NPR says beetles are investing in trees. Sophisticated little buggers – first they invest, then they destroy – driving the price up. Sick the SEC on them.
National Parks Week kicks off Saturday, but the celebration comes at a rough time for National Parks. Harried by federal funding cuts and urban development, the nation’s park system is also facing the rising threat of climate change.
Those effects are becoming most visible in Yellowstone, one of the best known of all national parks, according to Paul Solotaroff. He wrote about Yellowstone’s climate challenge in April’s issue of Men’s Journal and tells Weekend All Things Considered guest host Noah Adams that the damage is putting the park’s ecosystem out of balance.
As a consequence of the heat and dryness, pine beetles have invested the trees and left many of them dead, he says. This is a big problem for Yellowstone, as the pines are especially essential to the park’s inhabitants. They provide shade, stabilize the soil and, perhaps most importantly, feed the local grizzly bears.
Flooding primary concern with big snowpacks in Wyoming
uh no, the damage is a natural process of the parks ecosystem……..
All we need is for one whack job to publish a study saying the pine beetles are endangered……..
I think NPR means infest, not invest.
Their proofreading is as good as their science.
at least it passed spell check and they could have just as easily typed “Incest” depending on the Fat Finger Process used!
This displays the government’s Mismanagement of the National Park system.
Global warming will make the bears both hungry and horny!
You probably have a chart showing Wyoming has not warmed up the last 100 years.
“Trout, another part of the bears’ diet, are dying as a result of rising temperatures in the streams. All of this, he believes, can be linked back to climate change”.
Naaah, couldn’t possibly be a geothermal component to stream temperature. That could only happen in a volcani- –
errr, never mind.
More idiotic writing:
“They provide shade, stabilize the soil and, perhaps most importantly, feed the local grizzly bears.”
Grizzlies eat pine trees? Who knew? They actually do strip bark and eat the cambium layer sometimes but that’s a minor food for some bears.
Yellowstone is the capital of Big Lies from the Conservation Biology gang. This was where they whipped up many crises, starting with the listing of the grizzly in the Lower 48 as a ‘Threatened’ species in the 1970s… because their population had recently declined… because they closed the dumps there – the equivalent of a summer long salmon stream for generations of bears – and had to kill a bunch of desperate bears.
That was all predictable but they lied about it, and then forgot to tell the public about that cause for the decline.
Then there’s the wolf introduction story… which started with the Big Lie that wolves would not impact their prey populations… and they have been lying ever since about that. On the bright side, the states impacted have apparently finally forced the feds to let them deal with the huge wolf population explosion which has decimated the game species and are now eating cattle, sheep, horses, pets, and scaring people… just a matter of time before some person is attacked – and don’t believe the Big Lie that wolves don’t attack people. That WAS true in NORTH AMERICA (not Eurasia) back when wolves were scared of people.