I once had a sweet, brown pit bull mix named Thembi, who had impressive musculature and a magnificent nose. Often on our walks, I would feel the leash go taut and know she’d sniffed out something tantalizing, likely a squirrel or a rabbit. She would snuffle excitedly, muzzle to the ground, tracing her quarry’s skittish path, up and down and around a patch of dirt road. I remember once seeing a rabbit scurry away mere inches from Thembi’s face. The clever dog had completely missed the animal she was tracking because she was so intent on its scent. I share this story because I fear this is what we’re doing with climate: we’re so tethered to the changes in carbon that we’re overlooking key aspects of climate stabilization—the extent to which ecosystems regulate climate, and the imperative to preserve and restore them. In doing so, we’re not only missing opportunities to minimize climate disruption. We’re also missing the plot. As our planet has evolved over billions of years, the chief means of regulating temperature is via the water cycle. Phase transitions of water—from solid to liquid to gas, and back—represent a tremendous transfer of heat. As plants transpire, the moisture moves up through the roots to be emitted as vapor. This is a cooling mechanism, a means of dissipating solar heat. You can think of it as plants “harvesting” solar energy and releasing it as latent heat, embodied in water vapor. The reverse process—its meteorological mirror—is condensation, whereby water vapor…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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