Crane lowers tree surgeon into the top of an 80′ oak. Photo: Dave Lindorff.

My house located in southeastern Pennsylvania about nine miles north of Philadelphia, in which my wife and I have lived and raised a family over the past 28 years, is a testimonial to the crisis of climate disaster.

That looming, and already evident disaster can be clearly illustrated by three trees.Two of these are quite young. The other as of last summer, is just a very large stump.

Let me explain.

We moved from Hong Kong back to the US in 1997 so my harpsichordist spouse could take up her new job as a professor of early keyboard a Temple University in Philly, and our two kids could experience school in the US — high school in the case of our daughter and nursery school in the case of our son. We has purchased a unique place to live: a somewhat neglected and rundown 257-year old stone farm house and really neglected barn on 2.3 wooded acres, the rest of the original 100-acre farm having long before been sold off for a suburban housing tract.

Over the years, I fixed up both structures, re-roofed both buildings, added missing doors to the rooms, wired in overhead lights, repaired long-neglected plumbing, etc. We had a lot of trouble, though with large trees near the house including a huge horse chestnut tree that was diseased and managed to drop a huge limb on my old Volvo station wagon, bending the frame and caving in the roof which rendered it scrap. Other trees that died or got felled by hurricanes over the years included an American elm, two beautiful old apple trees, several smaller oak trees, all the ash trees on the property in one bad year of a elm bark beetle infestation, and a mammoth silver maple tree near the house — the oldest tree on the property that had given the property its name: Maple Tree Farm.

As the mid-1990s was when climate change began receiving a lot of attention, and I became aware that the tree die-offs we were witnessing were mostly the result of that new environmental threat, either because storms, like Hurricane Sandy, with its bizarre track that saw it make landfall in New York Harbor, then turn west instead of the........

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