Green Daily

In one of those nasty climate change feedback loops that we've been hearing about, a deadly infestation of mountain pine beetles in British Columbia forests is releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

Trees, of course, absorb carbon while alive, meaning they release it when they die. The plague of tiny beetles has already killed millions of trees, and scientists estimate that the devastation will add almost a billion tonnes of CO2 to our already well-carbonated atmosphere before the beetles eat everything in sight and move on.

One of the reasons the insects have been able to do such unprecedented damage is because warmer temperatures have allowed them to survive in parts of the forest that previously would have been too cold for them. Of course, as more trees die and more carbon is released, temperatures get warmer, and the beetles can move further north to continue their depredations, so more carbon is released and so on, and so on, and so on.

Stupid forests, it's all their fault.