New report on the Pine Beetle from Colorado states that Forest Management namely fire suppression is what lead up to the infestation of Pine beetles that decimated Western North American pine forests.

Pine beetles as a harbinger of manmade climate change destruction 

I worked in the Forest Industry in the late nineties in British Columbia, Canada and was there in the forest looking at the first major infestations in person. I also harvested live beetles in -40C temperatures during the winter negating the claims that cold winters killed off the beetles which is the Global Warming theory that beetle populations are killed off in cold winters. Through our forestry research we determined that lack of natural forest fires when the conditions were optimum for the beetle to migrate lead to the massive killing off of whole stands of pine, the actual environment that the beetles like (dry,warm) are also the exact conditions that lead to natural forest fires. These naturally occurring fires completely destroy the colonies of beetles because the trees they infest become very combustible and burn very quickly, which is also something I witnessed,  the trees literally explode in flames. I was also in a meeting with the British Columbia Ministry of Forests where we presented a plan to contain the beetle outbreak by burning infected areas plus an addition 1000 meters around the perimeter in a controlled manner, we were told that the policy of Zero Tolerance for using fires to manage the forests was the official policy. This was 1998.

Over the past decade I have, before I had this blog and even recently on an article regarding Gavin Schmidt’s Climate Picture Book I have been telling this story of how the Pine Beetle was man’s fault, but not for the reason being reported. It now seems that real research and not environmental dogma has actually taken place and all the work we did in late 1997 and early 1998 has been vindicated. Too late to stop the damage but maybe not too late to change the policies on forest management that lead to these types of problems.