California should consider itself lucky if the pine beetle has just hit in 2015 and not really that bad from the pictures. Probably 50% of the trees in Colorado are dead, 90% in some places.
Indeed the pine beetle did quite a bit of damage. Some time ago I was working up in the mountains regularly, and from the US-40/I-70 junction and on up the US-40 corridor, the damage was apparent and got progressively worse the deeper one went into the mountains along US-40. Once past Berthoud Pass, the forest was the opposite of how a healthy one should look: dead brown as far as the eye could see with the occasional patch of living green. I've not been up there in a while, so I don't know how things have progressed -- if they've gotten worse, better, or just shifted about.
Sadly, what needs to happen in these areas of pine beetle infestation is what will never be permitted to happen: the forest needs to burn. A large forest fire would kill the beetles and their eggs/larvae, clear out the dead trees to make space for new growth, and fertilize the soil, making it possible for the forest to recover. But with how much beetle-kill there is up there, I don't think a controlled burn would be permitted. It would likely escape containment; there'd be too much risk to persons and property. But the longer such a burn is deferred, IMO, the harder it will be to prevent one, and the more severe it will be. I don't know of a good solution here. Cutting down all the dead trees for lumber might help, but I don't think it can defer a need for a burn forever, nor do I think it will help the forest recover as well as a burn would.
It looks quite beautiful, with the fall foliage, leaves changing color.....then you realize those are evergreens and are changing color because they are dead.
I don't think any place experiencing the destruction of its landscape, the erosion of its environment, and the tragic loss of so many unique, beautiful and valuable places, should count itself lucky simply because it's not as bad as somewhere else.
The pine beetle is native to Colorado. Its population is normally tempered by cold winters. With increasingly warmer winters brought on by global climate change, the pine beetle is left unchecked.
It seems like a similar process is playing out in California due to the native bark beetle.
Colorado seems to be doing better these days. I think the pine beetle mitigation efforts are showing some progress and I would assume that the trees left standing are maybe naturally more resistant.
I would think, although possibly wrongly, that if this was drought induced the die off would be more uniform. The pictures look similar to what I saw in Wyoming a decade ago due to pine beetles.
Both are likely related, reduced water makes the trees more susceptible to the ravages of the pests?
I spent half my childhood in South Lake Tahoe and have lived in the region most of my life. During the 80's and 90's, much of which was a period of drought for the region, beetles were a problem and being actively mitigated by the forestry service. You can go through the national forest all through the sierras and see trees that have been tagged for removal due to beetles. The problem is very severe right now and certainly the worst I can remember. I've got a couple of friends that work for the us forestry service and they say it's so bad they can't keep up with it. Other sources point out that beetle infestation is part of the problem.
Reduced water does indeed make pine trees more susceptible to beetles. Pines defend themselves by producing pitch to trap and expel the beetles, and that works better when the trees have enough water.
I visited Rocky Mountain National Park in early September, and it was awful what fraction of the trees appeared to have died off. There were some absolutely gorgeous scenes that must have been truly stunning when they were green. I'm sad I missed seeing them before the pine beetle.
My home town of Cincinnati has been suffering from the emerald ash borer. Forests that I played in as a kid are now just empty fields.
It's hard to say what will happen here. If the drought subsides, which statistically speaking it should as California's climate trend should "regress to the mean," the ecosystem should recover to some extent. Unless the tree population/ecosystem has been so grossly devastated that the tree it is past returning to a self sustaining point.
The current drought in California isn't widely considered to be caused by global warming though there does seem to be some notion that it has been worsened by it. It's too sharp a climate swing to fall along the global warming trend line.
The scary thing isn't that this is global warming but that this is just an image of what rapid climate change could do on a much vaster scale if not kept in check somehow.
In the scale of a human lifetime this is a tragedy. We see the forests when we are children and we expect to be able to return to them again and again and that the same will be true for our descendants.
But go a little farther out, and every asteroid impact above a certain size incinerated every last tree on earth, instantly. Giant ice sheets scraped them off en masse like barnacles.
In every case, trees came back. Maybe not the same trees, but trees suited for their new environment. It will be the same for beetles or climate change or whatever comes next.
I'm not sure any asteroid has ever incinerated every tree - I suspect not - but realize that even fairly mild extinction events such as the one that killed the dinosaurs had rather dramatic consequences: in particular; that the planet never recovered what it lost. AFAIK no (fully) land animal even close to the size of a human survived Chicxulub and its aftermath. Crocodiles were the only large (50lb+) "land" animals to survive, and they're semi-aquatic, don't need a lot of food, and the ones that survived may well have been smaller than humans anyhow.
So, you're right that there is little risk of humanity wiping all life off the planet's surface, even if we all tried. There is, however, a considerable chance that humanity might wipe most large animals and lots of plants off the surface of the planet, and it's a least imaginable we'd completely wipe ourselves out (and take with us most other vertebrates). Smaller pockets of humanity certainly managed that.
You'd have to be quite the misanthropist to say "meh" to the consequences of a serious ecological collapse. I'm assuming it won't come to that, but it's not at all inconceivable.
My time horizon is "Do we have enough trees sucking carbon out of the air before we cross the point of no return?" and "Can we plant enough trees before we lose all the coastal property?"
Also, I don't think it's obvious that whatever replaces the current habitable zones will be nearly as large or fertile as what we have now. It's by no means a necessarily long-term zero-sum game.
The trees come back. 150 years ago, for example, Yosemite valley had many fewer trees (see this painting, as an example: http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/american/cho-looke-yo... ). Not just in America, I was visiting some homesteads in Scotland, and they said 70 years ago, the trees were all gone, but they'd grown back.
For Scotland and many other parts of Europe, forests started coming back both because forests were (re)planted and because we started burning coal and oil instead of wood and stopped building wooden houses, ships, etc.
...You've completely overstated the beetle problem. It seemed as though it would have massive impact a few years ago, but it didn't. Very specific locations saw a lot of damage, but the overall impact is negligible.
