October 27, 2009
I heard a Marketplace report on life in Helena, MT, now that the mountain pine beetle isn't being killed by hard frosts, making it through the winters, and so destroying northern pine forests:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/10/27/pm-climate-race-1/
(go to minute 15:55 for the lead-in).
It's titled "Climate change in our own backyards". WARNING: depressing report.
Here's a snippet — what interested me was Robbins's reply to the issue of whether people are going to start believing in climate change:
JIM ROBBINS: This was all forest here. And now it's a lot of smashed pieces of wood here and pine needles and occasional patches of weed that we'll have to spray next year.
SAM: So Robbins says when people are faced with these kinds of images daily, in their own backyards, it becomes a lot harder not to believe in climate change.
ROBBINS: There's a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think there's something along that line happening here. I mean, there are still some people who refuse to believe it. But I think there's been an erosion of that disbelief and it's changed pretty dramatically.
