The Human Age by Diane Ackerman Read Free Book Online Page B

bad news for all the drought-weakened trees. Wildfires gust across their dry remains, sending flares through vast swaths of vegetation, as in the historic wildfires that blackened over 170,000 acres of caramel-mesa-ed New Mexico, and the record-breaking wildfires in mountain-blessed Colorado.
    These massive conflagrations are bad not just for timber harvestersand tree lovers but for anyone who thrives on oxygen-rich air, since forests are the lungs of the planet, inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. We inhale their flammable waste to stoke the fires in our cells. They inhale ours. Bears, humans, and trees are as seamlessly connected as in and out breaths. And all this ash lies down quiet as snowfall, slowly settling to leave its trace, our trace, as the fire-debris weaves into the geological record. A fine line perhaps, but indelible as the cinders of Vesuvius.
    Frostbite and torched forests may be the extremes, but 2012 and 2013 were legendary scorchers throughout the United States. Across the heartland, around the church suppers, cicada songs, and quiet nights of teenagers sitting on the paint-peeling white bandstands in the middle of town, frying heat doomed crops and broke 29,300 high-temperature records. Fall drought withered crops in 80 percent of the country’s farmlands. Broad-brimmed-hatted, slow-drawling Texans saw the driest year since record-keeping began in 1895, drier even than the rawhide soil of the Dust Bowl. So dry that, as farms resorted to irrigation, public water supplies plummeted. The Lone Star State alone had $5 billion in damages. Not just from crop losses, either. The earth became so parched that it cracked all over like a callused heel, in the process wrenching apart water mains (forty in Fort Worth alone) and buckling the pavement on bridges and roads.
    Worldwide, the past year ushered in record-breaking snowfalls, droughts, rains, floods, heat, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, even plagues of locusts. The whole bag of tricks, biblical in their proportions, including weather pranks we usually expect, but not all and everywhere and wound up to such an extreme. Taken as a whole, as one weatherworks out of balance, it understandably starches the mind, widens the eyes, and fills parents with worry about their children’s future. Every six years or so, the United Nations Panel on Climate Change issues a report. In September 2013, the panel of 209 lead authors and 600 contributing authors, from 39 nations, poring over 9,200 scientific publications, came to these landmark conclusions: global warming is “unequivocal,” sea levels are rising, icepacks are melting, and if we continue at this pace we “will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate.” However, they added, we can slow the process down if we begin at once.
    How the story plays out will be a tale told by the silent, everlasting rocks, in colorfully hued bandwidths. They’ll recall a time when Earth was swarmed over by intelligent apes who whipped the weather into something they hadn’t quite intended.
    Yes, our tinkering has given Earth a low-grade fever, which we need to quickly calm before it climbs. But global warming won’t be tragic everywhere and for every species. That would only be true if Earth’s creatures, landforms, geology, waters, and climate were spread evenly around the planet, and they’re not. Earth is a patchwork of many different habitats, and climate change will visit them in uncanny ways: cool hot zones, heat cool zones, flood dry zones, dry temperate zones. Thanks to climate change, Europe’s growing season has been lengthening, with warm-season crops thriving farther north, to the delight of farmers (although in central and southern Europe, crops have suffered because of the extreme heat and drought). In Greenland, local farmers, seeing fertile soil for the first time, began avidly planting. Milder winters require less heating, which saves on energy, and travel and