Ask ARSE: What Can I Do to Help?

We have a heartfelt letter from a young follower that we were honoured to read, so let's go right ahead and: Ask ARSE.

"Hi ARSE, I follow you and like reading about Space and Research in the mornings before school. I asked my teacher about climate change and what I can do to help and she didn't have a good answer.

My mum said to ask you what I can do to help against climate change.


- Connor, 11.

Firstly Connor, thank you for the message and the tenacious curiosity that lead you here. We applaud you for not settling for a poor answer to a highly important question. 

As for your question, the immediate thing you can do is to start supporting an organisation close to you that makes its mission planting trees. 

This goes for anyone reading this post.

If the world planted around 4.4 billion hectares of trees, we could pull decades of carbon from the atmosphere.

We understand this is a monstrous number, however, broken down the target is more manageable and even half of this number could prove highly optimistic for our future. 

A conference in February this year, the Thomas Crowther from the ETH illustrated that the carbon could be absorbed by trees and locked away in the wood. 

He also said "trees are "our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change."

The biggest problem to the planting of so many trees is that as the world is heating, the less fertile soil we have to plant trees, so a vicious cycle keeps spinning. 

But fear not, in urban and agricultural land there is room for around 8.7 billion hectares of new trees, so there is still hope and room to meet this quota. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends the planting of new forests and renewing old ones to avoid a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees by 2050 and we are in total support of this with your help. 

Thank you Connor, and thank you for spreading ARSE far and wide as we thrust ever harder into the deep unknown...