chevy’, pointless and personal. Author Mike Tidwell, an obvious long time ‘believer’ and lobbyist, has worked over the last 30 years to move the political dial toward climate action, amongst his neighbors, his home state of Maryland and Congress. Here, in his recent book, “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue”, he tells his and his neighbor’s story, in his DC area neighborhood, of the real world impacts they’ve observed and are attempting to combat. Amongst his neighbors are  Congressman Jamie Raskin, his friend, Ning, a college prof who has been working tirelessly on getting a novel carbon sequestration program up and running, a local state legislator who has been working to get massive scale wind generators built off shore and others working in smaller ways, dealing with the fall out of a climate already changing around them which, among other things, is causing crazy weather perturbations, changes in rainfall and temperature swings that are leading to things like a large increase in Lyme disease, because the milder winters are killing fewer of the disease carrying ticks, while also leading to the massive die off of mature trees across their neighborhood. Continue reading →

Climate Change and the Limits to Life: a couple reviews and examination

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Not to ‘rain on anyone’s parade’, but walking home last night at 10:30 from a neighbor’s, the air was still, it was 81F and 51% humidity…ugh. Normally, it cools off significantly here in the high desert once the sun goes down. This summer is different.
Today, August 2, we’re forecasted to break 100F again. That will be the 26th day over 90 this year, the ninth over 100F…with less than 1/4” of rain since June 1. I’ve mentioned before that our average high temp for July is 85F. We were at or below that only four days in July.
Our old normals no longer hold. They are shifting consistently higher from year to year. This is happening worldwide. Its effects are greater, and more devastating, at equatorial latitudes and polar.
It is estimated that at or above a wet bulb (W/B) temperature of 35C the human body cannot cool itself. We cool down by evaporating away sweat on our skin surface. W/B temps mimic this by placing a wet cloth sleeve around a thermometer bulb, the evaporation taking away heat in the same way. W/B temps are then cooler, ‘chilled’ by the water evaporating away, drawing heat away from the thermometer’s temperature sensitive bulb, than ‘dry bulb temps. When these rise higher than W/B 35C, our internal organs and systems begin to falter and will fail in relatively short order, depending on our state of health. Some of us will have greater tolerance than others, but all will die at these levels if they have no way to cool their core temperatures. Some argue that this begins happening below this. Many areas are already experiencing such ‘events’. Governments are still slow to act We continue to build out our cities in patterns that maximize energy use and consume resources and products from around the world which must be transported to us, removed from where they other wise occur. Profit driven businesses, still refuse to change their practices and goals, insisting that the market will solve this…the same market that has created the problem…and we ‘demand’ this, these patterns, goods and services, ever more ‘divorced’ from the places we actually live, the limits and constraints with which we’d otherwise have to live.

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