Yesterday, I came across something this is very important. The ramifications of this are incredibly serious.
In this article, North American Forests: When the Colors of the Trees Change, massive amounts of North American forests are being wiped out by the bark beetle. Due to warm winter temperatures, winter survival rates of larvae shot from just 20% to over 80%, causing a massive population explosion. More beetles means more trees attacked and killed.
By 2010, over 30 billion trees have been killed. Logging operations to combat the infestation has resulted in even more tree loss, including many healthy ones. In British Columbia alone, over 18.1 million hectares are considered contaminated by 2012. In the lower 48, hundreds of millions of tree are already dead and dying. Western forests are at risk of being virtually wiped out.
But it gets worse then this.
Trees produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide. This balance is now threatened:
Ahead of us we have the possible destruction of forests, vital in maintaining oxygen levels necessary for life, in the control of carbon dioxide, and in water cycle balances. Notably, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere has dropped from 35 to 21 percent from prehistoric times to now, and the carbon dioxide has increased in part by the human growth pollution in cities with high oxygen levels, which often comprises only 15 percent of total air. So at this rate it is obvious that in these cities we will render the “air” unbreathable. Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a botanist, says, “the abuse of forests and pollution of the oceans has caused them to produce only half the oxygen (they produced) 10,000 years ago.”** We must also consider that in the last 30 years this process has accelerated the deterioration or the collapse of almost all living systems.
This paragraph really stuck out, so I began to research the facts. Are cities really losing their oxygen?
Dangerously low levels of oxygen are now being reported in cities around the world. Increased carbon dioxide levels are displacing oxygen in the atmosphere.