My Trees Don't Lie: Climate Disaster is Coming!

What does it take to change the mind of a climate-change denier?

My windmill palm at five years of age in 2021, located on the southeast-facing side of my home in southeastern Pennsylvania, just 12 miles north of Philadelphia. Its biger and lusher now. (Photo by Dave Lindorff, taken on Nov. 2, 2021)

My Uncle Duke died recently. A complicated fellow, he was a career Army man whose career was running military hospitals, his politics skewed right, but he was also kind, loved animals, and admitted to me, his unabashed leftist nephew, that I had been right in opposing the Vietnam War, which he came around to agreeing had been a terrible policy mistake and was never the national security issue as it was claimed to be.

I developed an interesting relationship with Uncle Duke made possible, I think, because we were family, and family was important to us both. This allowed us to disagree but to remain friends. Duke would often send me emails from his right-wing military friends which were either crazy fake news stories (like the photo he sent me with the worried comment “Look what’s happening to New York City. Please share this around!” showing all of Times Square including for a mile along 42nd Street clogged with hundreds of thousands of muslim men all on their knees on rugs praying to Mecca”) and racist jokes. In the case of the former, I’d tell him, Uncle Duke that is a faked photo, just like the vast horde scenes in Lord of the Rings, to which he’d reply, “Thank you Dave. I never know what to believe on the internet.” When it came to the jokes, I’d tell him, “Uncle Duke this is a terrible racist joke. Please don’t send me disgusting stuff like this,” and he’d apologize.

I was thinking how I’d miss that connection to civil discourse with an arch-conservative, but just had a long talk with another younger relative, a cousin who was quick to dismiss climate change as a hoax to me, and to tell me I was wrong in my book “Spy for No Country” when I claim and show that the US nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki never had anything to do with ending the war with Japan.

I was able to explain that even Top US commander in WWII, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, opposed those two bombings before they happened and afterwards too. But I’ve been wondering what would also convince this cousin that sea-level rise from unprecedented global warming was a real threat in the very near term — perhaps even my own life time, which would mean, if I’m lucky, in the next 10-15 years. He sniffed at that notion, claiming (without ervidence) that all the politicians are buying sea-front property.

Now however, I think I’ve got it: My trees! They don’t lie.

On the 2.3-acre partially wooded lot my wife and I bought back in 1997 in an exurban community about 12 miles north of the city limits of Philadelphia, we initially had 12 old-growth trees — all but two of them hardwoods over 100 years old along with two huge slightly younger fir trees. In the last decade all but two of those centenarian trees have died or been blown down, leaving a sick and dying oak and one huge healthy oak that, sadly, I have arranged to have toppled, cut up and removed next month because it unfortunately poses an existential threat to my old stone house in an era of ever stronger hurricanes. (I actually was alerted to that danger when an unprecedented F2 tornado ripped up our town three years ago, cutting a quarter-mile-wide swath of destruction for three miles that destroyed our town hall, an elementary school, the local campus of Temple University, and several dense suburban neighborhoods. The twister missed our home by a quarter mile as we huddled with our granddaughter in the center of the stone structure, me worrying the whole time that just one limb from that oak landing on the roof could have reduced the house to a pile of heavy stones with us under it!

The first old tree we lost was a sugar maple that toppled unexpectedly onto the neightbors’ property, just missing their wood-frame house. A prolonged week of unusually heavy rain had turned the ground to mud and allowed its whole root network to pull out of the ground when a powerful front moved through., Of the old-growth trees that died, there was a beautiful horse chestnut in the front yard and a gigantic spruce tree both toppled by Hurricane Sandy, the largest storm to make landfall in New York City, where it raised seas so high that much of Wall Street was flooded in a historic first. The storm then uncharactistically headed west instead of north or east and swept up through central Pennsylvania at hurricane strength before swinging back over northern New England. I had the other Spruce cut down after that because it was right near the house. Had it fallen instead of the neighboring fir, our house would have been gone.

Two giant silver maples which lent our property and its 1740 farm house its name: Old Maple Farm, both died of pests that I was informed by a tree expert were only attacking them now because of the warming climate that allowed thebark beetless and the fungus they carry on them to move north to tackle sugar maples. These trees themselves are stressed by the hotter summers and lack of major frosts in winter which used to kill the beetles. Two huge oak trees and an American Elm suffered the same fate, one oak dying almost a decade ago in front of the house, and the other, a particularly old, large tree, now about half dead. The elm, in just one year’s time after appearing perfectly healthy, died about 8 years ago.

Now if this tree holocaust accounting doesn’t convince readers, or my climate-change-denying cousin, there is also the case lf my two palm trees.

Palm trees in Pennsylvania?

Yes. Some eight years ago, my harpsichordist spouse had a residency at Colonial Williamsburg, VA to study music being played on her instrument in that first capital of the US colonies. On a visit to her down there, driving around the area I noticed, to my surprise, several homes that had 15-foot palm trees growing on their southern sides. I had no idea that palms could grow in a state like Virginia.

A year later, while researching an article on climate change, I read that a warming earth meant that within a decade or so, the climate in southern Pennsylvania would be what it historically had been in Virginia some 150 miles to the south. “Hmmm, I thought to myself, I wonder if I bought a couple of palms and planted them on the south side of my house, whether they might survive our increasingly warm winter months and grow to be like those palms I saw in eastern Virginia? So I ordered first one windmill palmetto palm native to the Azores and Mediterranean, and planted it about ten feet to the south of my house. It has survived eight winters, though it hasn’t grown much taller. The other tree, which I ordered the following year, I planted much closer to the house in a sheltered corner facing southwest, making it much more sheltered from cold northerly winds, and much closer to the heat-radiating walls of the house. It has thrived and has grown to a height of six feet at the top of its luxurious fronds. The thick trunk alone is now almost three feet high!

I get a kind of dark pleasure showing skeptical friends my tropical trees and explaining that I plan on being the prescient first person in Pennsylvania to be able to drink a pina colada to our collective global-warming nightmare under my own palm tree.

The reason this bizarre situation is possible is that our winters here in southeastern PA have grown remarkably warmer over the years since we moved here from Hong Kong in 1997. In those first years, winters were bitterly cold in late December through most of February, with temperatures often falling to the low single digits for days in a row and sometimes below zero — temperatures that would kill any palm tree. But during the eight years we have had our two little palms in the lawn, the temperature has never hit single digits. In fact, the temperature has only fallen as low as 12-14 degrees a few times since then and then only for a brief time early in the morning, before rising above freezing quickly during the day — not enough time to freeze the palm’s trunk and damage the developing fronds inside its core.

Now if that report on my trees doesn’t convince my cousin and you dear readers that this catastrophe of climate change is real, I don’t know what will. But when my palm is high enough so that I can sit in its shade, you are invited to come bring me the coconut, pineapple and rum to prepare my colada to share. Make it a green one so we can drink from the coconut like they do in the islands.

I can almost hear my late Uncle Duke, were he to live to 100, joining me under my little palm and chuckling as he hands me my drink saying, “Well Dave, you were right about global warming.”