[asa] Coasts Not The Only Areas at Risk from Climate Change

Living a mile up you would think that my home in Fort Collins Colorado would
not be at great risk from climate change. But that actually has not been the
case. In the Fall 2001 issue of American Entomologist
http://www.math.usu.edu/~powell/phenol/feature-logan.pdf the following
question was asked:

> ... global warming may result in increased mountain pine beetle
> activity. These direct and indirect effects potentially have devastating
> consequences for whitebark and other high-elevation pines. Will global
> warming improve the success of the mountain pine beetle in
> high-elevation systems?

The question was answered in this morning's Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_7972146 :

 A pine beetle infestation is spreading from the mountains into southern
> Wyoming and the Front Range, and all of Colorado's mature lodgepole pine
> forests will be killed within three to five years, state and federal
> officials said Monday. The bark beetle infestation ravaged 500,000 new acres
> of forests in Colorado in 2007, bringing the total infestation to 1.5million acres — almost all of state's lodgepole forests — according to the
> latest aerial survey. The infestation has now worked its way north and east,
> including an increase of more than 1,500 percent in the acreage affected in
> Boulder and Larimer counties. [Note: Fort Collins is in Larimer County.]
>

Those of you who have visited Rocky Mountain National Park may have climbed
to the top of Flattop Mountain and seen the pika. You better hurry up.
Yesterday's Post had the following http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_7963405:

Pushed by warmer weather to ever-higher elevations, the tiny pika is losing
> real estate at an alarming rate, according to scientists, and is
> disappearing rapidly from much of its historic territory in the West.

> "They've been driven upslope a half mile since the end of the last ice
> age," said Donald Grayson, an archaeologist and paleontologist with the
> University of Washington who has documented the presence of pika over the
> past 40,000 years.

> "Pikas in general are now found at such high elevations that there's not a
> lot of places left for them," Grayson said.

> The plight of the pika has grown so dire, conservationists are seeking
> endangered- species protection for the critters and demanding that federal
> officials target global warming as a threat to their existence.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Jan 15 20:26:19 2008