Back in 2010, during a trip to the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy — i.e. the Washington D.C. metropolitan area — I paid a visit to my old neighborhood in the town of Takoma Park, Maryland (not to be confused with an adjacent neighborhood of the same name just across the District line). I could remember the street grid well enough, and made my way to the apartment building I had lived in some thirty-five years previously, just to see what the place looked like. The area was recognizable enough — it was totally Hispanic by then, but it had been moving in that direction even when I lived there. Salvadoran restaurants. Mexican grocery stores. Cuban barber shops, where “razor cut” might have more than one meaning.
So the neighborhood was familiar, except for the growth of trees. What was it with the foliage hanging over every street, and dense greenery blocking the view around every corner? It’s not like it had been a newly-developed area when I lived there — it was an old established suburb by then, with forty- and fifty-year-old buildings and trees that had long since reached their maturity. So what was it with all that mass of greenery? It made navigation more confusing than it should have been.
It got me to thinking about the possibility that increased CO2 in the atmosphere had stimulated all that luxuriant new growth in the trees and shrubs of Takoma Park. The possibility made me look at the landscape in a different way in other places, including the remote countryside here in the boondocks of the Central Virginia Piedmont. Yes, it did seem like all the hedgerows and second-growth areas were choked with densely-packed shrubs and small trees. When I cast my mind back to the way things had looked in the same places thirty or forty years before, it seemed that the landscape back in those days had been more spare, more austere. The view was more wide open then driving along the back roads. But that was a very subjective observation, and could have been ascribed to the power of suggestion.
Or maybe not. Just a few years after my return to the barrios of Takoma Park, NASA published a report about the increase in green biomass across the globe between 1982 and 2015. Posted in 2016, it was entitled “CO2 is making Earth greener — for now”. The weaselly qualification “for now” had to be included to make sure the piece adhered to the Climate Crisis narrative. Sure, it’s nice that the Earth is experiencing more plant growth — but don’t get used to it! It won’t last, and before too long we will all fry, or drown, or freeze, or whatever the latest fashionable apocalyptic scenario is.
According to this report, my subjective impressions about the flora of the East Coast were based on very real changes:
A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.
An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.
Green leaves use energy from sunlight through photosynthesis to chemically combine carbon dioxide drawn in from the air with water and nutrients tapped from the ground to produce sugars, which are the main source of food, fiber and fuel for life on Earth. Studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth.
While rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the air can be beneficial for plants, it is also the chief culprit of climate change. The gas, which traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere, has been increasing since the industrial age due to the burning of oil, gas, coal and wood for energy and is continuing to reach concentrations not seen in at least 500,000 years. The impacts of climate change include global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice as well as more severe weather events.
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I also knew that the phone would come back on today, because it always happens that way. The technician comes to work on Monday morning and looks at his trouble tickets while he drinks a cup of coffee. Then he gets in his panel truck and comes out here to Eerie Hollow to reconnect the string to the tin can.
