R
Ridgerunner
Guest
With all due respect, Im not persuaded. If nothing else, “researchers” gave us infestations of multiflora rose and sericea lespedeza, not to mention kudzu. Insect travel in itself means nothing. Lots of insect pests and other destructive life forms have done it handily.The thousands of researchers who have written dozens of papers on the subject have been very careful.
At epidemic levels (and it was the biggest epidemic of all time) the beetles begin attacking healthy trees. So it wasn’t an issue of them moving to where the trees were sicker. They moved into areas that had at one time been too cold for them, but now aren’t. They crossed the Rockies, which had always been a barrier for them due to the extreme altitude, now it isn’t. They were exacerbated by the fact that there were milder winters and warmer summers.
It’s warmer. They are worse because it’s warmer. They have looked into all the other possibilities, and its worse than it would have been because it’s warmer. Don’t believe it if you doing want to, but that’s what’s happening.
I also remember a poster here who maintained (with supposed research to back it up) that global warming was proved because some kind of bird (I can’t remember now what it was) had supposedly taken up permanent residence in east central Missouri instead of southwest Missouri. The theory was that the birds moved north because of global warming. I did some research on it and found that the only change had been that an area in east central Missouri had developed food resources through farming that had not been plentiful before. The number in SW Mo had not changed.