Effect – but it reacts to changes in climate rather than causing climate change. Evaporation and precipitation is a cycle and any water in the atmosphere doesn’t stay there for more than a few weeks.
Nature itself, in its widest to its narrowest forms, is also cyclical: the cycle of life and death. Animals and plants live, die, and become food for others, and the CO2 they create gets used up elsewhere as a result of this natural cycle.
Humans meanwhile, pump six gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year and take little if any out. Nor do we put any fresh air back. We could do through activities like tree planting, since every tree naturally offsets 650 kg of CO2, transforming pollution, offsetting carbon, and giving us back fresh air. The problem is that few people are planting trees and, in fact, deforestation – the reverse of what we should be doing – is a major issue.
In 1600, for example, over 12% of Ireland was covered by broadleaf forests. By 1800, the figure was down to 2%. Since then, the country has been working to restore its forests but, by 2000, only 7% of woodlands had been returned. And, in the urgency to put trees back, the bulk of planting has been non-native trees. Many of these – like the iroko, from West Africa – are being logged in such an unsustainable way that if the present rate of depletion continues the forests there will be gone in five years. The outcome is stalemate (at best).
It is for these reasons that The Village has introduced the Earth C.O.S.T. Programme to plant a new forest of indigenous trees at its Centre for environmental and personal healing.
As it is, the Earth absorbs about half of our current CO2