Meet the mountain pine beetle, a beneficiary of climate change

Well, we've already met two victims of climate change (specifically, global warming), the polar bear and the harlequin frog. And we've already seen how that change is being felt up in Canada's North, in Tuktoyaktuk.

But one creature seems to be benefitting from all this warming, much to the detriment of Canada's forests. Dear readers, meet the mountain pine beetle:

Millions of acres of Canada's lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.

The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the future of the forest and the communities in it.

Nothing against the little critter, which is just doing its thing, but can we not begin to take global warming a bit more seriously? For some, this will mean acknowledging the problem in the first place. For the rest of us, we who already live in reality, it means working on serious, long-term solutions to the problem, both scientifically and politically.

Or shall we just settle back into oblivion, our narcotized oblivion, waking up one morning to find our forests gone, our world that much more uninhabitable?