Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
about climate change, which scientists were coni dent was being acceler-
ated by the carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels. Massive
deposits of shale gas, recently unlocked, had struck many similarly: there
was nearly ten times more much carbon in the world's gas i elds than in
the Alberta oil sands.
7
h e Sierra Club, which had campaigned to move
“Beyond Coal” since 2002, added “Beyond Oil” at er the BP spill in 2010
and then launched “Beyond Natural Gas” in 2012. In a world threatened
by climate change, fossil fuels no longer appeared to make any sense.
A brief walk with Jef Mit on and Scot Ferrenberg through the
pine forests of Niwot Ridge nearly a mile above the nearby town of
Boulder, Colorado, makes it easy to understand why people are worried.
h e world has been get ing hot er, and so has Niwot Ridge. Mit on,
the model of a naturalist with his white beard and big smile, studied
evolutionary biology at er get ing his PhD in 1973. When I visit, he
is toting a tripod-mounted camera to record the results of the pair's
experiments. Ferrenberg, who's carrying a small axe to slice into trees, is
tall and lanky with a salt-and-pepper goatee; he spent time in California,
Pennsylvania, and Arizona, working jobs from entomological (insect)
research to technical support for forest i re control, before moving to
Boulder and becoming a graduate student in Mit on's lab in 2008. h ey
were then part of a team studying the impact of higher temperatures on
alpine trees and plants by planting massive heating lamps in the hills
above Boulder and watching to see what happened.
8
h e two men were walking in the forest one late spring day when
they spot ed something odd: mountain pine beetles were moving about.
Pine beetles had recently been in the news. In British Columbia, the
crit ers invaded around 2001; ten years later, more than half the log-
gable pine in the province had been killed, devastating a core part of the
local economy.
9
h e Rocky Mountains came within the beetles' sights
in 1996, but it took a decade before the epidemic there really intensi-
i ed. By 2010, four million acres in northern Colorado and southern
Wyoming had been hit, and beetle watchers were warning of more
damage to come.
10
It wasn't unusual to see mountain pine beetles in
the Colorado hills: they had been there for as long as anyone could
remember. But everyone knew they couldn't live at the high altitudes of
Niwot Ridge and that the beetles usually didn't come out until July.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search