Commentary: Every past climate change over the last 2,000 years affected only half the globe. This climate change, this one we are in now, is world-wide. Either we keep treating this global warming like a hot potato or we work on what we can do where we live, city or country.
For instance, science says if those who raise cattle added 1% seaweed into the cattle’s diet, the methane gas released into the atmosphere by cattle would be cut in half.
The city folk have plenty to do to cut the pollution they cause on our behalf as well. The sooner city and country folk leave their nest of the like-minded and cross over their cultural divides to talk to each other, the longer it is before the rancher has seaweed in his hamburger.
Our local ranchers could pat themselves on the back on the way to a Pepper Pot burger. That was where I toasted my husband James when I realized one of our farming sons, Ronnie, had planted over 7,500 trees. Seven-thousand, five-hundred trees. Grandson Randy helped plant the pecan orchard where he married his Jolene, so the trees feel personal, too.
My farming family I married into six years ago disagrees with me on climate change in their up-close and personal relationship with the Earth but they are planting trees. A trillion more would cut the world’s carbon in half.
And since my city son Daniel was the one who mentioned to me all the good that James’ country son is doing by planting all those trees, I believe we can still talk to each other as temperatures rise.
We don’t have a lot of time until the cows come home and eat their 1% seaweed. As reported in The Week, Aug. 16, the speed and scale of this made-made global warming is unlike anything in these last 2,000 years, including the Medieval Climate Anomaly. The records in tree rings and ice cores and sediment from all over the world show that, in none of the past events in the last 2,000 years, was more than half the globe affected.
Well, fellow earthlings, only Antarctica is left out this time as temperatures rise all over the world. And many of the climate fluctuations between the 1300s and 1800s were from volcano ash. This current change affects all of the globe. Because the entire world and not just half of it is affected means this current climate change is just not part of the natural cycle of things.
Besides seaweed, there are ideas out there that address the problem, like a World Carbon Bank to invest in clean energy. And it is our city sons who can clean up the landfills with a newly discovered mushroom that eats plastic. Pestalotropsis microspora mushroom contains a chemical that breaks down the key ingredient in plastic, polyurethane.
Sea walls, like New Orleans needed, are ignored while we argue about the added security of a border wall.
But let us all respect each other, not treat each other with scorn while we figure it out for the next generation. I know that kind of love and respect that crosses political divides. I have it at home.
It is possible.
(Claudette Ortiz Franzoy’s newspaper columns appeared in the Las Cruces Sun News and Casper Star Tribune and were also read on National Public Radio- KUWC and KRWG.)