A Road Scholar with a Bigger Charge Account

 

Trees can die directly from insufficient watering or simply become more susceptible to diseases and pests like bark beetles. We’ve always enjoyed the splash of life that trees can bring to an urban street. Aside from the shade and the decorative look, trees also absorb carbon dioxide as their chlorophyll-blessed leaves and needles convert CO2 to oxygen. But as farmers around the world are discovering, as climate change redefines a new-normal in temperature and precipitation ranges, trees and crops may stay put, but their growing zones are moving!

If you have spent time in the Pacific Northwest, where timber and paper mills have been based for a very long time, it is spectacular to see forests without end… even after the recent devastating wildfires. For large parts of Oregon and Washington, particularly coastal and island communities, air conditioning has been an unnecessary luxury. Rainy western parts of the state, however, have given way to sustained heatwaves holding at over 100 degrees-plus Fahrenheit for days on end. Seattle, with the well-deserved nickname as the Emerald City because of endless green trees everywhere, may soon have to change that flattering epithet to the Dirt Brown City.

They’re so jaded with constant and mostly gentle rain up there that anyone wearing a raincoat or carrying an umbrella is immediately identified as a visitor, not a resident. Now they don’t seem to need to worry about getting wet up there for an entirely different reason. Manuel Valdes, writing for the November 22nd Associated Press, recounts this mounting arid sadness: “As the driest summer in Seattle’s record books ended, trees across the city were sounding silent alarms.

“It was the latest in a string of Seattle summers in the last decade, including a record-breaking heat dome in 2021, to feature drier conditions and higher temperatures that have left many trees with premature brown leaves and needles, bald branches and excessive seeding — all signs of stress.

“‘You see it in big leaf maples and hemlocks, just loaded with cones or seeds, it’s kind of their last-ditch effort to reproduce,’ said Shea Cope, an arborist at Washington Park Arboretum, a sprawling 230-acre park north of downtown… This summer was fatal for three ‘significant’ trees in the park’s pine collection, including an 85-year-old Japanese red pine infected with fungus left by beetles… ‘We’re losing conifers faster than our broad leaf, deciduous ones,’ Cope added as he surveyed a towering knobcone pine with half its canopy dead…

“Cities worldwide have promised to plant more carbon-absorbing trees to help fight climate change. Research has shown the shade of mature trees also helps reduce unhealthful ‘heat islands,’ especially in poor neighborhoods . President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act infused $1.5 billion into the Forest Service’s urban tree program — money for cities to do even more planting and maintenance.” Except it’s far bigger than even 1000 times that sum.

Indeed, sweltering residents in Puget Sound are finding that once laughable (to them) national obsession with air conditioning is becoming increasingly necessary even in the San Juans. Even in a land where cheap electricity is generated by hydropower, this is not a trend that is moving in the right direction. For me, it is one of those seminal moments, a nasty hint from Mother Nature, that if aridification can happen in the Pacific Northwest, it is a red flag warning that it will happen all over the globe. Folks are going to have to make do with fewer coffee beans and chocolate where others on this planet simply starve to death.

We’ve been misled to believe that all this will happen gradually; too many climate warnings describe “life by the end of the century.” But this canary in our climate change coal mine kills in sudden jerks and starts… NOW. TODAY.

“Researchers from France and Australia analyzed the impact of higher temperatures and less rain on more than 3,100 tree and shrub species in 164 cities across 78 countries. They found about half the trees already were experiencing climate conditions beyond their limits. They also concluded that by 2050 nearly all tree species planted in Australian cities will not be able to survive in urban areas.

“‘If trends hold, we are going to have a lot of trees die,’ said Nicholas Johnson, an arborist for Seattle City Parks. ‘Under heat, trees get weak — just like people.’… Heat and drought force trees to spend energy surviving that would otherwise go to regeneration, growth or fighting off disease and pests, Johnson said. ‘Everything outside is trying to eat a tree. The stresses become compounded.’…

“‘It’s not the gradual change that’s going to be the problem, it’s these extreme swings of too much water, too little water, too much wind, and storm intensities are going to cause these rapid changes,’ said David Nowak, a retired scientist for the U.S. Forest Service.

“Hurricane Katrina in 2005 wiped out about 10% of the trees in New Orleans, said Michael Karam, director of Parks and Parkways. And in 2021, he added, Hurricane Ida uprooted many new saplings... ‘The need to increase the canopy is greater than in years past,’ he said. ‘But the benefits in an urban setting remain the same. On any hot day, go in the shade and you’re reminded that trees are such a benefit to public health and welfare.’” AP. And we are perilously close to a point of no return, where we have culled so many greenbelts, melted so many glaciers and polar ice, released so much methane from melting tundra and destroyed so many natural costal barriers that climate change can continue even without our dumping massive greenhouse gas discharges into the atmosphere.

I’m Peter Dekom, and those momentary spikes in intensity that seems to define modern natural disasters are going to bring an accelerated and very abrupt reality to a whole lot of climate change deniers and marginalizers… and the rest of us will suffer right along side them.