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> Dear Colleague,
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>
> We would like to draw your attention to an article that appeared in
> yesterday's Washington Post entitled, " 'Rapid Warming' Spreads Havoc
> in Canada's Forests".  This article highlights the dramatic impact
> warming climates have on ecological systems and their associated
> economies.
>
>  
>
> We urge you to join over 112 of your colleagues and cosponsor HR 759,
> the **Climate Stewardship Act**---a proposal to cap US emissions of
> global warming gasses to 2000 levels by 2010---and to join the
> Congressional Climate Change Caucus.  A modest proposal for climate
> change policy, the Climate Stewardship Act contributes meaningfully to
> the growing national and international dialogue on this important
> issue, and the Caucus provides a forum for this dialogue in Congress. 
> For more information, please contact Edith Thompson in Rep.
> Gilchrest's office (5-5311) or Abbie Meador in Rep. Olver office
> (5-5335).
>
>  
>
>                                                       Sincerely,
>
>  
>
> Wayne T. Gilchrest                                     John W. Olver
>
> Member of Congress                                                 
> Member of Congress
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> **\'Rapid Warming\' Spreads Havoc in Canada\'s Forests**\
> Tiny Beetles Destroying Pines
>
> By Doug Struck\
> Washington Post Foreign Service\
> Wednesday, March 1, 2006; A01
>
> QUESNEL, B.C. \-- Millions of acres of Canada\'s lush green forests
> are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose
> population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more
> trees than wildfires or logging.
>
> The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of
> Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the
> future of the forest and the communities in it.
>
> \"It\'s pretty gut-wrenching,\" said Allan Carroll, a research
> scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies
> tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the
> beetle. \"People say climate change is something for our kids to worry
> about. No. It\'s now.\"
>
> Scientists fear the beetle will cross the Rocky Mountains and sweep
> across the northern continent into areas where it used to be killed by
> severe cold but where winters now are comparatively mild. Officials in
> neighboring Alberta are setting fires and traps and felling thousands
> of trees in an attempt to keep the beetle at bay.
>
> \"This is an all-out battle,\" said David Coutts, Alberta\'s minister
> of sustainable resource development. The Canadian Forest Service calls
> it the largest known insect infestation in North American history.
>
> U.S. Forest Service officials say they are watching warily as the
> outbreak has spread. The United States is less vulnerable because it
> lacks the seamless forest of lodgepole pines that are a highway for
> the beetle in Canada. So far, U.S. officials say, the outbreaks have
> been mostly in isolated clumps of remote wilderness areas of northern
> Washington.
>
> \"It\'s a rapid warming\" that is increasing the beetles\' range, said
> Carroll. \"All the data show there are significant changes over
> widespread areas that are going to cause us considerable amount of
> grief. Not only is it coming, it\'s here.\"
>
> \"We are seeing this pine beetle do things that have never been
> recorded before,\" said Michael Pelchat, a forestry officer in
> Quesnel, as he followed moose tracks in the snow to examine a
> 100-year-old pine killed in one season by the beetle. \"They are
> attacking younger trees, and attacking timber in altitudes they have
> never been before.\"
>
> The tiny beetle has always lived in high areas from Arizona to
> northern British Columbia, and occasionally populations have grown in
> limited outbreaks. In Canada, where the beetle\'s favored lodgepole
> pine thrives, it has been controlled by winters with early cold snaps
> or long killing spells of 20 degrees below zero. But for more than a
> decade, forestry experts say, the weather here has not been cold
> enough for long enough to kill the beetle.
>
> Scientists with the Canadian Forest Service say the average
> temperature of winters here has risen by more than 4 degrees in the
> last century. \"That\'s not insignificant,\" said Jim Snetsinger,
> British Columbia\'s chief forester. \"Global warming is happening. We
> have to start to account for it.\"
>
> The result is a swarm of beetles that has grown exponentially in the
> past six years, flying from tree to tree. The advance is marked by
> broad swaths of rust-red forest, the color pines turn before they drop
> all their needles to become ghostly grey skeletons.
>
> \"It\'s depressing to see,\" said Steve Dodge, a British Columbia
> forestry official whose office is along the Quesnel River. This town
> of 10,000 sits in the heart of the province\'s vast evergreen
> woodlands. Steam billowing from the kilns of a half-dozen sawmills and
> pulp plants enshroud the town, which proudly calls itself the
> \"Woodsmart City\" in homage to the timber industry that sustains it.
>
> In an attack played out millions of times over, a female beetle no
> bigger than a rice grain finds an older lodgepole pine, its favored
> host, and drills inside the bark. There, it eats a channel straight up
> the tree, laying eggs as it goes. The tree fights back. It pumps sap
> toward the bug and the new larvae, enveloping them in a mass of the
> sticky substance. The tree then tries to eject its captives through a
> small, crusty chute in the bark.
>
> Countering, the beetle sends out a pheromone call for reinforcements.
> More beetles arrive, mounting a mass attack. A fungus on the beetle,
> called the blue stain fungus, works into the living wood, strangling
> its water flow. The larvae begin eating at right angles to the
> original up-and-down channel, sometimes girdling the tree, crossing
> channels made by other beetles.
>
> The pine is doomed. As it slowly dies, the larvae remain protected
> over the winter. In spring, they burrow out of the bark and launch
> themselves into the wind to their next victims.
>
> British Columbia is a buffet laid out before them. Years of successful
> battles against forest fires have allowed a thick concentration of old
> lodgepole pines to grow \-- a beetle feast that natural wildfire would
> have stopped.
>
> \"It was the perfect storm\" of warmer weather and vulnerable old
> trees, coupled with constraints that slowed logging of the infected
> wood, said Douglas Routledge, who represents timber companies in the
> city of Prince George.
>
> At the province\'s Ministry of Forests and Range in Quesnel, forestry
> officer Pelchat saw the beetle expansion coming as \"a silent forest
> fire.\" He and his colleagues launched an offensive to try to stop or
> at least delay the invasion, all the while hoping for cold
> temperatures. They searched out beetle-ridden trees, cutting them and
> burning them. They thinned forests. They set out traps. But the deep
> freeze never came.
>
> \"We lost. They built up into an army and came across,\" Pelchat said.
> Surveys show the beetle has infested 21 million acres and killed 411
> million cubic feet of trees \-- double the annual take by all the
> loggers in Canada. In seven years or sooner, the Forest Service
> predicts, that kill will nearly triple and 80 percent of the pines in
> the central British Columbia forest will be dead.
>
> Pelchat is now spending his time trying to plan recovery through
> replanting. In this area, a mature pine forest takes 70 years to grow.
>
> Meanwhile, the beetle is moving eastward. It has breached the natural
> wall of the Rocky Mountains in places, threatening the tourist
> treasures of national forest near Banff, Alberta, and is within
> striking distance of the vast Northern Boreal Forest that reaches to
> the eastern seaboard.
>
> \"If that beetle is allowed to come any further, it will absolutely
> devastate our eastern slope forests,\" said Coutts, in Alberta. \"If
> we\'re not prepared, it\'s going to infest all Alberta, Saskatchewan,
> Manitoba, and then northern Ontario in 20 years. This is the
> battlefront.\"
>
> Ironically, Quesnel is booming now. The beetle has killed so many
> trees that officials have more than doubled the allowable timber
> harvest, so loggers can cut and haul as many dead trees as possible
> before they rot. The icy roads are choked with giant trucks growling
> toward the mills, loaded with logs marked with the telltale blue stain
> fungus.
>
> In town, two sawmills and the plywood and pulp plants of the largest
> company, West Fraser Mills, are \"running flat-out,\" with shifts
> round-the-clock, said Tom Turner, a manager there. He walked the
> catwalks of a sawmill as whirling machines below grappled and twirled
> the offloaded trees. Computers sized up each log, instantly figured
> the best cut, and shoved it at furious speed through giant disk saws
> and planers to produce lumber that rail cars would carry to home
> builders in the United States.
>
> West Fraser is spending \$100 million to upgrade the mill. Other
> companies have added shifts and proposed new plants to make chipboard
> or wood-fuel pellets. Property values in Quesnel are rising, rents are
> up, the local shopping center is flourishing again and unemployment
> has dropped, said Nate Bello, the mayor of Quesnel.
>
> But the boom will end. When what people here call \"beetlewood\" is
> removed or rots out \-- and no one is sure how long that will take \--
> the forestry industry \"will be running at about half speed,\" Bello
> acknowledged.
>
> He sees his chief challenge as figuring out how to convert Quesnel
> from a one-industry town to something with a more diverse economic
> base. He and city officials talk of attracting retirees and small,
> computer-based businesses, and even of luring tourists to the area,
> despite the stark industrial tableau of sawmills and pulp plants.
>
> Some people in town say those are quixotic plans. \"This town is going
> to die,\" scoffed Pat Karey, 62, who spent 40 years at the sawmill.
> Other men in the Quesnel cafe \-- \"Smokers Welcome\" said the sign in
> the window \-- nodded in assent.
>
> \"A mill job is \$20 an hour, or \$30 with benefits. The jobs they are
> talking about bringing in are \$8-an-hour jobs,\" said Del Boesem,
> whose runs a business dismantling heavy logging machinery.
>
> © 2006 The Washington Post Company
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