On Sunday the Chronicle had a front page article dealing with global warming’s effects on whitebark pines. In short, their habitat is warming, allowing mountain pine beetles to survive more easily and attack the pines. This is having an impact on a major source of food for grizzly bears and could lead to more confrontations with humans.
Seems like a solid enough article, but it deals with global warming. So far, though, we have no letters attacking the paper for saying global warming is real! It’s only been two days, granted, but if I don’t see any tomorrow I’m going to be very disappointed. This was front and center and it didn’t get the anti-environmentalists riled up? That’s just no fun.
UPDATE: Day 3, no letters. I’ve seriously overestimated the anti-global warming brigade.
UPDATE 2: Day 4, nothing.
Well, I was going to comment on Rick Bass’s article in Mother Jones, but there’s no online link to the article, and I haven’t actually read it. So yeah, that hampers it a bit. Mostly, I just wanted to make fun of him. Even though it’s a good article, according to the synopsis I listened to, he’s kind of an ass.
He’s an environmentalist, and a bit strange. This is the guy who was part of the group who was trying to stop the cutting down of some dead trees in an area near here, because they said they were actually alive. Evidence? Well, they were green at the top. Of course, they wouldn’t actually cut into the tree to see if there was still sap running (the best way to check), because that would hurt the tree. But, other people did, and there was no sap running, the trees were dead, and the green left would disappear soon. This is also the guy who shot an elk, thinking it was a moose (maybe the other way around, I can’t remember exactly). You can make your own judgement about the hunting part (and his mystical connections to animals, which apparently don’t deter him from shooting them), but he can’t tell the difference between those two? Quite the environmentalist.
