NEW WEST FEATURE
Protecting Western Forests from Global Warming a ‘Moral Issue,’ Gore says
At an Aspen appearance, Al Gore says the West's forests are at risk and 'we have to protect them.'By David Frey, 2-20-11
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| Rust-colored pines killed by beetles stand out in the snow in Eagle County, Colorado. David Frey photo. | |
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Seen from above, the mountains of central Colorado are a snow-covered mosaic of meadows, aspens and lodgepole pines. Some of those pines are green, their branches holding new-fallen snow. Others are red fading to brown – the telltale signs of trees killed by an epidemic of bark beetles that have wiped out millions of acres across the West.
Scientists say those trees are also a clear indication of global warming, one of several indelible marks a warming planet has left on the West.
“We have beautiful forests. We have to protect them,” said Al Gore, the former vice president who has become a climate change crusader.
Gore appeared Friday at the symposium Forests at Risk: Climate Change & the Future of the American West. The conference was hosted by For the Forest, a local group that formed after residents became concerned about the spread of pine beetles into the mountains that surround the ski town, but whose focus has widened as scientists increasingly pointed to a link between beetles and a warming globe.
“It is a moral issue,” Gore told the crowd gathered at the Aspen Institute, whose campus sits below hillsides turning red from beetle kill, “and we have to be as a generation willing to stand up and do the right thing.”
It wasn’t his first visit here to the White River National Forest. In the summer of 1971, Gore, newly-released from the Army after serving in Vietnam, packed up his Chevy Impala and left his Tennessee home to camp in the Colorado mountains. The next year he did the same.
“I have my own relationship with the forest here,” said Gore.
Those forests have changed in those 40 years. They’ve changed in the past five years. Widening swaths of pines have been killed by beetles. Other insects have killed spruce and pinons. Sudden aspen decline has wiped out entire stands of the West’s most iconic tree. Wildfires, hotter and fiercer than ever before, have scorched thousands of acres.
Each phenomenon has its own causes, but scientists at the symposium agreed they all share climate change in common.
“The linkage that these scientists have found over and over again to global warming I’m sure some people resist but it’s a fact,” Gore said. “It’s unprecedented and we have to face up to it.”
While Gore was the most famous name at the symposium, his was a rare voice of activism in a conference heavy on science.
“The planet’s getting warmer. It’s getting warmer rapidly and it’s projected to continue to do so,” said Craig Allen, a researcher for the U.S. Geologic Survey based at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico who has studied the impact of climate change on trees around the world.
“We see it from the Amazon to the boreal forests in Siberia and everywhere in between,” Allen said.
Scientists recited a litany of attacks on the West’s forests linked to global warming. Bark beetles have devastated 2 million acres of trees across the West, particularly in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. They have spread higher and farther north than ever before and are threatening to reach unprecedented areas east of the Continental Divide.
More than 1 million acres of aspens in Colorado and Wyoming have been affected by sudden aspen decline, and aspens are expected to disappear altogether from at least two-thirds of the areas they recently thrived.
It’s not just epidemic die-offs. Individual trees are also dying at higher and higher rates across the West.
Wildfires are burning hotter and spreading farther, and wildfire seasons are lasting longer than ever.
The common denominator is global warming, researchers said, which has left trees weakened by drought while higher temperatures have helped insects, disease and fire to thrive.
Global warming change the look of forests forever, researchers said, but exactly what they will look like remains to be seen.
“We’re heading into uncharted territory,” said University of Arizona researcher Tom Sweetnam, who has studied the worsening of wildfires due to climate change.
For Gore, the forests are only a part of a picture of global impacts from rising temperatures. Last year, the hottest recorded on earth, saw unprecedented catastrophic wildfires and floods around the world, Gore said, including his hometown of Nashville, Tenn.
“This is a challenge to the existence of our civilization as we know it,” he said. “The things we love, like the forests, are at risk and there are things that can be done to mitigate the damage, but in order to solve the problem we have to solve the root cause. We’re putting 90 million tons (of pollution) into the earth’s atmosphere ever 24 hours.”
But what can be done? That question ran through the conference, but had few answers. Land managers said they were struggling to help create ecosystems that would be more resilient to climate change.
Sen. Mark Udall. D-Colo., called for Congress to put “a price on carbon,” either through cap and trade, a carbon tax or a similar mechanism.
‘I hope we get to that point before we’ve lost the opportunity to lead,” Udall said. “While we dither and while we debate, the Chinese are acting, the Germans are acting, the Spaniards are acting, many other countries are acting.”
Follow David Frey at www.davidmfrey.com or on Twitter.
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Comments
Climate Change is not the enemy. Support for Climate Change is the enemy. This CO2 mistake was a costly error and continued defense of unstoppable warming is derailing environmental efforts and social reforms. Pollution is real, death by CO2 was and is not real. If you still think the majority former believers will now reverse course and vote YES to taxes to make the weather colder, and YES to personal sacrifice to save the planet from SUV gas, not pollution, YOU are the new denier.
I think it is a moral issue to get policy right in the face of the actual circumstances. Wishing something doesn't make it so. Gore never figured that out, and never will.
Nearly all scientists agree, climate change is real, it's happening now, and humans are largely responsible for it. Firing off anecdotes doesn't disprove the science. Sorry if you don't like the answers, but 98 percent of the scientists who study climate and related fields do. I believe them.
I am not a denier, as I can see receding glaciers as well as anyone else. I'm not buying that humans alone are causing the warming, as well. All too many want the dichotomy of "us against them" and "no middle ground". So it can fit their politics in a neat little package.
Since the complexities and externals of forest management are impossible to quickly describe, it apparently seems easier for opponents to just to call the Forest Service corrupted liars, and ramrod their own Gaia-esque fantasy world plans.
You cannot "save" dead forests. When there are too many trees for the annual precipitation, lodgepoles react by getting sick, getting infested, then dying in droves. When this happens in mixed conifers forests, they tend to burn down completely, sometimes leaving P. pines very scattered, and unable to re-colonize areas for decades.
Yes, it's much more complex for anyone other than the Forest Service to take on and complete. They cannot do it with one hand tied behind their Achilles Heel.
If you cannot trust the Obama Forest Service, in an "open and transparent" government, with ample amounts of government whistleblowers waiting in the wings, with "scientific integrity mandates" for government scientists, who ARE you going to trust?!?!? Al Gore?!?!? NOT A CHANCE!
You go along with Tim Wirth -- as in, "Even if the science is wrong, it's still the right thing to do" -- like THAT wasn't preconception at its finest?
One thing that would cut through all the political garbage is to have certain cause and effect relationships. A causes B therefore C. Those conditions have not been met.
The cause and effect has been seen time and time again. The beetles are a perfect example. Warmer temperatures lead to drought. Drought leads to weak trees. Warmer winters lead to beetles surviving the winter. Warmer summers lead to beetles thriving in ways they haven't before and spreading farther north and into higher altitudes than ever before.
Is global warming the only cause? No. That's not the way the world works. Is it a cause? Overwhelming evidence says yes. Why would I disagree with the vast majority of scientists unless I had my own axe to grind. I'm not a climatologist or a biologist. I haven't studied it personally. Not coincidentally, neither have most global warming deniers.
The science is clear on man's cause of climate change--so no more wasting time with deniers.
A carbon tax is the only rational and market-based method to effectively reduce mankind's production of carbon dioxide. Subsidizing carbon costs through subsidies to the oil and coal industries is socialistic nonsense--let the free market decide by properly pricing the environmental damage caused by carbon production, then taxing those industries accordingly.
We still have time to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thereby reducing global warming and climate change. It won't be easy, and we will still see impacts already in play (which will result in more pine bark beetle kills, among other things). But doing nothing is not an option.
We know the cause of climate change--mankind's production of carbon dioxide. And we know the solution--a hefty carbon tax to change behavior, directing our actions away from carbon-producing technologies.
The issues are clear, as are the solutions. The question is whether we have the guts to face our own actions, and change our behavior for the sake of future generations.
-Jon Cheever
Not matter what a fat ass from Tennessee, whose father was a corrupted Congressman and then Senator, a crony of Occidental Petroleum owner and Joe Stalin's best American spy, Armand Hammer, was raised in a frigging D.C. hotel. With summers on the farm, riding Hammer and Stalin bred Arabians, and selling breeding bulls from their herd of registered Angus, and fine Arab horses. That is the oldest political funding scam out there: auctioning off your registered stock to supporters who come and pay many times what comparable livestock brings to breeders who are not US Senators. Oregon's own Sen. Wayne Morse raised registered Devon cattle on a 24 acre "ranch" in suburban Eugene. And so did former Gov. Straub and others. And the then high roller and mover-shaker, Glen Jackson, who was Chairman of the Board of Standard Insurance, Pacific Power and Light, and Chair of the State Highway Commission, had a large commercial cow and registered Devon ranch. You don't even have to pay the light bill to figure that one out. I have seen the embassy blue Buicks with the whip antennae, State cops in cowboy garb, and a half dozen Eddie Bauer equipped big wigs mount up to gather cows on one of those ranches.
Al Gore, Sr. was on the take, and now his son is in on the carbon credit Madoff scheme. A gamer of the system. A blowhard with a journalism degree. And the entitlement mentality to be a national spokesman for something he has not an iota of qualification to understand.
After the Indians were killed off or put on the reservations, and the metes and bounds of small land ownerships were put in place, and the unclaimed public domain was kept by the Feds which was never the national intent, you should expect forests to change and do things never before witnessed. The Indians controlled lodgepole and encouraged apen clonal expansion by directed burning. Small fires, and frequent fires kept the vegetation in ground stages where it was of use to humans and then their animals. Fire was not as much a threat to life and livelihood, after extensive burning. And, extensive burning had the intended result of not having a plethora of intensive burning. That type of fire just didn't do anyone any good. That system was extinguished a century ago, and now even logging is not allowed. So watch it grow crowded, use the available water to build high stems per acre, fire prone pecker pole patches, devoid of most other plants and wildlife endemic to the area so long ago. Watch it burn. Hope like hell it doesn't burn you out. If it starts on Federal land, and burns you out, there is no recourse with the Feds. However, if the fire starts on private property, and burns the Federal lands all so ready to burn, there is a three US Attorney task force in SLC ready to litigate the issue of damage to the Public Domain, and gain monetary recompense from the private citizen whose property the fire started on. That sounds so like an Arabian dictator's policy, now the reason for mass social discontent, doesn't it?? But that is the way it is in these United States of America. I sort of get the idea Al Gore, Jr. wants to take it all for the "public good", and run it himself as the all knowing and benign land, sea and sky Tzar of the World. All bow to the Great Al Gore, Jr. Yes suh!! Rat now, suh!! Yo' ice tea need a refill, suh? Jus' 'nother en-titled Southern Boy, that al gore, jr. A demoncrap sucking the system dry. Dumped Tipper so's to get some of that "happy finish' massage stuff. What a guy!!!
Let's just pretend that AGW is generally accepted, and known to cause droughts fer sure. So we can think ahead and gee, we are gonna have less water for these here trees. These here trees which forestry says are short-lived, even-aged, and in their dotage...and they are now fighting each other for their Social Security before they croak.
Add in the beetle function. Hmmmm.
How about if we start logging them, or at least seriously thin them out so the remaining stems have more water each, which will help them withstand beetles a bit better and improve the odds that they'll be around when the 40 below finally hits (as it will).
And while we are at it, why don't we plant some replacement stock that will be better adapted to the warmer and drier conditions -- or do outrageously well if things go back to the old normal?
And, when we've logged and gotten some cash out, that can go to pay for the kind of trimmed down fire cadre that can manage properly timed restorative prescription fires. Could even be Indians....they did it for a long long time before the white guys showed up.
I read a piece of history yesterday, about Lewis and Clark. Their "wow 'em" piece of European manufacture was an air gun. Yep. A super sized Daisy. Only it shot .44 cal ball from a rifled barrel at 750 feet per second. Magic, Dude. So L&C;had constructed lead kegs, which held gunpowder in volume enough to propel the lead balls that could be taken from molds of the lead kegs. Water proof. And, the only thing they started out with that was not totally used up at journey's end. The story said L&C;used an Austrian gun that held 22 balls in a magazine that auto loaded, and once sufficient air pressure was built into the cast iron butt reservoir, there was air pressure enough to fire those balls with efficiency. You can access the Beeman site through Google and read all you want about the history of lethal air guns, all predating "No Country for Old Men."
So, Indian burning and air guns. You think you have invented the wheel and find out that smart people have been around for a lot longer than you think. In the case of Indian burners, thousands of years. And for "don't shoot your eye out" at Christmas, it might have been "Don't kill the Bumpus hounds, dear." Which is much better than not being able to set fires due to constraints of the Clean Air Acts, all the while the same government encourages public lands to burn so that land management on the "cheap" will prevent fire there, for now. Third trimester abortion for forests. Liberal forest management theory of today. Fully accepted by the Obama Administration and Planned Foresthood.
Lettuce is up to $198/pound due to Mexican vegetable crops being frozen, gas is still $2.93, but I'm sure when this is gone it will go back up, esepcially if Gahadafi bombs the oil lines. We are making outselves totally at the mercy of folks who do not like us. That ain't smart when the vast majority of the country cannot provide even the barest food essentials for themselves.
A Mr. Aplet from the Wilderness Society spoke at Gore's show. He rightly blamed the Pine beetle(MPB) epidemic on so much "even age mature" forests that cover Colorado. The real kicker is he blamed the present "even age" on "wildfires that burned a hundred years ago that were fueled by miners logging slash". Of course in the same breath he would make the standard enviro claim that the present MPB deadfall doesn't increase fire hazard at all. I'm sure Mr. Frey would claim that the present MPB deadfall doesn't increase fire hazard. A time for all seasons I guess. That's the kind of science they adhere to. The "conclusion that fits the ideology of the moment" is the first thing to arrive at, grasping at facts to prove it comes second. Theory plays no role.
The only "green islands" in the sea of the Dead Red in Colorado is the "regenerated clearcuts". I'm sure Mr. Frey wouldn't know it if he was looking at it. Now he does. Only 3% of the White River was logged in 50 years. The USFS was well aware of the MPB threat. 20 years ago their entomologists recommended cutting 50,000 acres of high risk lodgepole forests on the WRNF alone. Because of enviro's, only 2500 were cut. Theres no way you would have stopped it, but in 20 years Coloradoans will be playing in these green islands instead of the "wall of deadfall" that will surround their communities. It was all about age diversity.
Mr. Udall recently scored 40 million dollars to log off MPB trees around the ski communities. Breckenridge wants to log 5000 acres around town. Vail Ski area wants to log 4000 acres. Aspen even wants to get out the cut with 2000 acres. Udall recently sponsored legislation that would "streamline environmental laws" so logging could procede faster. 10 years ago he sponsored legislation that would have cancelled the USFS timber sale program in order to "save and not destroy" our forests. Mendacity.
Of course, since the nearest and last sawmill in Colorado is 250 miles away from Breck, the USFS is "paying" loggers $1400 /acre to "salvage clearcut" and fire proof the forests in Colorado. Now thats what I call a "below cost timber sale". In Montana, which still has a functioning timber industry, the state DNRC recently sold a MPB salvage clearcut timber sale. The average diameter was only 9". Identical to Colorado's forest. The DNRC got "payed" by the loggers $700/acre for the right to cut the trees.
Breckenridge gave Obama 60% of the vote. The incredible irony here is that the very enviro's who destroyed the timber industry in Colorado now want the timber industry to save their butts. No more timber sale litigation. Soon they'll be taking credit for inventing this wonderfull new thing called "forestry".
You wanted natural, now wallow in it.
I left, and came back for a day of skiing, we got together. After the Diamond Park blowdown, the problem was made pretty clear, they were talking seriously about an active forestry program to establish a growth rotation inasmuch as the runs in the trees were not a static type deal.
Don't know what's happened since.
It’s called “Ad hominem”…Seems to be a lot of that here.
Dummies use it when they don’t get the rules of rational debate.
Really smart guys will use it on the dummies.
No place for it where reason and science all point in the same direction.
Lovelock, Masters, Cullen, Hansen, Earle…All agree…we are on the road to ruin.
If you read the science, in a book that actually contains a bibliography with
peer reviewed articles, you will see that the evidence is incontrovertible.
If you think it is not, find science evidence to the contrary. Quote it.
The energy it takes to melt all of the ice has kept things stable…It operates
on decadal time frames. No big changes happen till most of the ice is gone.
Two horizons for man: Our rise was based on the stability caused by the “Latent
Heat of Fusion”…We did not understand that, still don’t. Man’s fall will be based on the changes
during “The Latent Heat of Vaporization”…A run away heating that will make
earth a twin to Venus…Punishment for our Hubris.
Lee
Or as the old Norwegian faller said, "One more hole in da swamp. And one day closer to eternity."
Amazing!
Most "preservationists" I know want wildland fires to burn naturally under the appropriate circumstances. How could you possibly know whether "preservationists" like/dislike a retreat of lodgeple pine to it's historic range. You don't know foto so stop acting like it and post comment that does'nt trash preservationists and hype up fire suppression and logging.
And then you repeat that scenario across Europe and ask yourself who is the one consumed with greed?
Some people have more money than they can spend. Is that greed or happenstance? Lucky sperm club or hard work coupled with managed opportunity (called luck in some circles.)
Greed is sitting on your dead ass expecting someone else to take care of you, pay your bills, feed, clothe and house you. I guess there is a lot of greed in the US. Way, way too many sitting on their asses, like their mommas and poppas did, and their mommas and poppas did. Generational porch sitting has only taken good many and thrown it after bad. And now we expect to take all the wealth from who? A Dutch guy told me he came to the US to farm because even though you can't make as much money farming in the US than you can in places like Brazil, Paraguay, South Africa, Indonesia, at least in the US you can move it to do other things. In most countries your money has to stay in the country. And who wants to have money you can spend in any other country than the one you made it in??? No freedom in that. Who is the greedy one in that situation?? The political wing on that country, of course. Just like it is in this country where you can move money. How many Billions will it take to campaign to keep the Presidency in 2012?? Who will fund that deal?? Of course you know. Public employee unions and their dues, that is who. SEIU. Education unions. And they will campaign against "big" money. All the while they are the big spenders on all things political.
The fact is, right now, there are more people in America getting a living from government than there are people not getting a living from government, and they are now the majority. There are more of them than there are people who live and work in the private sector, and who's incomes are totally from private sector employment or entrepreneurial ventures. The goose is dead. We are now in the death throes of the golden goose that once laid the golden eggs. The poor thing got worked to death, never fed, and in the end, it was a crime to lay golden eggs due to a new layer of EPA emissions regulations.