Running out of air rapidly

I RECENTLY saw a TV report stating apple growers in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the US are struggling to grow apples and climate change is to blame.

The really bad news isn’t that Virginia apple harvests are failing, but it is a signpost for the dire climate change scenarios we’re heading towards. If apple trees are failing and dying as our planet warms, trees of every type will start to fail and die.

Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently reported that September 2016 “was the warmest September in 136 years of modern recordkeeping” in the US. There’s no doubt the climate is changing rapidly and it’s threatening countless plant and tree species that won’t be able to adapt.

Trees can’t pick up their roots and move, and different species of trees are differently adapted to particular types of soils, growing seasons, water availability and even altitudes, so trees are especially vulnerable to shifting climates.

This will have a profound impact on our planet. Trees are the planet’s lungs; they literally breathe in carbon dioxide through leaves and then exhale oxygen as waste, which you and I are breathing right now. When trees “inhale” carbon dioxide though, they don’t just “exhale” oxygen, they also trap carbon in their wood. The bigger they grow, the more carbon they hold. Beyond that, the root structures are necessary for healthy soils, and healthy soils hold in significant amounts of carbon trapped from the atmosphere.

When trees die those processes are reversed; trees stop capturing carbon and start emitting carbon as their wood rots. And as trees die due to our warming planet’s shifting climates, the dying trees will release once-stored-carbon back into the atmosphere, further accelerating the warming.

Trees are also essential to our planet’s water cycle, and water issue will get worse as climate change threatens forest habitats. We’re already facing drinking water crises worldwide, in part because of how humans have mismanaged our water resources, but also because our reckless management of forest resources has fundamentally disrupted the water cycle in many parts of the world.

In a healthy forest ecosystem, rain falls and soaks into the ground. As water seeps into the ground, it generally absorbs high concentrations of dissolved minerals, especially salts.

When trees die the saltier water underground is allowed to creep upward, infiltrating closer and closer to the surface, until it damages the surviving trees’ immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to parasitic infections.

If no trees are able to grow back, the salty water will infiltrate further towards the surface, killing crops and ultimately leading to desertification. Worldwide deforestation has destroyed soil, polluted water and left huge swathes of wasteland.

Failing apple orchards aren’t the end of the world, but are a signpost for potential disasters if we don’t take bold and immediate action. We need to start respecting how necessary forests are for the health of our planet (and our species!), and that means putting an end to slash-and-burn farming and severely limiting clear-cutting forests.

We need to start intelligently re-planting forests to help suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, to help rebalance the water cycle and to produce healthy top soil that will sustain future generations.

We also need to tackle climate change at its core, putting a price on carbon and investing massively in renewable technologies and technologies to capture planet-warming carbon from the atmosphere – and then we may be able to move towards a world that works for all. — Patrick Sekoe, Buffalo Flats