I read here that warmer temperatures in Canada are resulting in swathes of forest being killed by pine beetles. This in turn makes the forest more vulnerable to fire. Dead forest, rotting trees (makes me think of Gene Wolfe’s decaying world in the Book of the New Sun, though that was a colder, not a warmer world), resulting from climate change, and in turn contributing to it. And all this in a country now busily engaged in an unprecedented new kind of exploitation of fossil fuels that may dwarf everything we’ve seen so far.
Still, one good thing: for future remakes of the Lord of the Rings, there’ll be no trouble recreating Mordor. The Shire may become a little trickier.
