ASPEN — Global warming is reshaping forests throughout Colorado and across the West, scientists and public-land managers agreed at a symposium Friday, leaving foresters at pains to deal with a landscape that could look very different in the future.
While some still debate whether the changing climate is due to human-caused pollution, they said climate scientists agree the Earth is heating up, and dying aspen, spruce, piñon and other trees are fingerprints of a warmup.
“The climate is changing,” said Forest Service ecologist Linda Joyce, speaking at “Forests at Risk: Climate Change & the Future of the American West.”
“Temperatures are warming and will likely continue to warm,” she said.
That will change the look of forests forever, but exactly what they will look like remains to be seen, she said.
Aspen, the iconic trees of the West, will probably vanish from mountainsides where they once thrived, Joyce said. Pine trees will retreat to cooler climes, and animals that depend on them will follow.
That leaves land managers trying to grapple with “the eventual loss of the plants and animals we know,” she said.
While former vice president and climate activist Al Gore was the most famous name at the symposium, his was a rare voice of activism in a conference heavy on science.
“If you love the forest and you care about what’s happening to them, the No. 1 connection that’s happening to them is warmer temperatures,” Gore said.
“Ninety-eight percent of climatologists agree with this consensus, and a lot of them are practically screaming from the rooftops now, trying to get the attention of the rest of us that this is unprecedented, and we have to act,” said Gore, who presented a slide show about Western forests reminiscent of his film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The seminar was organized by For the Forest, an Aspen organization formed in response to infestations of bark beetles killing lodgepole pine on the hills surrounding the ski town.
Aspen sits in the heart of the White River National Forest, which is seeing a barrage of threats. Entire stands of aspen are dying due to a phenomenon called sudden aspen decline. Beetles are killing off vast swaths of pine and, more recently, spruce. Massive wildfires have scorched thousands of acres. All events have different causes, scientists agreed, but climate change is a common denominator, creating weaker trees and more-robust insects and disease.
The tough question is what to do about it, said University of Montana biologist Diana Six. “A lot of things we’ve done in the past I don’t think are going to work.”
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., called for Congress to put “a price on carbon,” either through cap and trade, a carbon tax, or a similar mechanism. “While we dither and while we debate, the Chinese are acting, the Germans are acting, the Spaniards are acting, many other countries are acting,” Udall said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, Harris Sherman, who oversees the Forest Service, said President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget prioritizes forest restoration and made climate-change planning part of the rules that govern forest management.
“It’s a challenge that I’ve never seen,” said Rick Cables, Rocky Mountain regional forester for the Forest Service. “. . . This context, the context of our times, with climate change and what we’re seeing on the landscape, is a game-changer.”
Government agencies are used to working slowly and juggling a variety of interests, from environmentalists to industry.
Those groups may have to learn to work together, Cables said, if land managers are to respond quickly. Tools such as fire and logging may be necessary, he said, even if they’re unpopular.
In the long term, forests may not be just victims of climate change but accomplices, scientists said. Live trees remove carbon. Dead trees decompose and produce it.
“In other words, the warming will feed the warming,” said Werner Kurz, senior research scientist for the Canadian Forest Service.
