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Beetle-Mania in the Forests

April 13, 2005

Timber workers and conservationists have something in common in the northern Rockies.

They're both worried that global warming is going to blister the region's high-elevation forests -- which would mean fewer jobs for timber workers and a degraded landscape for conservationists.

At the Intermountain Logging Conference held in Spokane, Wash., last week, timber industry managers and workers heard an ominous report on the impacts of warming temperatures. The report, delivered by Steven Running, a University of Montana ecology professor, shows the flip side of global warming that the "greening earth" crowd never mentions when it says that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be good for us.

Nature never delivers the simple answers promised by Madison Avenue slogans. Yes, extra carbon in the atmosphere will stimulate plant growth. Extra carbon also will hold in heat that stimulates the growth of insect pests that prey on trees. The extra heat also will result in a thinner snowpack, which will mean a drier forest where trees are moisture-stressed and fires burn hotter and more frequently.

Beetles that prey on coniferous trees are always present in forests. Mountain pine beetles, for example, burrow into lodgepole pine trees and eat the layer between bark and wood, blocking the flow of water and nutrients moving up from the roots. The bugs go after easy pickings – old or diseased trees.

Healthy trees have evolved ways of fighting beetle attacks by smothering them in pitch. Over time, beetles and trees have evolved a kind of balance of power in the woods, with each side waxing and waning as weather and other forest conditions varied from season to season.

Climate change, however, has upset the balance in the northern Rockies and seems to have given beetles the upper hand. As winter temperatures have warmed, more beetles are surviving to reproduce. Trees already stressed by poor forest management practices now face a double climate whammy – drier conditions and marauding beetles thriving in what, for them, are Club Med weather conditions.

Greg McKinnon of the Canadian Forest Service told the Spokane conference that there is little doubt that a changing climate is changing forests north of the border. Mountain pine beetles are no longer held in check by the hard winters that Canadian old-timers remember.

Last year, the beetles gnawed their way through 17 million acres of forest in British Columbia. Canadian scientists are concerned that beetles will spread into the vast boreal forests of Canada's north. Degradation of the boreal forests would have global ramifications, since those forests store immense amounts of carbon.

Canadian foresters are beyond denial about global warming's impacts. As McKinnon said: "There is no speculation. We're into uncharted territory. Not only are we not getting it under control, but the rate of increase is increasing."

Politicians had better wake up and smell the pine sap.