The start of a new year in most people’s eyes is viewed as a time to renew, to wipe the slate clean and to start from scratch. With the new year in Austin, Texas, came record breaking temperatures, the hottest temperature being 86 degrees Fahrenheit on January 31st, according to the Austin Statesman. That is 3 degrees over the record high temperature of 83 degrees Fahrenheit, which was set in 1911, and a whole 23 degrees higher than the average temperature of 63 degrees Fahrenheit that is normally seen for this time of the year. Need I remind you that winter was technically still in full swing and not even half way completed since the official first day of Winter for 2015 was December 22 and the first day of Spring for 2016 was March 20. Additionally, February and March were some of the hottest months on record as well. Majority of their daily high temperatures well exceeding the recorded historical averages logged by AccuWeather. A few degrees does not seem like a lot numerically, but it does make a difference when the entire globe increases by one or two degrees.
I know for a fact that rapidly changing and/or fluctuating temperatures between hot and cold or just plain hot can cause serious health concerns in humans. For example, when the environmental temperature changes, I get extremely sick. I remember that some time in between January 2016 and February 2016, there was about three consecutive weeks that I was sick and the tree pollen was terrible. I looked up some articles on how climate change can affect human health and was conflicted and shocked with one of the articles that I found. There was an paper from a document called Potential effects of future climate changes on forests and vegetation, agriculture, water resources, and human health that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published in 1987 titled “Climate Effects on Human Health”. It had an underlined part under a section titled “findings” that stated that “weather has a profound effect on human health and well-being. It has been demonstrated that weather is associated with changes in birth rates, and sperm counts, with outbreaks of pneumonia, influenza and bronchitis, and is related to other morbidity effects linked to pollen concentrations and high pollution levels.” All of which I feel as if I have touched upon earlier. The National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a booklet based upon data from the Ecological Impacts of Climate Change (2008), by the Committee on Ecological Impacts of Climate Change. Within the booklet, there was a paragraph that opened up the actual topic of how climate change affects the environment. It said verbatim: “Living things are intimately connected to their physical surroundings. Even small changes in the temperature of the air, the moisture in the soil, or the salinity of the water can have significant effects. Each species is affected by such changes individually, but those individual impacts can quickly reverberate through the intricate web of life that makes up an ecosystem.” Climate change effects, in my mind, is similar to knocking down on domino and starting a chain reaction of falling dominoes that then split into different patterns and cannot be stopped without completely destroying everything.
While I was doing my weekly observations and one-on-one time with nature, I approached some people on the trail that were either taking a break from jogging or relaxing on the grass to ask them how they felt about the weather being hotter than it usually is. I asked about 15 people in one day and all of their answers were surprisingly very similar. Majority of them talked about global warming and how humans are contributing to global warming through ways of air pollution, primarily through transportation. I talked to one man that described transportation in the manner of “… drilling fossil fuels from the Earth to create gasoline that is then sold to drivers to get around in their vehicles that give out exhaust and sometimes dark smoke and vapors that rise into the air and pollute the atmosphere.” A woman that I had talked to a few minutes earlier said something very memorable to me about global warming and how “…it is all just a global cycle that uses machines that pollute to fuel other machines that pollute to “better societal productivity”, which turns around and produces other “beneficial” machines that also pollute.” Honestly, I could not have said it better myself. On my way home from Lady Bird lake, I started thinking to myself about how everyone that I spoke with had the same idea about pollution ruining the Earth but none of them proposed a solution. Maybe it was due to the fact that I did not ask them for one, or maybe it was because people are all talk and no action. I believe that if I can speak to random people on the street about environmental issues and they know enough to have a conceptual conversation with me on the topic, they for sure have ideas about how to stop it and maybe even reverse it.
So what does this all have to do with carbon storage? It is pretty simple actually, the more plants and trees there are in the world, the larger the amount of carbon can be absorbed by the plants from the atmosphere. The plants, in turn take the stored carbon and use it to grow and go about photosynthesis and other metabolic process, creating oxygen. The end product of this system being less carbon dioxide and more oxygen to improve the health and quality of life for all animals and the Earth as well. In a study that Mike Ryan did in 1991, he concluded that “…The effect of any change in rates of maintenance, construction, or ion uptake will depend on the balance between net photosynthate and total respiratory costs… Imbalances between photosynthesis and respiration will likely occur first in mature forest ecosystems. Because the balance between photosynthetic and respiring tissue in forests decreases with ecosystem development, any increase in respiratory costs will affect older trees most. With increased temperature and CO2, forest ecosystems may grow faster, mature earlier, and die younger.” I am definitely going to research that specific topic some more and present what I come up with in my next blog entry. I did not want this blog post to be about carbon storage but more about the public’s (Austinites) views on climate change and the negative effects associated with it if we do not do anything to combat it while we still have a fighting chance.
Citations:
AccuWeather. “Austin February Weather 2016.” AccuWeather. N.p., 2016. Web. 3
Apr. 2016. <http://www.accuweather.com/en/us/austin-tx/78701/
february-weather/351193?monyr=2/1/2016>.
Ball, Andrea, and Roberto Villalpando. “Austin temperature hits 86 degrees, sets
new heat record for Jan. 31.” Statesman. N.p., 31 Jan. 2016. Web. 2 Apr.
- <http://www.statesman.com/news/weather/
sunny-skies-warm-temps-today/nqGTC/>.
Kalkstein, L. S., and K. M. Valimont. 1987. Climate effects on human health. In Potential effects of future climate changes on forests and vegetation, agriculture, water resources, and human health. EPA Science and Advisory Committee Monograph no. 25389, 122-52. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The National Academies. Ecological Impacts of Climate Change. N.p.: n.p., 2008.
Print.
Ryan, Michael. “Climate Change and Plant Respiration.” Ecological Applications
(1991): n. pag. Print.