It's autumn here in the nation's capital, and that means that in a normal year, trees would be bursting with color, the air would turn crisp, and harvest apples and seasonal apple products would fill store shelves.
Except that right now, apple growers in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley are struggling to grow apples, and
climate change is to blame.
The really bad news isn't that Virginia apple harvests are failing, that's just a signpost for some of the most dire climate change scenarios that we're heading for.
Because if apple trees are starting to fail and die as our planet warms and climate changes, trees of every type will start to fail and die too.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently
reported that September 2016 "was the warmest September in 136 years of modern record-keeping."
There's no doubt that the planet's climate is changing, and it's threatening countless species of plants and trees that won't be able to adapt to such rapid changes because of their specialized evolution and inability to migrate.
Trees can't pick up roots and move, and different species of trees are differently adapted to particular types of soils, growing seasons, water availability and even altitudes, so trees are especially vulnerable to the shifting climate zones of a warming planet.
And that will have profound impacts on the health of our planet and future generations.
Most people understand that trees are the planets lungs, they literally breathe in carbon dioxide through leaves, and then they exhale oxygen as their waste, which you and I are breathing right now.
When trees "inhale" carbon dioxide though, they don't JUST "exhale" oxygen, they also trap carbon in their wood, and the bigger they grow, the more carbon they hold.
Beyond that, the root structures of trees are necessary for healthy soils, and healthy soils hold in significant amounts of carbon trapped from the atmosphere.
When trees die though, those processes are reversed: trees stop capturing carbon, and start emitting carbon as their wood rots and the tree decays.
So as trees die because of our warming planet's shifting climates, the warming will actually accelerate, because the dying trees will release once-stored-carbon back into the atmosphere.
But that's not all that trees do for us; as I wrote in my book: "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," it's barely even the beginning.
