News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #27
History, as taught by trees, the challenges of carbon-dioxide removal, and fun stuff from the animal kingdom (world's largest beaver dam, blue-eyed reindeer)!
WHAT THE TREES REMEMBER: New tree ring science is teaching us about the past and future perils on our planet. (Washington Post)
Trees remember. They offer us a record of what it was like to live at certain moments in time, atmospherically/climatically speaking. Monsoons, droughts, fires, cold snaps — they are all written in the cells of the tree.
This story offers a beautiful visualization of trees’ capacity for memory, looking closely at ponderosa pines on Mount Bigelow in Arizona. These trees, which can live for more than five hundred years, have important lessons to tell us about the extreme changes taking place on our planet right now, and how they might alter these forests in the decades to come.
Advancements in dendrochronology (“the science of telling time through trees”) are allowing scientists to better understand exactly how tree rings form, which, Kiyomi Morino, the scientist profiled in this story, said, “just opens up our ability to interpret rings that were formed hundreds of years ago.”
This year, the hottest in recorded history, will have left ponderosa casualties in its wake, but it may have also changed the growth patterns in ways that will become visible, if they aren’t already: “Could the record heat and delayed rainfall have stressed the trees so much that they stopped growing in the middle of the year?”
““The power of tree rings … is they have the context of what we’re experiencing now,” said Morino. “They can give us some perspective, and in many cases these days, it’s perspective on how bad things really are.””
Welp. At least there is also this good news from the world of trees: The Biden Administration has announced plans to protect old growth forests (comprising 25 million acres of public lands) from logging, citing their importance to carbon sequestration, biodiversity preservation and their ability to better withstand forest fires.
PUTTING CARBON REMOVAL BACK ON THE RIGHT TRACK: Two former government scientists argue important fixes need to be made, now. (MIT Technology Review)
In order to limit warming to 1.5ºC on average, we will need to suck a lot of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, either via “natural solutions” or technological solutions that don’t exist yet, either at scale or at all. (For example, last week, the Global Carbon Project reported that the world’s technology-based carbon removal only captured about 10,000 tons this year, much less than one-millionth of emissions, according to MIT Technology Review.
Beyond the technical difficulties and magnitude of this challenge, two former Department of Energy staffers are concerned that the whole enterprise isn’t being framed properly, namely that it relies on corporate goodwill (untrustworthy so far) rather than a “publicly-funded and coordinated effort more akin to waste management.”
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