Tu Bishvat, the New Year for Trees, the day that trees are judged for the next year according to Jewish tradition, is the ideal day to consider how the destruction of trees is arguably the main reason that the world is rapidly approaching a climate catastrophe and other environmental disasters.

Because of animal-based agriculture, over 40 percent of the world’s ice-free land is now used for grazing and growing feed crops for animals. This has reduced the number of trees from about six trillion to about three trillion. This sharp reduction in carbon-absorbing trees has caused atmospheric CO2 to reach 425 parts per million (ppm), far above the 350 ppm that climate scientists consider a threshold for climate stability. This hazardous level is a major cause of many negative climate-related events.

The world is rapidly heating up. Every decade since the 1970s has been hotter than the previous decade. All 26 years in this century are among the hottest 27 years on record. The 13 consecutive months from June 2023 to June 2024 all broke monthly temperature records. Both 2023 and 2024 broke yearly global temperature records, and 2025 was the world’s........

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