Mysterious condition hits aspens in West

Bee`s are disappearing. Bat`s are disappearing, Birds are disappearing. Now aspens?
You think nature is trying to tell us something?

Ambro wrote:

Bee`s are disappearing. Bat`s are disappearing, Birds are disappearing. Now aspens?
You think nature is trying to tell us something?

No, I think the bars just closed and you are PUI (Posting Under the Influence). Go to bed! It's 2:45 a.m.

Be patience for a few hundred years and everything will work out.

yep, nature always bats last.

Things will return to normal once about 7.5 billion human beings choke to death in their own waste.

This article notes that "the public" may not be enthusiastic about such proposed remedies as clear-cutting for addressing the plight of the aspens. This should be amended to "certain uninformed but aggressively vocal segments of 'the public' " who put their eco-orthodoxy ahead of sensible science. How about setting up some side-by-side research plots on this somewhere to test the hypothesis?

We lost a couple of trees in the yard 2 or 3 years ago. Was a hot summer. One was an apple tree, the other I think was a Chinese elm. They both had the bark blister up and split from the trunk. Kind of like they got steamed. The other trees survived, was just those two. Though the sunlight hasn't seemed to be so intense this year, and it being a relatively moister year, the veggies and ornamentals we planted had an unusual amount of browned leaves. Things haven't grown with their normal vigor. I have noticed the rate ground dries out after watering has varied tremendously throughout the summer. Perhaps it has to do with changing wind patterns, sending in drier air and the plants can't keep pumping water fast enough. The leaves transpire too fast for the root system, and the roots can't gather enough water fast enough from the drier soil.

Too much bare ground in New Mexico, allowing the moisture to escape too quick. Perhaps we should put rocks on all of the WalMart bags in the landscape. Come to think of it, I haven't seen so many hanging on the brush this year.

Clear Cuts are Bad.... it doesn't matter that it helps aspens reforest, or provide conditions for browse, shelter and growth of elk and deer, reduce the fuel loading to avoid large forest fires. It gives the sudo-environmentalist a platform to decide that nature knows crap and only they possess the wisdom that govern what nature should be.

Before we came into the picture, there were gigantic fires...could we let that happen now without us attempting to put the fire out?

Let Nature Work wrote:

Clear Cuts are Bad.... it doesn't matter that it helps aspens reforest, or provide conditions for browse, shelter and growth of elk and deer, reduce the fuel loading to avoid large forest fires. It gives the sudo-environmentalist a platform to decide that nature knows **** and only they possess the wisdom that govern what nature should be.

The skepticism is from our long history of watching the Forest Service "cures" cause the next set of problems.

Maybe the National Forest supervisors and BLM should consider the effects of hundreds of thousands of gas wells throughout the west spewing out VOCs, nitrous oxide from constant diesel trucks and generators, and other chemical contaminates and their poisonous recombinations inside of our atmosphere that are cloaking all of Life and immune systems in noxious toxic smog....

Ambro wrote:

Bee`s are disappearing. Bat`s are disappearing, Birds are disappearing. Now aspens?
You think nature is trying to tell us something?

Yes, it is getting too cool and there isn't enough Carbon Dioxide in the air.

PC Chavez wrote:

<quoted text>
No, I think the bars just closed and you are PUI (Posting Under the Influence). Go to bed! It's 2:45 a.m.

No PC, I just couldn`t sleep thinking about you.

awww... that's just SAD :(

Francisco wrote:

Maybe the National Forest supervisors and BLM should consider the effects of hundreds of thousands of gas wells throughout the west spewing out VOCs, nitrous oxide from constant diesel trucks and generators, and other chemical contaminates and their poisonous recombinations inside of our atmosphere that are cloaking all of Life and immune systems in noxious toxic smog....

You are thinking of the Chinese coal fired plants, mostly without scrubbers.
Huge source of mercury added to the atmosphere, and blown around the planet.

The US plants, trains, and trucks have had mandatory pollution control devices for decades.

As far as the gas wells, it is the business of the producers to capture maximum amounts of the CH4, C2H6, and liquids, not to waste it.

There is a lot more VOCs released from wastewater treatment, and agriculture than the oil and gas industry in the production process.

Is this why there was no gold on SF Baldy by Oct. 12 last year? That's the day I got there. In 2007, I must've spent half an afternoon driving and walking around in all that gold, getting some wonderful pictures in the process. Then in '08, zilch.

Or did '08 just have a short color season, and I missed it?

NO! NO! Not that! Anything but that!!

...most of the leaves may freeze before they turn this year.

Can anyone tell me why the aspens here in Utah turned a sickly greenish-golden this year instead of the characteristic flaming yellow shade? Is this a symptom of SAD, or was the weather just not conducive to bringing out the bright yellow hue this year? It didn't turn coolish as early as usual, and then we had one day where it went from 70 degrees to 40 degrees, and I wondered whether that somehow shocked the trees to the point that they were not able to go bright yellow?