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Sunday, May 02, 2004
Warm climate's effects striking in West
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - Just outside this mountain town, where the acres of ponderosa pine turn into a Christmas green blur, Tom Whitham eyes the weary, struggling forest.
Death is everywhere. Their limbs bare and bark brittle, the trees quickly turn this forest into an aching reminder of the devastation of drought and a massive bark beetle infestation.
Forget talk of global warming and speculation of what it might do in 50 years, or 100. Here and across the West, climate change already is happening. Temperatures are warmer, ocean levels are rising, the snowpack is dwindling and melting earlier, flowers bloom earlier, mountain glaciers are disappearing and a six-year drought is killing trees by the millions.
Lilac and honeysuckle bloom up to 10 days earlier. Warmer temperatures lead to a huge surge in woody plants that thrive in warm, wet conditions. Glaciers are retreating, roads are buckling in Alaska and shifting some supports on the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Already-low reservoirs are called upon to water fields and quench thirst for longer and longer periods after the seasonal snowpack is gone.
Bennie Hodges of the Pershing County Water Conservation District in rural Nevada, said the drought has forced him to allot farmers such a meager amount of water that they can only farm a fraction of their land. The county's only reservoir is at 17 percent capacity.
Mike Wagner saw it coming. He predicted a beetle outbreak years ago in northern Arizona when he saw how abundant older trees were in overcrowded forests. When the drought began, the beetles were ready. By 2002, trees weakened by drought were unable to fend off the beetles, and they were soon overcome. Tens of millions of trees across the West have been killed at a rate never seen before.
"Absolutely unprecedented," said Wagner, a regents' professor of forest entomology at Northern Arizona. "We've never had these conditions before, never had that combination."
Warmer temperatures only help the beetles reproduce more quickly, leading to more lost trees. Some types of beetles that used to propagate two generations in a year now can produce three.
"This is all due to temperature," said Barbara Bentz, a research entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service who is studying bark beetles. "Two or three degrees is enough to do it."
Outside Cody, Wyo., an entire forest has been killed by the drought and beetles.
"It used to be a nice spruce forest," said Kurt Allen, a Forest Service entomologist. "It's gone now. You're not going to get those conditions back for 200 or 300 years. We're really not going to have what a lot of people would consider a forest."
"What we're seeing is consistent with what we expect to happen under global warming," said Evan Mills, scientist at the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "We will expect more beetle infestation, more drought, more wildfires."
In Flagstaff, home to the world's largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest, Tom Whitham wonders how much more devastation the drought and beetles will cause, and to what extent humans will contribute to it.
"The thing that would make me really sad is if this were human caused," he said, glancing at the bare trees towering over his pickup truck. "If you lose a 200-year-old forest, you can't get it back."
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