PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The plant life transforming FDR Park into a garden-lover’s dreamland was considerably less wilted than many of the guests at the Philadelphia Flower Show’s first outdoor exhibition in its 192-year history, coinciding with the region’s first official heat wave of 2021.
To be sure, a late-spring scorcher isn’t all that unusual in these parts. Philly sizzled with higher readings across the same dates almost a century earlier. But visitors to the show got an in-your-face reminder that the cool green spaces of shady parkland offer blessed relief from increasingly relentless city summer temperatures, which environmental scientists warn will come more frequently as carbon dioxide emissions drive up temperatures, trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space.
Experts from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report that the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has reached its annual peak, up to 419 parts per million in May, despite the pandemic's pause on harmful human activity.
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It’s a horrifying high: We’ve never recorded a higher number in the 63 years since instruments could gauge CO2 concentrations. Ice core records show the last time the planet saw numbers like this was during the Pliocene Epoch, more than 4 million years ago, well before the start of human history and just before some gnarly changes across the planet’s surface.
Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA, said in a statement that CO2 molecules can hang around in the air for as long as 1,000 years.
"In terms of human civilization, these emissions are forever," he said. “If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, the highest priority must be to reduce CO2 pollution to zero at the earliest possible date."
Climate change and its present and looming impacts have been underpinning the exhibits at the Philadelphia Flower Show in recent years, no matter the overall theme.
This year, the theme is "HABITAT: Nature’s Masterpiece," and visitors are subtly reminded of changing plant environments between the blooms and among the displays around every corner.
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A mural just past the entrance illustrates a project called Heat Response sponsored by The Trust for Public Land. Reminding passersby that “Last year Philadelphia recorded its third-hottest summer on record,” it notes that these meteorological meltdowns disproportionately impact low-income communities, an inequity that influences people’s health, safety and daily lives.
The project pairs artists with residents to drive change through arts activism.
The results range from public art, new gardening clubs and creative workshops in Grays Ferry, to co-designing alternative heat-decreasing structures with gardeners in Southeast Philly, to a bilingual coloring book about urban heat islands and environmental justice that will be distributed throughout Fairhill.
The Trust for Public Land has just released its tenth ParkScore® index. The coalition promotes conservation and health of parks and green space. It finds 75% of residents in the 100 most-populated U.S. cities live within a 10-minute walk of park. Props to Philly, where 95% of residents do. It ranks #19 on the list of 100 cities.
As for the Flower Show's park setting, there’s no decision from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society as to whether it will be back in the great outdoors next year. PHS volunteer guide Sharon Strauch is enjoying the direct connection to nature.
Within days of exhibitor trees being installed for the show, she says “birds started building nests in them! And there’s an exhibit that started with berries on one of the bushes, but the birds took care of that, too.”
FDR Park’s bee population is also having buzzy little breakdowns to keep up with all the new pollinating demands of temporary floral displays in full bloom every few steps.
It’s almost enough to let you forget that the world is headed to a climate danger zone … until you leave the shade to find a beverage vendor because you’ve finished the last drop in your water bottle while out in the first heat wave of the year.