Add Your Photos and Video to This Story

Beetles may doom Canada's carbon reduction target – study

by jayr_patron | April 23, 2008 at 09:10 pm | 151 views | add comment

Butterfly effect? It seems incomprehensible that a tiny beetle the size of a grain of rice can cause the earth's warming. That's just the way it is I suppose.

Pine beetles that have already destroyed huge swathes of Canadian forest are on pace to release 270 megatons of carbon dioxide (C02) into the atmosphere by 2020, says a study released Wednesday.

That is the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions that Canada is committed to reducing by 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol, and would effectively doom that effort to failure, the study says.