Die-offs - Trees and Ocean Zones Fading Fast

Global warming byproducts become links in a causal chain that can only make things worse. Here are two that probably won't find their way to much public attention, but are nevertheless of huge importance to all of us.

Bark beetles are rapidly working their northward to the great forests of the northwest U.S. and western Canada. One estimate is that 80% of the marketable lodgepole pine in British Columbia could be killed off in 10 years. And in the U.S. pine bark beetles are infesting more than a million acres of forest in Idaho and Montana, while over 2.5 million acres are threatened in Washington state.

Warmer winters are blamed for the spread of the beetles, which have historically been killed off by the hard freezes. The impact of continued dying off will land on the environment as a whole and on the industries that rely directly and indirectly on these sources of timber.

And while we're in the American Northwest, we can look offshore from Oregon and find the return (for its sixth successive year) of a "death zone" where low oxygen levels are inhibiting sea life. Unlike the dead zone on the Gulf of Mexico, which is blamed on fertilizer runoff deposited by the Mississippi and other rivers, the Pacific dead zone is caused by new wind patterns that are identified as a result of global warming. The winds churn the ocean, bringing up so much plankton from the deeps that their death and decomposition take up most of the oxygen supply in the area.

The impact here is on our supply of food fish, but it's a climate-related effect that could be seen in other global regions as well.

China's Line in the Sand Ignores the, uh, Sand

China used to be able to grow enough food to feed its entire population. It used to be a net food exporter, but since 2004 it has been a net food importer. With one fifth of the world's population, it has only 7% of the world's arable land, so its leaders intend to stem the loss of any additional land to other purposes such as development. Housing, roads and factories have been gobbling up farmland at an accelerating pace. China now has a food security problem.

Reuters reports that in a news conference, Minister of Land and Resources Xu Shaoshi declared that the government will hold the line at a minimum of 120 million hectares devoted to agriculture. How this new law will be enforced, given the turmoil of China's booming business development and migration to the cities, remains to be seen.

No mention at the news conference, apparently, of the spreading Gobi desert, which has been claiming Chinese farmland for years. More on that in a future post here.