141–147 of 147 posts
It's disappointing to see serious reporting like this saddled with a clickbait title like "This disease has killed a million trees in California, and scientists say it’s basically unstoppable."
This is, sadly, completely typical for Chris Mooney. His writing is usually decent. His headlines are pathetic. I've been hoping he'd stop for years. He hasn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is, sadly, completely typical for Chris Mooney. His writing is usually decent. His headlines are pathetic. I've been hoping he'd stop for years. He hasn't.
Most journalists do not write their own headlines.
On an unrelated note, the best comment reply ever: "Why do you assume that the experts missed a plan that some random guy on the Internet came up with in 30 seconds?"
"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law
>while there may once have been a chance to stop the spread of $ARTICLE_TOPIC — around the year $CURRENT_DATE_MINUS_FIFTEEN_YEARS — that opportunity has since passed. Forces didn’t mobilize fast enough or spend enough money FTA, with minor edits; I think we'll see a lot more language like this in the coming ten years. The consequence, which absolutely no one would be against ("what do you mean, there's 90% fewer oak…
It looks like in 2002 California enacted a task force to control the spread of the disease. see "Sudden Oak Death Management Act of 2002". However, this was subject to appropriations in the California state budget. The author is implying the act was hampered by not having the budget to do the work (apparently $60 million a year according the article).
There's always someone desperately trying to get The Powers That Be to notice.
Years ago all of the oak trees in my area were cut down due to being killed by the Emerald Ash Borer, a beetle. Fines were imposed for exporting fire wood outside of the affected counties (a common thing to do in my state where people take their chopped logs up to their cabins for bonfires) but it did little to keep the bug from spreading further and further. Many of these trees were in large forests, but it's most n…
Something like this happened at my college, and one of my friends was in the forestry program. He was so pissed because every time trees on campus got a disease, they'd cut them down and replace them all with a single species. So in 50 years when those trees got a disease, they had to cut them all down again. So 50 years from now some maple disease will have your town cutting down all the trees all over again :/
Since the various jurisdictions didn't pay for the replacement trees (but all had ordinances requiring a tree every "x" feet where the property meets the roadway), people were free to purchase any kind of tree they wished. The problem is that Maples were the most inexpensive tree that could be purchased at a reasonable size so nearly everyone planted a variety of Maple. So,... yup ... give it a few years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's curious that so much 'evolution' is going on at the moment. Interesting how the Great Barrier Reef and the oceans fisheries are currently 'evolving' Rather remiscent of how the Western European population evolved in response to the plague.
That's the fun of natural selection, sometimes you get selected, sometimes you don't.
Where environmental change is so rapid that none of the individuals are fit, you don;t get evolution, you get extinction.