Cometh the Dread Pine Beetle
Surely by now you’ve heard the “pine beetles” meme, just in time for committees’ work on a climate-change bill — that the pine-beetle devastation of trees across Montana is the result of Global Warming. Same goes for hurricanes, drought in Africa, California fire season, heavy rains in the Ozarks, and that nasty chill that catches you on your way out the door. All spooky, sad, we’ve-got-to-do-something-about-it anthropogenic global warming (an industry term, AGW for short).
The pine beetle was especially seized upon because it seemed such an unusual, once-in-a-lifetime, indeed apocalyptic event (I drove from Lincoln to Helena, and the intensity of the beetle damage was spooky). Turns out the pine-beetle scourge has precedents throughout the Twentieth Century, or so reports Katie Brown for the Heritage Foundation. There’s not enough data for the one in the 1920s to judge the intensity of beetle epidemic, but the one in the 70s-80s is larger than what we’re seeing today. These instances were largely under-reported at the time (when, in comparison, we make a BFD out of the pine beetle today).
One can learn from the state’s amusing and utilitarian Pine Beetle Action Website — beetles.mt.gov — that trees in “overstocked” areas which have not been cleared by fire or by Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative are in the most beetle danger. Nature will find a way of thinning trees if we do not.
Incidentally — and I say this only because it is my maiden commentary about Global Warming and there seems to be some confusion on the Right over what to believe — my take on global warming is not denial of its “anthropogenic” nature. Rather, I approach the matter with a certain fatalism. The evidence presented by eminent climate scientists says we are, essentially, doomed in historical time by our booming populations and use of the land. I take it one step further and acknowledge that encumbering people to a point necessary to “save the planet” is not especially desirable and, frankly, just isn’t going to happen on any earth-saving level in the name of “environmental crisis.” Maybe Homo sapiens will give it a good run longer; I’m thinking a few thousand years or so — why should we disadvantage our own society and handicap our state’s production valves in the hopeless quest to save off civilization’s end run?
(H/t to Aaron Flint, who mentioned the Heritage piece on one of last week’s shows.)
So then you are saying that as long as we are doomed anyway why put off that awful day for a few unpleasant years or decades. This might appeal to us old folks, not sure how it sounds to the young. When I was trying to learn how to be a doctor one of our professors would say “When you don’t know the diagnosis, you should only use half the dose.” Your approach sounds something like that. But if your opponents have no problems with lying, then they can just as easily switch their efforts to persuading the rest of us that they can do something about it and as long as we are OK with the fatal day we might as well be OK with their apocalyptic means for dealing with it.
It wuld nt be unusual for Easter Island to repeat on a larger scale, perhaps even a global one. The planet has endured many extinctions. Ours would merely be the latest.
The planet is fine, by the way. It is only the narrow frame within which we exist that threatens us. It’s this propensity we have to overpopulate and over-consume the bounty of the planet. I am inded fatalist about this – the human strain will go on until the next comet, but we will exist in far fewer numbers. All of the advances of the carbon era will be undone because we reintroduced all of the carbon into the atmosphere that produced prior extinctions.
Denial presents in many forms – that’s human, and I’m human too. But professional, intellectual, corporate-financed propagandistic denial is especially offensive.
Tool.
Travis, if you haven’t already read this, I recommend Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.
Also, download “Global Energy Rationing”, Access to Energy, January 2007 (Vol. 34 no. 6).
I suggest reading ‘Collapse’ by Jared Diamond and its specific acccount on Easter Island.
Since you’re familiar with more than one aspect of this story, I’m curious what your opinion is regarding it?
The “New Scientist”?
Aptly named.
Yes, “New Scientist”. It’s been “new” since it’s first issue in 1956.
Thanks for the links Walter.
Re: Collapse — fun book; the first chapter’s about Montana and quotes Republican state senator Rick Laible of the Victor area at length. As with every Jared Diamond book, there are some curious and perhaps too-precious turns of logic & fact on which his conclusions rely; I recall him claiming that Africa lacked development because zebras have keen peripheral vision and are much harder to lasso and domesticate than a horse. I think the Easter Islanders — or at least the memory thereof — has profited enormously by the fact that they did destroy all of their trees to build giant stone heads. Imagine had they just been another unexceptional people of greater Polynesia, with lots of trees but no stone heads. They wanted to be judged by their big, totemic heads — no doubt they are today.
And Mihalis: Just imagine if someone came up to you and tried to explain away the Civil War by saying the South had a heat stroke. I’ve heard this theory but I’ve not seen the actual data sets. Some conflicts in Africa are primarily concerned with food and water resources which are climate-dependent (and this is particularly true about conflicts in the Sahel region or any desert region where resources are scarce or farmland borders the Sahara and is threatened by desertification, etc). The intensity of these conflicts might exist in proportion to temperature… maybe. But I think this totalizing article is a bit rich — especially its use of words like “forecast” which suggest not just a correlation but some kind of law that temperature is linked to war casualties. Africans have wars for many reasons that have nothing to do with the climate: wars of national honor or tribal integrity, wars for non-climate-dependent resources (minerals, diamonds, oil), and wars for simply no good reason at all (i.e., the type premised on the Enlightened Ruler’s dreams).
1956?
Sounds (and reads) like all the old scientists are dead.
Says more about you than New Scientist.
Thanks, I’m very observant.
In the Southeast, farmers lament the pine beetle.
What else can you expect when you clear cut multi species, multi aged class forest and plant thousands of acres of pine. Farming a monoculture just hangs out the dinner sign to nature which quickly moves to restore balance and diversity in nature.
Sometimes, you don’t need a degree in silviculture … it’s just about common sense…
Travis- There is more than one type of bark beetle at work here. Some of the worst damage is in British Columbia and especially Alaska where 4 of the five main species of trees are sucuming to infestasions of various beetles. Its all related to one thing, significantly warmer, drier winters( climate change)!
The beetles have been around for millions of years and the cold winters used to keep them in check, not anymore it seems.
As for your fatalistic attitude , I don’t get it , you seem like you are scared to death of the big bad Islamists and want to do everything you can to stop them but something like climate change that makes the terrorist threat seem like a hang nail compared to full blown cancer of climate change you just want to sit back and watch.
Well , for folks with kids there are only two responses when a freight train is headed for your kids. You stop the train are you f…..ing die trying. You sure don’t stand around trying to convince yourself and everyone else that it really isn’t a train coming down the track.
As for the cost of switching from fossil fuels to solar based ones. It will be the biggest economic boom since the switch from analog to digital electronics in the 80’s and 90’s. There will be millions of jobs created . The only cost will be to the fossil fuel industry witch already have contingency plans in place to participate in the green economy.
Well, Ken, you’re comparing a threat that poses immediate danger to our civilization in particular to a global existential threat that may lead to humans’ diminishment in QoL over thousands of years. So: “apples and oranges” is my response.
The relevant analogy, vis-a-vis climate change, would be this: would you rather be obliterated by the freight train face-forward, or would you rather be given a critical wound by a freight train while scampering away, linger, and then die? Just because there is a crisis does not mean that crisis has a solution.
There is no indication whatsoever that even the most radical environmental reforms being proposed in Congress would do enough to stave off crisis.
That’s what you took away from that book?
Easter Island was a lesson that Christian/capitalist cultures need to absorb – resources are not unlimited, growth cannot be sustained indefinitely. The pine beetle is doing devastating damage, and you’re in denial. I can make no more of this than that.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” (Edward Abbey)
Travis states: “Just because there is a crisis does not mean that crisis has a solution”.
If you bury your head in the sand your ass is vulnerable Travis ! Come on you are smarter than that!
The beetle infestation sout of Butte is as bad as it is between here and Lincoln and around Helena. Only 39,000 acres burned this year in Montana-a nothing fire season. The next few years are going to see some fire seasons like we haven’t seen since 1910.
Someone could make a lot of money in the next 10 years contracting for the Forest Service.