Roses are blooming on bushes with just a few pockmarked leaves remaining. This is a cucumber vine. Crop yields will surely decrease if we continue to pollute the air with greenhouse gasses. These leaves are typical. It's therapeutic to find something pretty, and examine it closely, whilst ignoring as best you can the surrounding decay. The lily of the valley leaves are scorched. As leaves that should be green are yellowing, those that should be purple varieties are turning green instead, like this basil, and potato vine. This is the first season that annual plants have such pronounced symptoms of chlorosis and obviously, for them, it isn't a cumulative effect from years of drought or acid rain or gradual temperature rise. It's not a fungus or a bug or a disease that is affecting every single species that produces chlorophyll, all at once, at the same time! The silky dogwood leaves are all this shriveled, and honestly I don't remember what a fading cone flower should look like but surely not so hideous?
http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/ This is a fascinating and beautiful site to wander around, and then through your tears, google "albedo effect".
As long as I'm making a foray (which used to be for gathering mushrooms, but there aren't any anymore) I may as well depart from climate change and post this endorsement of our former president and his very accurate views:
I started this blog because I have been in despair about trees, which are dying in such huge numbers as to be inconceivable. That horror has turned into a much broader concern, about plants and food, and oceans and sealife, and people and our cultures. I try to keep it on the original topic for the most part, but this issue, of health care reform, is too pertinent and so I include it.
1. Obama needs a victory of this magnitude to go forward and create major legislation to slow down and halt the climate change that threatens to destroy civilization, and
2. The debate about health care is illustrative of the gap between the educated and the idiots. The middle must be informed, and become active.
Yesterday I felt sort of obligated to do my bit and canvas for the Democrats for the election this fall. I'm not too excited or optimistic about the candidates but I feel that President Obama needs a strong message of support. So off I went to Hunterdon County HQ, and was then sent to go door-to-door in Lambertville. I have always thought of Lambertville as a sleepy little town on the Jersey side of the Delaware, across from the heavily touristed Pennsylvania artists' colony of New Hope, to be a reasonably comfortable dwelling place of old historic brick homes which line several blocks adjacent to the river. There are rows of antique shops, clothing boutiques, and some rather nice restaurants. So my first surprise was to be sent to this neighborhood, on the outskirts, which looked more like a Georgia backwater than a plausible commute to exurban Manhattan. And they had their share of bare trees. Once I worked my way into the center of town I was enjoying the afternoon, with clear blue sparkling skies, and the opportunity to visit people in their back yards. They are postage-stamp sized, but often crammed chock full of wonderful trees, shrubs, and potted plants, lovingly tended. Close inspection yielded the usual miseries. These huechera leaves are the perfect emblem of a loss of green chlorophyl. This garden was bigger than most, large enough to include this magnificent oak. Unfortunately, many of its leaves cluttered the sidewalk and road, indicative of terminal despair. And of course, so many of the trees were thin as well. On the way home, I saw this hot-air balloon. When my kids were young, I took them every year to a 6 a.m. launch of a race in Bloomsbury, years before it turned into an overcrowded mash of spectators. Many times at dusk we would see them land in the field across the street. What a lovely magical sight! Coming home, I checked in at the garden and though the cherry tomatos are sweet, I was quite horrified to see how the raspberries are turning a vile black, their leaves mottled. And another tree came down. Last month one landed on the deer fence and had to be removed at great expense. This one will just have to sit and rot. It has the nasty lichen that is rampant. And the leaves are dreadful. Oh and I have a confession to make! I do not write this blog. It is Simon, in the dead of night who, with beak and claw, taps out these missives. He has a new analogy for you!!!! Don't you love them? Simon is so so smart... Imagine you, in some sort of unexplainable desperation, clamber into your car in a closed garage, and start the engine. As the garage starts to fill with carbon monoxide, and you breathe in ever greater concentrations of the poison, you become first sleepy, and then comatose and ultimately, you die. Let us think of the earth as a gigantic garage. Of course, it is after all a finite place, with limits, like walls. Suppose we, the drivers, start releasing ton after millions of tons of invisible, toxic gasses from burning gasoline, coal, and biofuels, into the atmosphere. Sooner or later, as the level of poisonous gasses increases, the trees that need to breathe are going to get drowsy, and then collapse in a wilt, and then shrivel up and eventually die. Basically, they will and must suffocate, unless we stop filling the air with toxic emissions. Guess what? The trees are now all comatose, many if not most, or all, of them already quite beyond any attempts to resuscitate.
Okay, I'm stealing this from commenter Dion, even though he hasn't said I could cause 1. I don't think he'll mind 2. It's a youtube video and 3. Even though I thought it was silly and sort of lame at the beginning, it perfectly expresses what I am doing. Thank you Dion for bringing it to my attention.
I haven't planted cleome in years - it is self-sowing, almost a weed now, and blooms until frost. It was move-in day at Princeton. The enormous trees on campus are so thin they are painful to regard, but students and parents lugging suitcases, boxes, and furniture didn't appear to notice. This is a redbud tree. The leaves show the familiar discoloration of atmospheric poison. It's much worse than last fall and it seems unlikely a tree with this much damage can survive. Princeton has large trees all around town as well as on campus. The leaves of this large tree indicate severe stress. Dogwood appear to be particularly susceptible. Crepe myrtle used to be exclusive to the south, but with warmer winters they are able to thrive in New Jersey. But not with the pollution. Some trees are turning brown - others are showing fall foliage ahead of schedule. Everywhere, the lawns and walkways are strewn with fallen leaves. These dorms have wisteria vine climbing on the stone walls. And the leaves are showing chlorosis.
Here is a story from the New York Times about contaminated water and the lack of EPA oversight.
Invisible pollutants in water are mimicked in the air, to even more deleterious effect. Toxic chemicals from burning fossil fuels and even worse, biofuels, are breathed in by plants and animals.
The EPA and other government agencies are doing a disgraceful job of monitoring the poisonous gasses we are all being exposed to, causing among other effects, cancers, lung disease, asthma, and mass extinctions of vegetation - that would be trees, shrubs, annual crops, and every other component of our shrinking biomass.
And here is a very intriguing post to that article:
"I have a friend who is a chemist and he called his employer the Environmental prostitution Agency. He was regularly asked to change results. Being an excellent chemist he moved on as the problem was too large for him to tackle."
On that note, for levity, I will reproduce an exchange of emails between myself and the scientists at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research following my letter to them about ethanol and pollution:
Hi Gail, Thank you for your interest in our research program at NCAR. We do our best to interact with USEPA and state regulatory agencies to ensure that the knowledge resulting from our research is incorporated into the modeling tools that they use to develop pollution control strategies. cheers, Alex
I forwarded his reply to friends with this note:
awwww, isn't it nice this guy wrote back? I feel so much better now, I can totally relax, knowing EPA is incorporating NCAR data into their models.
One friend answered:
You would think they would get some better language in there.
Everybody knows that "We do our best..." is code for "We don't really care, we won't do anything, and we have no explicit instructions; but now that you mention it, we will put it on the bottom of the list and forget about it."
If they actually did ANYTHING they would be sure to detail what that might be.
To which I said,
I took at as bureaucratize until I got to the "cheers", then I thought it was snark.
Here's the relevant EPA report if you can make heads or tails of it:
so stupid, makes you think we'll deserve what we get. Or rather, we'll get what we deserve, because, why not?
Another recipient wrote back:
I think it's very important that the government continue to conduct assessments of each assessment before the need for an assessment is fully assessed.
The model first proposed by the Department of Redundancy Department should be adopted by all Departments to assure complete compliance with the standards propounded by the Bureau of Standards.
And the final ascerbic pronouncement:
Hmmm... looks like human population numbers will be self regulating.
Speaking of which, on a more lighthearted note, I found this website http://www.vhemt.org/aboutvhemt.htm and heartily support the movement to reduce the human population (support means, I'm in favor of not breeding - but not totally ending the entire human population as a plague on the earth, forever. It seems to me there might be some number of people that could perpetuate the great gifts in our cultures that would simultaneously be enlightened enough to respect the teeming biodiversity that existed 200,000 years ago when people arrived and immediately started mucking things up.).
this summer, for reasons unknown, "the Gulf Stream slowed down," Edwing said, sending water toward the coasts—and sea levels shooting upward.
Oh well, it's certainly heartening to know they are so sanguine about unexplained ocean current slowdown and sea level rise decades before predicted! I can relax now, cause for sure, it follows if there IS anything wrong with the trees, it isn't toxic greenhouse gasses!
They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent…Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences …We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now . . .
- Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936
The science is beyond rational dispute. Sure, there are those who will continue to deny or find “reasonable” excuses for delay. But in the end it will come down to a Hobson’s Choice. There will be no options. The decision will be the inevitable consequence of indecision. It may come down to who lives and who dies. It also may come down to a more simple proposition – when they die – most of them, maybe all of them – as a consequence of disease, famine, war, or worse.
Paleontologists and biologists are increasingly referring to the present era as “sixth great extinction” because of the unprecedented – and increasing – rate of species loss. They aren’t talking about polar bears. One quarter of the world’s corals have already died – the rest are facing imminent threat and collapse. Marine life is in full retreat. The oceans are approaching a level of acidification beyond which they will no longer be able to absorb CO2.
These facts apply to conditions affecting two-thirds of planet’s surface. The remaining third – the dry land we inhabit – is equally challenged. Massive losses of vegetation. Desertification of once arable land. Failing aquifers. Rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets. More and larger forest fires.
And then there’s what everybody thinks of when someone says “global warming” or “climate change” – the accelerating increase in average global temperature. A few years ago, the consensus was that a one to two degree rise by the end of the century was likely. Now it’s more than twice the hike in half the time. Worse, we’ve already put enough greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to push this trend forward for centuries into the future.
This is not conjecture. It is not some scheme cooked up by a cabal of tenured Ph.D.s with a secret design for world domination. It’s not a foreign plot aimed at making the US less competitive. It is not the plot line in a Michael Moore script or Al Gore’s gambit for another Oscar. It is fact. It is inescapable.
But that may be too much to get your mind around. It doesn’t exactly require a leap of faith – just the same degree of imagination required to translate a national security briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US” into a modest increase in airport security or take the information in a 2001 article in Scientific American titled “Drowning New Orleans” into a program to upgrade the levees and review the evacuation plans.
This is just not that hard.
But in case you are still not persuaded that we are well and truly screwed, we can drill this down to a personal level. Instead of greenhouse gasses, worry about carcinogens – chemicals that cause cancer. Burning fossil fuels dumps vast quantities of cancer-causing compounds into the air every day. You are breathing them in. Your children are awash in them. They are another inescapable fact – and they will kill you, or someone you know or love – and there’s almost nothing you can do about it.
Almost.
And it’s really not that hard to do.
We have the technology – right now – today – to completely transform our energy economy from one based on fossil fuels to one based on totally free fuel sources. Solar. Wind. Tidal. Geothermal. It’s just not that big of a deal. It will cause a little bit of displacement. It will also create tremendous economic opportunity. And vastly increase our national security. And balance our trade deficit. And much more.
It will also make us all healthier. And lower our healthcare costs. And, most importantly, make it much more likely that you, and those you love, and those who play some large or small role in your daily life, will avoid the pain and suffering of cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
We can do something now – or wait for the inevitable “Pearl Harbor Moment”. Now will cost a lot less. And waiting for Pearl Harbor carries with it the very real possibility of defeat.
