Month 4, Day 15: Beetlemania

I got all the info used for this letter from a new series at Kos, “This Week In Climate Change.” Definitely read it all.

Part of that piece was a link to Newsweek’s short article on the pine beetle in the American West, which is killing forests with brutal efficiency. So I used the Newsweek piece as the hook for a letter.

Thanks for giving a closer look at what global warming will be bringing us in the years to come. The dying forests left in the pine beetle’s wake are just one of many phenomena which mark the planet’s rising temperatures. Some of the other things we can expect to see: more weather anomalies and storm activity (such as this winter’s freak blizzard in Washington, DC); higher pollen counts (severely affecting many asthmatics); shrinking populations of sensitive wildlife (Antarctica’s Adelie penguin population has diminished to a third of its 1980 level); more and more invasive species replacing local flora and fauna; irregular and unpredictable monsoons (potentially devastating food production worldwide)…the list goes on and on. It is time to stop treating climate change as a forum for political gamesmanship, and to start addressing it for what it is: a slow motion catastrophe that constitutes the most urgent existential threat humanity has ever faced.

Warren Senders