MEDICINE BOW NATIONAL FOREST, Wyoming - From the vantage point of an 80-foot (25 meter) tower rising above the trees, the Wyoming vista seems idyllic: snow-capped peaks in the distance give way to shimmering green spruce.

But this is a forest under siege. Among the green foliage of the healthy spruce are the orange-red needles of the sick and the dead, victims of a beetle infestation closely related to one that has already laid waste to millions of acres (hectares) of pine forest in North America.

“The gravity of the situation is very real,” said Rolf Skar, a forest campaigner with Greenpeace.

The plague has cost billions of dollars in lost timber and land values and may thwart efforts to combat climate change, as forests are major storing houses of carbon, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.

The beetle outbreak, which has taken a lesser, but mounting, toll on spruce trees, could make it that much tougher to meet the ambitious target to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.

That is laid out in a climate bill that narrowly passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and waits Senate debate.

Many researchers have also linked the infestation in the U.S. and Canadian West to climate change, notably a dearth of winters cold enough to kill the voracious little bugs.

“Pine beetle infestations are cyclical in nature and have been occurring for thousands of years but what is making things worse now is the effects of global warming,” said Skar.

“If you don’t have the real cold extremes to kill off the larvae under the bark you are going to have extreme infestation events,” he said.

CARBON FOOTPRINT

In the Medicine Bow National Forest, scientists are getting a first-hand look at the carbon implications.

The forest is home to the U.S. Forest Service’s Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments site in a tower with gadgets that, among other things, examine the “carbon flux” of the forest.

The site was established a decade ago, before the spruce beetle infestation, and gives scientists a unique chance to measure the changes to carbon storage wrought by the insects.

“We are getting readings here every half hour,” said Colorado-based U.S. Forest Service scientist Mike Ryan, shouting above the wind as he pointed to an instrument that measures carbon. This gas analyzer resembles a small space capsule on the end of a horizontal metal pole.

(See more from Ryan in the video below)

In the terminology of trees and carbon, a healthy forest is a net “sink,” with trees storing carbon as they grow. When they die and rot they “emit” carbon back into the atmosphere, and so a dead or dying forest becomes a “net source” of greenhouse gas, meaning it emits more carbon dioxide than it stores.

Ryan said the net carbon storage in this patch of woods is about half of what it was three or four years ago. In another three or four years, he believes it will become a net source.

A SEA OF GREEN TURNS ORANGE

This scenarios is being replayed across the West.

In Colorado, aerial surveys show that from 1996 to 2008 Colorado lost almost 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of pine forest to the beetle outbreak, Wyoming 677,000 acres and South Dakota 354,000 acres.

Over the same period of time, the spruce beetle, which has also ravaged forests as far north as Alaska, took out 374,000 acres of spruce trees in Colorado and 340,000 in Wyoming.

That cumulative total of over 6 million acres (2.5 million hectares) is an area larger than Israel or South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

A composite picture above, shot from 2003 to 2008 by the Forest Service, shows trees dying over time in an Engelmann spruce stand in southeastern Wyoming due to a spruce beetle epidemic.

Farther north in Canada, the pine beetle has attacked trees over an area of about 39 million acres (14.5 million hectares) in British Columbia since the 1990s.

The sheer scale of the damage can be seen northwest of Denver in Colorado’s Yampa Valley. Vast tracts of formerly evergreen forest now have huge splashes of orange running through them.
Vast tracts of formerly evergreen forest now have huge splashes of orange running through them.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, a third of the United States’ land area is covered in forest but it is only expanding at a rate of about 0.1 percent per year.

Under “cap and trade” provisions in the U.S. climate bill, additional forest growth may be encouraged through a market mechanism that will allow reforestation efforts by landowners and other groups to be counted as “carbon offsets.”

Such projects could generate cash through “carbon credits” paid by polluters who want to exceed their own emissions caps.

A forest can recover, but that can take decades.

“Most forests will recover the carbon they lose but if the next 50 to 100 years is important we may not have that much time. It’s setting back carbon storage efforts,” said Ryan.

Forest growth in the United States currently sucks up about 12 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s a big number. To get another 10 percent you would have to convert a third of U.S. agriculture land to forest,” said Ryan.

The outbreak has other consequences. It is creating huge fire hazards as it leaves mountains of combustible wood in its wake. In a worrying trend, it also has spread from lodgepole pine to ponderosa pine.

There are expenses for landowners as well.

On his ranch in northern Colorado, mountain realtor Bill McClelland points to a dying tree and says: “A week ago that tree was green. I’ve lost another one.”

In May, he had to cut 476 pines on his property and then have them ground into wood chips — an expensive operation that is one of the few ways to contain the outbreak. He reckons an infestation will generally shave about 20 percent of the value off a private wood lot or ranch.

Past beetle outbreaks have been stopped by very cold winters but recent winters have not been cold enough.

Another factor scientists attribute to the outbreak is past forest clearance and fires that saw large areas cleared.

Often when this happens, the forest that regrows in its place will have huge patches of trees the same age and this makes them susceptible to a collective attack when they mature at the same time into the older trees that the bugs favor.

The beetles may collectively wreak havoc by nesting and feeding in the trees but they look harmless enough as individuals, not least because they are so tiny.

At Medicine Bow, Ryan points to a few writhing in a glass jar that have been trapped on the trunk of a spruce tree.

“Until we get a big cold spell they are going to go on until they have nothing to eat,” he said.

There’s no shortage of references these days in corporate and government reports to earnest, new steps to fight climate change. Often they promise to make carbon emissions cuts equivalent to taking millions of cars off the road…

For example, take Europe’s fourth biggest single source of carbon emissions, Britain’s Drax coal plant. It said in March that as a result of efficiency improvements it had cut carbon emissions equivalent to taking 195,000 cars off the road.  But of course that was a cut against a theoretical projection of rising emissions — not an absolute cut.

Take a similar announcement from Canada this week. The oil industry in Alberta is busy trying to extract oil from tar sands. That is a far more polluting, energy-intensive way than just sucking the stuff out of oil wells, because steam must first be injected into the sand to make the oil flow. Now Alberta is experimenting with a technology, called carbon capture and storage, with three test projects which by 2015 would “achieve annual carbon dioxide reductions equivalent to taking about a million vehicles off the road”, the province says.

Funnily enough, 2015 is also the year when a U.N. panel of climate scientists says global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide must stop rising to limit global warming to 2-2.4 degrees celsius, a widely perceived threshold for dangerous effects (page 20 here). It seems a little disingenuous — in that wider context — for  Alberta to talk of taking cars off the road from test projects to trim carbon emissions under a wider programme to expand one of the most polluting forms of oil drilling known to man.

The wider context does seem relevant if we’re not to pat ourselves on the back as catastrophic climate effects creep up. And it may be especially relevant this year, as climate talks and rhetoric ratchet up ahead of a meeting in December in Copenhagen, meant to seal agreement on a new climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Microsoft Corp Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie – the guy in charge of the company’s $9 billion research budget and deep thinking — sat down with Reuters to talk about clean energy — carbon free, not necessarily renewable, in his view. Following are a couple of excerpts.

Mundie talks about why wind and solar power may not be huge players on the renewable energy scene.

Mundie discusses his affinity for novel nuclear approaches.

Mundie shares his thoughts on clean energy road blocks.

Video editing by Courtney Hoffman

Can semantics help save the planet?

A showdown between leaders of Chevron Corp and the Sierra Club on Wednesday night revealed a number of shared beliefs between the two California institutions, particularly about the need for a transparent way of pricing carbon.

The debate at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on Wednesday night pitted Chevron CEO David O’Reilly against Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and both agreed that limiting carbon emissions should involve some sort of levy imposed by the government - if only there was a word for such a thing.

“It would be much cleaner if there was a transparent cost on carbon that one could see,” O’Reilly said.

The moderator suggested that was a ‘tax’. “Nobody wants to talk about it,” O’Reilly replied. 

“Call it a fee,” Pope then suggested.

They also agreed that legislation which is workable in California or other states was not so easy to sell at a national level, even though the White House now seemed supportive, according to Pope.

“You could have conversations with the Republican caucus in the Idaho legislature that you couldn’t have with anybody in Washington D.C.,” Pope said of the eight year Bush administration.

They strongly disagreed on the timeline for cutting carbon emissions, but both saw cars as among the last carbon emitters that would go, simply because people would have to pay to replace them.

“The last clunker on the road will probably be one of the last relics of the energy economy of the 20th century,” Pope said.

Pope also suggested that all oil companies worldwide should commit to putting 10 percent of their profits over the next decade into a fund to help communities hurt by production of oil and gas.

O’Reilly, having said earlier in the debate that he made $14 million last year, noted this cost would also be passed along to consumers ultimately, but didn’t think many were in the mood for that.

“If you can get the government to increase taxes other than on a few of us, I agree,” O’Reilly said to boos and hisses.

The current issue of the American magazine Foreign Affairs has a thought-provoking piece that asks if the geoengineering option shouldn’t be used as a last resort in the battle against climate change. You can see the introduction to the article here (but will need to be a registered user to read all of it online).

 Climate geoengineering is a thinly explored branch of science which to date has seen little in the way of peer-reviewed research. Some of its advocates envision global systems which would launch reflective particles into the atmosphere or position sunshades to cool the earth.

Another approach is to dump iron dust into the sea to spur the growth of algae that absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the air. When algae die, they fall to the seabed and so remove carbon.

We’ve done stories on these and related topics before which you can read here and here.

Part of the controversy around the subject stems from the fact that many environmentalists and policy-makers view geoengineering as an “easy fix” that governments might be tempted to take instead of the hard option of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Many scientists have been reluctant to raise the issue for fear that it might create a moral hazard: encouraging governments to deploy geoengineering rather than invest in cutting emissions,” write the authors, who include David G. Victor of Stanford Law School and M. Granger Morgan, director of the Climate Decision Making Center.

There are also concerns about unforeseen side effects — a worry with almost any new technology that is perhaps greater when humanity intentionally tampers with the environment.

But the authors argue that the challenge of climate change is too great not to try everything at our disposal.

“Humans have already engaged in a dangerous geophysical exercise by pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The best and safest strategy for reversing climate change is to halt this buildup … but this solution will take time,” they say.

“Meanwhile, the dangers are mounting. In a few decades, the option of geoengineering could look less ugly for some countries than unchecked changes in the climate.”

It is noteworthy that this argument has been made in the pages of Foreign Affairs, which is sober, influential and often features analysts who are ahead of the curve. This alone signals that geoengineering is emerging from the fringe.

What do you think? Is geoengineering an option that should be used in the struggle against climate change? Or do the risks outweigh any possible benefits?

(Photo: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10, 2008. Could geoengineering be used to help stop climate change consequences such as melting sea ice?  REUTERS/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/Handout (UNITED STATES)