“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 84

Ferrenberg and Mit on quickly started to guess what was happen-
ing. Mountain pine beetles are one of the simplest organisms you can
use to study the impact of climate change on living creatures. h e life
cycles of the cold-blooded beetles are controlled by heat; add more
high-temperature days, and the beetles' lives speed up. With rising tem-
peratures, altitudes that were always too cold to support pine beetle
populations were suddenly warm enough to host the creatures. More
troubling, though, was how quickly the beetles were developing. It used
to be that pine beetles would breed one generation before dying of in
the cold. Now, propelled by rising temperatures, they were breeding
two generations every year, the i rst in the late spring, the second in
the summer. If one generation of beetles used to count sixty members,
two generations meant thirty-six hundred. A small change in climate
meant big and devastating consequences on the ground.
And it was not just the lowly mountain pine beetles or the trees
they feasted on that were feeling the heat. Scientists were now gingerly
at ributing extreme weather events such as heat waves and droughts to
a changing climate, and they coni dently predicted worse consequences
to come. Raging wildi res, widespread droughts, and devastating storms
like Hurricane Sandy, whatever their individual causes, made the sorts
of dangers that lurked in a warming world vivid. And many i xated on
other ways in which small changes might have big impacts. I visited
the Arctic with the Coast Guard in 2008; they wanted to establish a
presence in a region that many were heralding as the next frontier of
geopolitics, as rising temperatures melted Arctic ice and opened vast
new territories to commerce. h e boat I was on landed in Kivalina,
Alaska, a village under assault by waves that had previously been kept
away by massive sheets of now-melted ice. No corner of the earth, it
seemed, was being spared. Yet seven billion people around the world
continued to use energy largely as if nothing was amiss.

m m m

Along Niwot Ridge past where Mit on and Ferrenberg study their
beetles, scientists have been collecting air samples since 1968. 11 Each
one is sealed in a cylinder and later scrutinized with special equipment