This May and early June has been a busy period from a global climate change and global warming perspective. It has even touched most of us here in the North Country.
Most of us will have noticed the haze in the air in recent days and health alerts issues by different state and federal agencies. Yes, these are tiny particles from enormous forest fires in northwest Canada some 2,000 or more miles away.
You can visit the NYSDEC Air Quality Index, which is updated daily.
For comparison purposes, the entire Adirondack Park consists of six million acres of private and state land. So far, the forest fires in British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Ontario and other northern regions have burned over seven million acres and the fire season has just started. Hundreds of fires are still burning.
The implications are serious in that these burned trees have now emitted enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, along with particulates and they no longer can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere via photosynthesis. It is a double whammy.
Scientists in Canada think that the warmer, drier winter with less snow cover, followed by a dryer than normal spring season, has set the stage for these wildfires. Temperatures across Canada have been warmer than normal this spring too.
And finally, there’s more fuel for the flames from tropical forests too.
We are losing tropical forests in the equatorial regions as well as the northern forests in Canada, Siberia and elsewhere.
There is concern that forests are no longer sinks for CO2 but emitters.
And then we have an independent climate related organization titled Berkeley Earth. At first, uncertain of government interpretation of temperature data, they analyzed the raw climate data independently. And, lo and behold, they produced the same results. Full partners now, they publish their own data sets and one telling graph is included here and titled “Global Warming by Month.”
The graph has a lot of information in it, so let’s take a closer look. The axis along the bottom is for the 12 months of the year. Above that are a series of horizontal wiggly lines moving from left to right. Each line traces the annual temperatures for a year and whether it is above or below a calculated baseline.
The vertical axis on the right shows temperature changes over the past century in fractions of a degree Celsius increments. They are color coded with the blue lines being colder annual records and then the color gradually changes to yellow, orange and then red, reflecting recent warmer annual temperatures.
The dot for May 2025 shows the second warmest May in the 175-year data record. It is about 1.5 degrees C warmer than the earliest data shown here.
No surprise, it’s just another confirmation of our warming planet over this time period.
Changes in our climate also offer opportunities for entrepreneurs too.
JR Howard of Texas Solar Sheep cannot buy sheep fast enough. According to Canary Media, he supplies them to solar farms, where their grazing keeps the grass short, which is cheaper than mowing it. Eight new solar fields in Texas run by Enel North America placed an order for 6,000 sheep in 2024 to manage this process. This form of Agrivoltaics which combines solar panels and agriculture, is a model of efficient land use that benefits farmers, renewable energy initiatives and business.
Using sheep instead of mowing also reduces fossil fuel use and allows native plants to mature and bloom and increases biodiversity.
See the photo of sheep among solar panels provided by Texas Solar Sheep. Almost 100,000 acres of panels are now grazed in the U.S.
And then we have artists in the climate picture too. The Adirondack History Museum in Elizabethtown has a new Exhibition, ”The Elements: Images of Hope,” from May 24 to Oct. 12. Dan Keegan is featured with several of his graphite drawings on archival paper in the Rosenberg Gallery at the Museum.
An earlier graphite on paper image from 2022 is titled “Skyline,” which is from a series on climate change and the elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. It is 30 inches high by 80 inches wide.
Some other news highlights are as follows:
• Americans who now think global warming is happening outnumber those who think it is not by a ratio of 5 to 1 (73% versus 14%.) Yale Program on Climate Change, Feb. 2025.
• Of the first 25 of 100 leading institutions in energy research and development globally, 23 are in China. (Nature, Vol. 639, 20 March 2025.)
• In March 2025, 93.2% of new vehicle registrations in Norway were electric.
• According to Clean Technica, May 25, 2025, China’s clean power generation has caused the nation’s CO2 emissions to drop despite rapid power demand growth.
And, so it goes.