Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the mountain pine beetle, a pest once kept in check by winter cold, has decimated huge swaths of forest in western Canada. Officials with the Canadian Forest Service say that the beetle has crossed the Rockies and they fear that it will soon start eating its way east. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about,” one official told the Post. “No. It’s now.”
What will it take to bring Bush out of denial?
UPDATE: Google is your friend! I found the article referred to above. It is entitled, "'Rapid Warming' Spreads Havoc in Canada's Forests" and it starts out like this:
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.
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.
"This is an all-out battle," said David Coutts, Alberta's minister of sustainable resource development. The Canadian Forest Service calls it the largest known insect infestation in North American history.
This is really bad, folks.
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