The Gary Null Blog

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/30/970521/-A-story-of-a-mini-ecological-disaster

Sat Apr 30, 2011 at 07:52 AM PDT

by pollwatcher

When we think of global warming, we think of sea levels rising and ice caps melting and maybe more and bigger hurricanes.  Big events that will probably happen decades in the future.  But maybe the effects of global warming can manifest themselves on many, many micro scales with even more disastrous results, and maybe it's happening right now.

Here in the west, the pine trees are being devastated by a pine bark beetle because the winters just don't get cold enough anymore to kill them.  In Alaska and northern latitudes the permafrost is melting and disrupting the lives of indigenous people who depend on frozen ground.  Spring is coming early in many parts of the country and fall is coming later.

Of course it's almost impossible to attribute any single weather event, or even an entire years weather events to global warming.  But since this isn't an article to be published in a scientific journal, and this is a Democratic blog site, I'm going to do it anyway.