I’ve been home on a short medical leave, so I’ve had time to gather some scrap cedar and hammer together a few soapboxes to stand on.
I am no climate scientist and do not pretend my environmental experience makes me an expert on the subject. But during over forty years of outdoor recreation and thirty of employment in the environmental field I have observed numerous southern species moving northward, but few migrating southward. I can’t see how this doesn’t point to a logical conclusion. Yet global warming deniers are fighting the idea to the last breath, with most armed with no more than their political ideology, or at best a few facts cherry-picked from the internet which support their views. I wonder how much evidence it’s going to take.
As brought up by Dragoncjo, regarding the potential habitat offered by dead or dying pines, virtually every change to the environmental can have positive and negative effects on specific segments of it. The environment has always adapted to change. But we are not talking about the random forest fire, which has helped shaped the animal and plant makeup of the pines for many thousands of years. This new pest is potentially part of a global issue that is going to result in unpredictable changes on a massive scale, and many will not be good ones.
Some have said these climate swings were going on long before man. But species extinctions have also gone on long before man, which has certainly not stopped us from eradicated our share of species since we’ve been on the scene, so what happened before us is hardly an argument. We do indeed have the ability to cause bad things, or to at least make them worse. No magic bullet has been identified, but many of the recommended actions are good things to do in their own right, regardless of the climate issue. We need more open minds and less that are closed due to partisan loyalty. I stopped being partisan long ago. I’m too green for the right and too well-armed for the left.
