He was right. And it's not good news.

I don't agree with the man who has the Twitter handle "SteveSGoddard" very much. (Yes, I know his real name.) However, every now and then he tweets about something interesting.

On Christmas Eve, he tweeted this:

"Pine beetles have declined more than 90% in Colorado over the last three years, after brainless experts blamed them on increasing CO₂."

I asked him for a reference, but he didn't reply. I suspected I knew why this might be happening, but wanted to confirm.

So I searched and found something he posted earlier this year, on March 10. It had a link to an article.

Colorado spruce bug epidemic eclipses mountain pine beetle blight

And in that article, it said this:

"Meanwhile, the mountain pine beetle epidemic slowed dramatically, likely because the pine beetle has run out of live trees to infest."

Funny how in his March 10 tweet, he said just this:

"Another climate alarmist fantasy up in smoke
"the mountain pine beetle epidemic slowed dramatically"

Context is everything, eh? But I want more confirmation. Let's learn some more.

Mountain pine beetle background 

Here's some anecdotal confirmation:

Destructive mountain pine beetle declining in Colorado 

"They ate themselves out of house and home," said Joe Duda, deputy state forester for the Colorado State Forest Service.

In other words, the beetles have gradually run out of available, stressed pine trees to eat, and their numbers are declining. While that is good news, the damage is done."

My suspicion has support now. And that is a quote from the deputy state forester of the Colorado State Forest Service, who ought to know his subject. But can something more official be found?

First, another anecdote (I added an underline for emphasis):

The beetle and the damage done

"Some efforts are being made to stanch the beetle’s spread. Forest Service officials in the Black Hills have proposed treating 248,000 acres of recently infested tree stands in hope of slowing or halting the advance of the beetles. A drought-ending change in the weather could also tamp down the infestation in some areas. But for the most part, the infestation is expected to run its course, abating when the beetles have consumed most of their preferred host—mature pine trees."

So, the expectation is that when you nearly wipe out their host (the trees), the beetle population will decline. Makes sense.  And Colorado has been very hard-hit. So the decline that SteveSGoddard posted about is probably real, and being real, it's not good news.

But still, I yearn for an official statement of some kind.

Well, here's what the Colorado State Forest Service has on their Web site, rather than an anecdotal quote from Joe Duda.

Mountain Pine Beetle 

I'm going to grab a lot of text and put it here, because I expect that they'll update the page sometime in 2016. (They ought to.) Note my emphasis again.

"In 2014, the area affected by mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) declined to its lowest level since 1996. A total area of 15,000 acres with active infestation were mapped during the annual aerial forest health survey.

Most of these acres (approximately 10,000) were in Larimer County, in the vicinity of Red Feather Lakes. Infestations also continued along the eastern slope of the Sangre de Cristo Range and on Miller Mesa near Ridgway.

The decline in area with active infestation is primarily due to the death of suitable host trees during previous years of the outbreak. Since 1996, almost 3.4 million acres of lodgepole, ponderosa and five-needle pines have been affected by this bark beetle.

For more information about insects and diseases impacting Colorado’s forests, read the 2014 Report on the Health of Colorado’s Forests and the 2014 Insect and Disease Update."

So I was right. And so was SteveSGoddard. But the reason he was right, the reason I suspected there was a decline, is not good news at all for the pine forests of Colorado (or other Western states). Because the mountain pine beetles are declining due to the fact that they've infested and killed so many pine trees.

I wish that wasn't the way it is, but that's the way it is.