Letter: Global warming may destroy Western forests

Friday, Aug. 8, 2003 | 8:39 a.m.

Dry years are bad fire years, and warm winters are followed by bark beetle infestations. President Bush has a solution for these weather-related problems -- cut more trees. Like every solution he has proposed, it is financially beneficial to big campaign contributors.

It has been known for a hundred years that logging increases the fire hazard. Logging debris -- limbs, tops, and defective logs -- increases the amount of fuel on the ground. Fire hazard is determined primarily by the amount of fuel on the ground. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 will increase, not decrease, the severity of forest fires.

Lots of people believe that the reason we had such bad fire years in 2001 and 2002 was not because of a prolonged and severe drought, but because environmentalists had curtailed logging in our national forests.

It has been known for 70 years that bark beetle infestations are a result of warm winters. Research in the early 1930s established that if temperatures inside the bark (where the larvae winter) drop below a lethal minimum, the larvae will perish and that will end the bark beetle infestation. If temperatures remain above the lethal limit all winter, there will be a beetle infestation.

The only effect logging has on bark beetle infestations is to reduce the number of trees that adult beetles have to infect. With fewer trees to infect, the chance of any tree escaping infection is lessened.

With global warming, beetle infestations will continue to spread north and to higher elevations. Our Western forests may become the first casualties of global warming.

VERNON BOSTICK