The Ghost Park - Yellowstone Up First; The Rest Will Go As Trees Die & Burn

[hatrack]

EDIT

The sharpest rebuke to the junk-science shills is the disaster now unfolding in the American West. States from the Dakotas on down to Nevada weathered devastating jumps of almost 2 degrees, or roughly double the rate of the planet’s rise. The northern Rocky winters got radically milder, the summers started sooner and were drier and longer, and wildfires burned through vast tracts of timber weeks after the usual fire year ended. The damage to natural resources has outstripped the worst predictions of climate scientists everywhere: Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest reservoirs in the States and the lifeblood of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, respectively, stand half- empty and notching record lows, thanks to shrinking snowmelt. The country’s greatest trout streams have been closed to anglers during parts of eight of the past 10 years, and the keystone trees of the interior West — the aspen, whitebark, and lodgepole pines — are dropping dead in holocaust numbers, felled directly by the surge of heat or by insect infestations spawned by it. And this is a mere prelude to the hellfire that’s coming: a regional warming of as much as seven to 10 degrees by the end of this century, bringing permanent drought plains, coastal tsunamis, and widespread human dispersal. “Without a countershift the equal of the Industrial Revolution, we’ll see mass migrations in our grandkids’ lifetimes,” says Steve Running, a renowned ecologist at the University of Montana and a lead author of the United Nations report on global warming in 2007. “Major cities in the West, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, may have to be abandoned as badlands.”

Running is scarcely an outlier voice. “What we’ve seen out here is like nothing on record, and our tree-ring studies go back a thousand years,” says Jonathan Overpeck, the co-director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona and one of the go-to climate scientists in the country. “The winters are shorter, the snowpacks melt early, and the drying seasons are longer and hotter, which leads to terrible wildfires and tree death. One of the many things that worry me, as the heat increases, is that this region becomes a second Outback. Already, our water supply is severely strained, and with decade-long droughts like the one we’re in now, it’s hard to see how we’ll avoid it.”

EDIT

Flying north, over the foothills of the Madison Range, we passed lodgepole pines whose evergreen crowns were the color of undercooked lamb. Shaped like closed umbrellas at a hundred feet tall, these, too, were desecrated by beetles, who carry in their mouths a vicious bacteria that drains the trees of sap and nutrients. Beyond the sick lodgepoles were legions of dead ones, their gray trunks tinder for trouble. Though Yellowstone’s fire season used to end in September, three big blazes raged that morning, having burned through the weekend unchecked. “With winters ending early and summers stretching longer, you’re getting bone-dry conditions that last for months,” says Gordon, who, as founder of the nonprofit EcoFlight, flew arborists over Yellowstone dozens of times to compile the data on whitebark-pine death for the NRDC. “With all this deadwood, a couple of lightning strikes and there go thousands of acres.” In years of normal climate, or what used to pass for normal, summer fires served as reset buttons, purging old trees to make way for young ones and clearing new groves for herds to graze. But the decade of high heat here has set the stage for cataclysm: superfires that leap past all containment. Montanans speak grimly of the summer of 2000, when the Bitterroot National Forest lost a fifth of its acres to 100 new fires a day, and of 1988, when a third of Yellowstone’s trees were devoured in a months-long inferno. Dire though those were, things could have been worse. “The Big Blowup of 1910 basically leveled Montana, burning everything in sight, including towns,” said Skoglund. “Everything’s in place for another fire-of-the-century event. All we’ve lacked — so far — is gale winds.”

Past the town of Gardiner, we crossed the Gallatin Mountains, their brown pates glinting like copper pots. Twenty years ago, these peaks were crowned with snow no later than mid-October and, packing drifts up to 10 feet, were closed to hikers. Now people climb them in shorts and Tevas clear through Columbus Day. Gordon swooped in closer, to a couple hundred yards of the tree line; there, as ragged as week-old stubble, stood vistas of whitebark pine. Even in health, they are queer-shaped things — tall, gnarled stalks screwed into the hill, with crowns like Druids’ hoods. These were far from well, though, either draped in red (dying) or the end-stage gray of rigor mortis. “Seven years ago, this was solid green. Now it’s all deadfall and ashes,” muttered Gordon. “It’s like the roof’s blown off and the animals have fled. But where do they go — where do any of us go — when it’s all this gray down there?”

EDIT




http://www.mensjournal.com/the-ghost-park

[itsrobert]

1. You should provide a link to your source

Or cite the material with author, publication, publisher, copyright information, etc.

[hatrack]

3. Gah! Sorry about that!

:hi:

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Gotta say, Fuck Reagan.

Some of this is also due to his forest managment bullshit that has led to mega-burns.

[reggie the dog]

4. I was in the rockies last year and it broke my heart

from the foothills of wyoming near Laramie all the way to steamboat springs colorado about 90 percent of the trees were dead due to beatles. i aske some locals at a ranch, while they were repairing my tire, what that meant for them, they kept saying over and over agian "it's changed EVERYTHING" it gets hotter due to lack of shade so the plants at ground level die off, you cannot go hiking or fishing or rafting in due to risk of being killed by falling dead branches and everyone is scared of a wildfire bigtime. i remembered those forests as being so gree in my youth. i literally cried when i saw it, cried because my 3 year old will never know how beautiful the west once was. here in france our mountains, the massif central, are seeing mass die off of pine due to some kind of insect infection. i fear that the alpes will be next, this is not good for oxygen levels....

[mimitabby]

5. here's another quote

These days, there are maybe 1,500, and it’s hard to imagine how Yellowstone’s bruins will make it to the end of this century. So desperate have they become that they run toward gunfire, having learned that hunters leave gut piles after a kill.

[OhioDoink]

6. Great Smoky Mountains

I hike the trails there as much as I can.Higher elevations the Balsams are gone,lower down the Chestnuts have been gone for 70 years,the Hemlocks are going and soon to follow will be the Ash.Sad.:cry:

[zeaper]

7. So when were these alarmist lies written?

It’s now 2011, I live near Yellowstone; we are worried about flooding after a very cold and snowy winter (second one in a row).

Wyoming flood potential rises with snowpack

[hatrack]

8. Well, Zeaper (and gosh, isn't that an appropriate name?), it's not about flooding . . .

It's about forest collapse, but then you don't have to take my word for it. Here's the US Forest Service (dateline last month):

CHEYENNE — Wyoming’s bark beetle epidemic is showing signs of slowing, forestry officials say, for the rather depressing reason that the insects are running out of trees in the state to infest.

But the beetles literally aren’t out of the woods yet, according to forest experts. And the larger question may be how to deal with the huge expanses of dead trees they’ve already left behind.

The latest aerial survey by the U.S. Forest Service, released in January, shows an estimated 314,000 acres of Wyoming pine forest died from beetle infestation in 2010 — mostly from mountain pine beetles. That’s a fourth of tree mortality rates in Wyoming during both 2009 and 2008.

In all, about 3.1 million acres of trees in Wyoming — mainly lodgepole and ponderosa pine — have been infested since the outbreak was first noticed about 15 years ago. The worst-hit areas have been the Medicine Bow National Forest in southeast Wyoming, Black Hills National Forest in northeast Wyoming and the Shoshone and Bridger-Teton national forests in the western part of the state.

EDIT

http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/article_3af28c3d-2bde-5da8-9718-257f586000c8.html

Then there's fire behavior in beetle-killed timber and slash in Montana - i.e. ignition to 3 acres in two minutes - kind of a preview of summer, 2011:

The precise implications Montana's large number of beetle-infested forest acres have on wildfires are still being studied. But one thing is clear: Drastic changes in wildfire behavior have been reported by fire crews working in infested areas, FireSafe Montana's Everett "Sonny" Stiger said Tuesday.

Stiger presented his talk "Wildland Firefighter Safety and the Mountain Pine Beetle" during the International Association of Wildland Firefighters conference being held in Missoula this week. Stiger and his team have been gathering firefighter observations of blazes burning in stands killed by mountain pine beetles for several years. Crews have reported intense and quickly spreading fires that produce black smoke and tall flames.

One firefighter noted that it was "astounding" how fast fire in beetle-kill stands spreads. In one case, a fire burning in such a stand grew to three acres in two minutes and to more than 100 acres in the first hour.

Even fires in infested stands that haven't yet fallen into the "red-and-dead" stage are displaying these characteristics. Those "still green" stands have 50 percent less moisture than healthy forests, Stiger said. "We need to make (fire crews) well aware this kind of spread is possible," he said.

EDIT

http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_ebf497f0-6004-11e0-aac0-001cc4c002e0.html

Then there's this story about current beetle outbreaks in Idaho and how climate ties into that:

Cathy Whitlock, professor of earth sciences at Montana State University, researches and collects sediment cores from lakebeds and analyzes the fossil pollen and charcoal in order to learn about past vegetation and frequency of fires. She has found evidence of past fires in core samples from a small lake in the Sawtooth Mountains, and these events are associated with periods of high fuel accumulation and drought. “Pine beetles are native to Idaho forests, and the remains of beetles in lakes suggest outbreaks in the past,” Whitlock said. “It happens. The forests survive and recover. I think what impresses people now is the scale of the current infestation. People want to know if the dead and dying trees will increase fire hazard or not, especially if the climate continues to warm.”

Hicke is currently conducting research on mountain pine beetle activity in the Sawtooth region, and said the recent outbreaks suggest there is a climate change influence. These aspects are related to epidemics at high elevations that affect whitebark pine and limber pine. He said these tree species have been attacked in the Stanley area in the past, for example in the 1930s, but this period was a time of warming and temperatures decreased, indicating that the conditions in the whitebark pine forest were too cold to support outbreaks.

“But now we’re seeing outbreaks with the warming conditions and we expect that the warming conditions are not going to switch to colder temperatures, but that they will continue on,” Hicke said. “So that’s pretty strong evidence for the impact of climate change at these high elevation sights.” The evidence for this relationship is solid, according to Hicke. “We do know, based on biological studies, that outbreaks are more likely in warmer conditions,” Hicke said. “This isn’t just correlation, there’s good evidence.”

However, the beetle’s dependence on temperature is more subtle than originally thought, according to James Powell, professor in the statistics, mathematics, and biology departments at Utah State University. Powell has been involved with mountain pine beetles through the USDA Rocky Mountain Research Station since 1994, when he used mathematical models to predict how infestations progress in a forest environment.

EDIT

http://www.uiargonaut.com/sections/news/stories/2011/april/4111/climate_change_in.html

Then there's this guy from Montana who's lived there for 12 years who just cut down the last of his trees, since most of them were dead:

EDIT

When we bought the land, the stands of timber were so dense and unruly you couldn’t walk through parts of the property. I bought my first chainsaw, an orange beauty. I spent a lot of time thinning small trees, sawing up bigger ones for firewood, splitting and stacking the wood, and using it all to heat our house. We rarely used the propane furnace. Our masonry wood stove from Finland, a Tulikivi, has a mass of gray soapstone around the fire box that stores the warmth and radiates heat into the house for 24 hours, even in the coldest days of December.

And we were “fireproofing” our property, thinning trees around the house should a wildfire break out.

Four years ago, the beetles came. First a couple of our oldest pine trees turned red. Alarmed, we quickly cut them down and covered them with black plastic. It’s stomach-churning when the tree reaper comes to claim your forest. One day ivory-colored plugs that look like candle wax are plastered on the trunk, a sign the tree is pumping out resin to try to halt a drilling bug. Sometimes a tree wins by entombing a beetle; far more often the trees lose to the mob assault.

Then things went exponential. One dead tree turned to five and the next year five turned to 30, dying far faster than I could cut them down. Now the mortality count is in the hundreds, more than 95 percent of our forest, and many more in the national forest around us.

Last week we threw in the towel. A logging crew cut down all but a few of our trees, taking away our forest and leaving us a meadow. The trees, too damaged to be turned into lumber, were hauled off to a pulp plant, where they will be ground into an oatmeal-like slurry and turned into cardboard boxes. I won’t make money; in fact it will cost me some $700 an acre to get rid of them. And good riddance — the sooner they’re gone the better. Dead trees are a fire waiting to happen.

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/garden/02tree.html

Or you could try reading the article.

Have a super day!

[Systematic Chaos]

10. But, dude...there was a whole bunch of SNOW.

And all that snow must mean everything's okay, right?

RIGHT?!??!?!

[Nihil]

12. And somewhere, deep in the countryside, ...

... an old footbridge over a river has started to feel lonely
as it's usual companion has disappeared. It isn't too concerned
though as it has happened a few times before in the last 9 years
when the companion temporarily awakens from its slumber to go
on a brief (if noisy) excursion before taking fright at the bright
light of knowledge that burns its deep-seated ignorance so much
that it has to return to the safe, dark, resting place under the bridge.

The footbridge understands and is grateful to the torch-holders
for sending its little friend back, safe & sound, ready for another
year of dozing uneventfully before its next adventure.

:hi:

[NickB79]

9. Are there any pines resistant to borer beetles?

I know it might be sacrilege to some to suggest planting non-native trees, but at this point we need some tree cover in the region.

[zeaper]

11. Sorry to interrupt your DOOM story, but most of it is nonsense

This article should contain the disclaimer at the beginning: "Fit only for consumption by Eastern Urbanites"

Sure the forests have been hit hard by beetles, but not so much in Yellowstone. It’s the multitude of extra lies that got my attention. Things like hunting grizzly bears in the Park or the plane rides over the Park-both are illegal. Then there is the story of dead Park aspens and a never ending drought, again just not true. This is a phony article regarding Yellowstone National Park, get a clue people, maybe you should come out and visit and see for yourself sometime.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Mayeb you should read the article properly before spouting off

It talked about the 2007 removal of Grizzlies from the endangered species list, and the 2009 ruling that put them back. It does not say anyone is hunting them now. But there's an appeal against the decision, and they want to hunt them if that's successful:

The sow had two yearling cubs in tow and thought her offspring were threatened, said Mark Bruscino, Game and Fish bear management program supervisor in Cody.
...
“We should be planning (grizzly) hunting as soon as we can do that legally,” said Bruscino.

Legally, meaning when the bears are removed from endangered species status.

http://www.powelltribune.com/news/item/5278-

It doesn't talk about flying over the park itself, either. It talks about a flight starting at West Yellowstone airport, and going over the rim of the park, Hebgen Lake, north, and then over Gardiner - ie a route outside the park.