Clyde Burnett, Peak to Peak. In early March, global warming produced warm and very moist air from the gulf, and the Arctic changed circulation, which brought a cold air mass. Upper air cold wind from the west and southerly moist warm surface wind produced tornadoes with extensive damage and loss of life. That’s a hard way for those vulnerable folks to adapt to climate change.

Tornadoes are increasing because we have 410 ppm CO2, and we are still working toward 450 ppm CO2 from burning the solid and liquid carbon in coal and oil. There is slight hope for political change to reverse that or at least slow the dangerous rate we are currently maintaining. We’ve said it before: the disasters haven’t hurt the economy enough for voters to make a correction.

We can’t make coal or oil, but we can grow trees with increased fraction of time of the carbon in CO2 as solid rather than gas, as in our normal climate 50 years ago. China and India have planted trees as shown in the satellite photo of increased green. I have been told that household plants remove household odors. Perhaps the use of trees to remove gas and particulate pollution was much of their goal, but they also remove CO2!

However, those seedlings need to grow for 20-30 years before the rate of trapping CO2 becomes large. If we have wildfire here, sequestering is gone overnight and there is an immediate CO2 increase. Hansen has found that a desirable historical situation had 350 ppm CO2. We need to plant our trees now!

(Originally published in the March 21, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)