The latest creatures to fall victim to “climate change” are America’s songbirds, joining a growing list of casualties attributed by climate alarmists to manmade changing weather patterns and global temperature shifts.
Warmer temperatures are threatening American songbirds with dwindling numbers due to an inability to successfully breed, a new study from Scientific Reports alleges.
A team of researchers studied migratory patterns of songbirds between 2001 and 2012 and claimed that of the 48 North American songbird species that migrate north, nine of these — or almost 20 percent — “didn’t reach the grounds by the deadline critical for mating and breeding the next generation of birds,” wrote Karla Lant in her summary of the report
Plants in eastern North America are “greening up” sooner than normal because of global warming, the report contends, while plants in the western part of the continent are somehow undergoing the process later.
This means that birds such as the Townsend’s warbler and the rose-breasted grosbeak “are arriving either too soon and being met with frigid temperatures or too late and missing out on the insect boom that coincides with the new plant growth,” Lant stated.
Either way, the birds have a much lower chance of surviving and reproducing, the report alleges, so the nine species identified are consequently in danger of dwindling numbers.
“As climate at the breeding grounds changes, birds may be unable to adjust wintering ground departure times and transit speeds sufficiently to match their arrival with altered breeding resource phenology, particularly leaf growth and the closely associated emergence of herbivorous insects,” the report warns.
If attributing changes in migratory patterns of songbirds to “global warming” after a mere 12 years of observation strikes readers as highly suspicious, that’s probably because it is.
Event attribution—the ability to link a given phenomenon to manmade global warming—is exceedingly speculative at best and completely unreliable at worst, even according to true believers.
At a meeting of climate scientists at Oxford in 2012, one participant argued that, given the insufficient observational data and the coarse and mathematically imperfect climate models used to generate attribution claims, they are “unjustifiably speculative, basically unverifiable and better not made at all.”
Nature Magazine felt compelled to conclude (with unusual modesty) that “better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.”
Of course, the purpose of studies such as these, which remarkably continue to receive funding, is ultimately practical rather than speculative. They are meant primarily not to inform but to exhort, and to put pressure on policy makers to coerce human behavior change in accordance with climate change theory.
Obama acualy allowed for the deaths of eagles all in the name of windturbines and eco-freak energy and frankly every darn bird and bat chopping windturbine needs to be ripped down and scrapped its a total waste of tax money over this renewible energy poppycock
“Don’t believe your lying eyes!”
Once again, that’s what the eco-socialists are telling us. I have never seen more bird variety in my life as we have this spring in rural Wisconsin.
LOL! My trees are full, as always. Orioles, Gros beaks, killdeers in the fields , et al. I used to pity the robins that were caught by a spring snow squall until I realized that they could fly South if they couldn’t handle it. Their vying for territory.
Birds have trouble breeding when they have been bird blended .
Obama Ok ‘d the bird blender industry massacre over 4000 eagles per year .
as an acceptable cost of production for expensive intermittent power .
Imagine the horror and moral indignation if 4000 polar bear and polar bear cubs
were killed in leg hold traps ? Eagles and other birds …no problem after all look at the symbolism and photo op of a wind turbine . So green .
Notice how politicians never have them in their back yards ?
Song birds love the tropics for a reason … more food and they don’t freeze .
They are more at risk from cats and bird blenders than any warming .
Just wait for the eco-wackos to use the song birds as more ways to rake in the dough we do indeed need song birds but this claim is false