The Redding, CA and Greece wildfires are what scientists warned in December 1997 would happen across the planet Earth over the next decades corresponding to rapidly rising temperatures. They’ve proven right and now it seems to be getting out of control.
The scientists, who I no longer keep records on them, told a conference at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Kyoto, Japan on that frigid day that the global weather would become untenable. Arctic and Antarctic icebergs would melt raising sea levels dangerously high, and storms including hurricanes and typhoons would become far more violent to the point of disabling aircraft from flying and seagoing ships to cruise. And they emphasized that Earth would become scorchingly hot with brush and wildfires all over as has been gripping many and increasing parts of the earth.
On that day in Kyoto, few, excluding climate scientists and their supporters, believed the warning. Republican lawmakers who visited Kyoto to pressure the Clinton administration not to sign the Kyoto Protocol — successfully at the end of the day — scoffed and laughed at the scientists as Trumpsters do. ‘There’s no such thing as global warming,’ one Republican representative as I recall blasted. Others said, while not denying global warming, said it was a natural geological event, not caused by human activities.
Not being a scientist but as a journalist who believes in the virtues of the ‘Sixth Sense,’ the ability to tell who’s and what’s right and wrong and so on, I have been witnessing eerie phenomena over the past few years in my area of Nagano in central Japan. And all those seem to be caused by climate change. Trees are growing much faster than, say, a decade or two ago at a speed that they cannot sustain to remain erect. In the 2017 fall, fairly strong though not of threatening velocity winds from a typhoon cut across my area, a mile-high mountain range. Damage was what I have not seen before: Many trees broke mid-trunk looking miserably and ugly. Had the winds been stronger, those trees should have been uprooted but the winds were not that powerful. I discussed what I saw with my lumberjack colleges and they also reported similar tree kills. And down in urban areas, where temps this summer briefly soared to 100F, leaves of keyaki (scientifically called zelkova) trees lining many sidewalks of Tokyo and other cities were dangling down, not growing upright as they are supposed to do. I took a closer look at the keyaki trees in Tokyo and noticed that some leaves were growing upright while others of the same trees were sagging. And trees seem to be dying faster than before too.
Another ecosystem change I’ve seen recently is a giant earthworm, longer than a small snake!
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What those ecosystem developments portend to Planet Earth I have no idea but fallen victim to killer moth attacks. My physician told me that the moths, hyphantria dunes, are pest that cause damage to agri crops but harmless to humans — until recently. He thought that the moths have evolved into acquiring poison in response to rising temperatures.
Toshio Aritake