By Kim Jong-chan
Political Editor
Breaking its decades-old tradition, the Goyang City government in Gyeonggi Province held its tree-planting event about two weeks earlier than usual. Paju, a nearby city north of Seoul, and Guri, east of the capital, followed suit.
This is because of changes in climate. The weather is warming up. As a result, there is a gap between the time when the trees form buds and the time when people plant them. It is better to plant seedlings early.
For another instance, people in mountainous Gangwon Province planted broad-leaved trees instead of conifer that grows in cooler areas of the world, a week earlier than the Arbor Day which falls on April 5.
What is noteworthy is that broad-leaved trees such as painted maple can absorb more carbon dioxide, which is blamed for the rise in global temperatures, than conifers, including pine trees that have very thin leaves called needles.
Another unusual thing surprised Koreans last month. Two fleets of mackerel vessels returned to Sogwipo, Jeju Island, laden with abundant tuna, many of them bigger than usual measuring more than one meter in length. The schools of tuna, passing by Jeju, were following the warm Black Current, when they got caught.
In recent years, tuna and mackerel from the sub-tropics have moved to northerly latitudes fast. Before the 1990s, tuna caught in South Pacific were larger than those caught in waters off Jeju.
Such phenomena are caused by warming, which is a global phenomenon rather than a regional one, which is driven in large part by greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the effects of global warming, a big section of Antarctica's massive Wilkins Ice Shelf has begun disintegrating.
In China, three weeks of ice and snow storms hit China in February. It was the neighboring country's worst winter storms in half a century. Power cuts plunged large cities into darkness. Chinese stocks fell to their lowest level in six months.
The winter storms were nothing but a natural disaster. But it may have rather been a man-made disaster. In 2006, China produced the largest amount of carbon dioxide in the world. The United States ranked second. When it comes to global-warming greenhouse gas emissions, China, one of the fast-growing economies on the globe, ranks second, after the United States.
A half of China's factories which emit global-warming greenhouse gases are clustered in the southeastern coastal areas. This is presumed to have caused changes in climate there.
Nowadays, climate change is more important than terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Terrorists kill people and weapons of mass destruction have the potential to kill enormous numbers of people. The 9/11 attacks cost the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people. But global warming has the potential to kill everybody in the long run.
Every country and organization has to do something to cool the warming planet. New technologies, renewable energies and more research are essential to solve the problem. A joint Canada-U.S.-Maxico report said basic changes in building designs and construction could slash greenhouse gas emissions.
Global determination to cut greenhouse gases manifested again in an agreement reached in last December's Bali conference in Indonesia. The United Nations-led meeting set a 2009 deadline for a landmark new treaty to reduce greenhouse gases once the current Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Last Monday, climate negotiators from around the world began a week long meeting in Bangkok on drafting a complex international accord by 2009 that can slash the greenhouse gases.
A day earlier, Seoul and other cities around the world joined the Earth Hour campaign to switch off lights for one hour in the evening in an effort to publicize the effects of climate change.
The average Korean yields more than twice the carbon dioxide of the average global citizen. Campaigns to reduce the carbon footprint are burgeoning in Korea. The Carbon-Neutral campaign has recently been launched in Seoul. The southeastern industrial city of Ulsan joined the campaign.
Planting more trees will not only kill carbon dioxide but also clean the air and cool the streets.