Maybe the bible isnt so wrong after all
Someone i know has just returned from canada and was taken on a helicopter to see the area affected.
Canadian Pine Beetle problem:
Basically the beetle would usually be kept under control by cold winters killing them off and stopping them from spreading into colder areas.
Because of a 4deg increase in average winter temperatures this isnt happening.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801772.html
quote:
QUESNEL, B.C. -- Millions of acres of Canada's lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.
The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the future of the forest and the communities in it.
"It's pretty gut-wrenching," said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. "People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It's now."
Scientists fear the beetle will cross the Rocky Mountains and sweep across the northern continent into areas where it used to be killed by severe cold but where winters now are comparatively mild. Officials in neighboring Alberta are setting fires and traps and felling thousands of trees in an attempt to keep the beetle at bay.
21mil acres = ~ 85,000km2 and that was in 2006.
They can fell the trees for up to 4 years afterwards but with the american building industry almost dead there is no market for it and the trees will likely just rot.
http://www.mpb.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/index_e.html
quote:
At the current rate of spread, 50 per cent of the mature pine [in BC] will be dead by 2008 and 80 per cent by 2013.
Im sure we are going to find things like algae blooms and insect problems get a lot worse with even a few degrees change.
I'm no doomsday advocate but this certainly isn't something that I have thought much about as a consequence of global warming (though it is logical).
![[quote]](http://static.biggie.co.nz/img/dis/message_quote.png "Quote message"){kind=small}
on the march again?