• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Warning Sign, Birds Dwindling

calamity

calamity

Privileged
Supporting Member
DP Veteran
Monthly Donator
Joined
Feb 12, 2013
Messages
160,900
Reaction score
57,844
Gender
Undisclosed
Political Leaning
Centrist
Bird population in North America, down 29% since 1970.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/19/north-america-has-lost-billion-birds-years/

“That’s really what was so staggering about this,” said lead author Ken Rosenberg, a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy. “The generalist, adaptable, so-called common species were not compensating for the losses, and in fact they were experiencing losses themselves. This major loss was pervasive across all the bird groups.”

The study’s authors, who include scientists from Canada’s environment agency and the U.S. Geological Survey, were able to put a number on the decline because birds are probably the best-monitored animals on Earth. Decades of standardized, on-the-ground tallies carried out by ordinary bird enthusiasts — including the annual North American Breeding Bird Survey and the Christmas Bird Count — provided a wealth of data that the researchers compiled and compared.

They then cross-referenced that with data from a very different, nonhuman source: 143 weather radars that are designed to detect rain but also capture “biomass” flying through the skies, as hundreds of migratory bird species do every fall and spring. Birds look “sort of like big blobs” in radar imagery, said co-author Adriaan Dokter, a migration ecologist at the Cornell Lab. Measurements of the blobs’ size and movements showed that the volume of spring migration dropped 14 percent in the past decade, according to the study, published Thursday in Science.
Click to expand...


Just one more sign that our precarious toehold on this blue ball is about to fall out from under us. Of course, except for those who believe in some Second Coming arriving to save them, the ball is all we have. It's always amazing to see how little we do to preserve it.
 
Hey at least Ive seen the bees comming back this year.
 
Ok..so if they’re basing that on the appearance of “blobs” on weather station radars over the last 50 years then how do they know it’s not just reflective of improvement in the technology or even a change in migratory patterns?

On another note...I wish members would consider posting sources in the OP that aren’t behind a paywall.
 
Just the other day it was "Who gives a **** if birds are getting sliced and diced by wind turbines."
 
bubbabgone said:
Just the other day it was "Who gives a **** if birds are getting sliced and diced by wind turbines."
Click to expand...

I was just gonna mention da windmills.
 
dirtpoorchris said:
Hey at least Ive seen the bees comming back this year.
Click to expand...


I thought so too, but it turned out, the honey bees were coming from my neighbor who had built an apiary and was raising bees for honey.
 
calamity said:
Bird population in North America, down 29% since 1970.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/19/north-america-has-lost-billion-birds-years/




Just one more sign that our precarious toehold on this blue ball is about to fall out from under us. Of course, except for those who believe in some Second Coming arriving to save them, the ball is all we have. It's always amazing to see how little we do to preserve it.
Click to expand...
My handi-dandi calculator says that over the 50 year time frame that represents a disastrous collapse of 0.42% a year! :eek:

Sounds more like a rounding error that a forecast of calamity (double entre intended).
 
Bullseye said:
My handi-dandi calculator says that over the 50 year time frame that represents a disastrous collapse of 0.42% a year! :eek:

Sounds more like a rounding error that a forecast of calamity (double entre intended).
Click to expand...

Yeah, that must be it. :roll:
 
Bullseye said:
My handi-dandi calculator says that over the 50 year time frame that represents a disastrous collapse of 0.42% a year! :eek:

Sounds more like a rounding error that a forecast of calamity (double entre intended).
Click to expand...

What about the melodrama about the "blue ball" being all we have?
Have you figured that in?
That has to count for something.
 
bubbabgone said:
What about the melodrama about the "blue ball" being all we have?
Have you figured that in?
That has to count for something.
Click to expand...

Do you have another place to go? Do share.
 
Bullseye said:
My handi-dandi calculator says that over the 50 year time frame that represents a disastrous collapse of 0.42% a year! :eek:

Sounds more like a rounding error that a forecast of calamity (double entre intended).
Click to expand...

Meaningless. Know why? Because if you just call it such-and-such a percentage a year it can go on infinitely and never reach zero. Like cutting something in half and again in half and again and again and again... You could go on forever which is impossible which is why it's a meaningless exercise.
 
calamity said:
Bird population in North America, down 29% since 1970.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/19/north-america-has-lost-billion-birds-years/




Just one more sign that our precarious toehold on this blue ball is about to fall out from under us. Of course, except for those who believe in some Second Coming arriving to save them, the ball is all we have. It's always amazing to see how little we do to preserve it.
Click to expand...

I think abolishing the pollution standards and the EPA will help solve this problem
 
Winston said:
I think abolishing the pollution standards and the EPA will help solve this problem
Click to expand...

Corporate profits and Executive pay are up. What's the problem? Besides if there was a problem, an unregulated free market would solve it. :roll:
 
calamity said:
Bird population in North America, down 29% since 1970.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/19/north-america-has-lost-billion-birds-years/

Just one more sign that our precarious toehold on this blue ball is about to fall out from under us. Of course, except for those who believe in some Second Coming arriving to save them, the ball is all we have. It's always amazing to see how little we do to preserve it.
Click to expand...

Human's have always been on Mother Nature's rollercoaster. Presumptuous to believe we have brakes and a steering wheel.
 
Grand Mal said:
Meaningless. Know why? Because if you just call it such-and-such a percentage a year it can go on infinitely and never reach zero. Like cutting something in half and again in half and again and again and again... You could go on forever which is impossible which is why it's a meaningless exercise.
Click to expand...
Sorry, no. The percentage I calculated was a projection that would continue ad infinitum. It was a look at the specific time period his link stated. There's no guarantee that the decline will continue at that rate, speed up, or slow done.
 
requiring more ethanol destroys bird habitat
burning "biomass" destroys bird habitat
building more roads destroys bird habitat
piping and channeling more water into big urban cities destroys bird habitat.
building seawalls to protect mansions and concrete jungles instead of letting coastal birds have that space destroys bird habitat.


One can blame "global warming" until they turn blue, but this issue largely is about human intrusion into natural areas. It doesn't matter how many electric cars you drive across the country. That you can drive them across the country on a 4 or six lane highway is why we will have fewer birds.
 
Drawdown said:
requiring more ethanol destroys bird habitat
burning "biomass" destroys bird habitat
building more roads destroys bird habitat
piping and channeling more water into big urban cities destroys bird habitat.
building seawalls to protect mansions and concrete jungles instead of letting coastal birds have that space destroys bird habitat.


One can blame "global warming" until they turn blue, but this issue largely is about human intrusion into natural areas. It doesn't matter how many electric cars you drive across the country. That you can drive them across the country on a 4 or six lane highway is why we will have fewer birds.
Click to expand...

I think the main thing is there’s a huge leap of logic here that doesn’t make sense and is actually quite humorous. The OP posits that birds aren’t moving in the numbers or exactly when and where this person thinks they should be based on the rather dodgy radar imaging technology of the 1960s so they must be dead! :lol:
 
Napoleon said:
I think the main thing is there’s a huge leap of logic here that doesn’t make sense and is actually quite humorous. The OP posits that birds aren’t moving in the numbers or exactly when and where this person thinks they should be based on the rather dodgy radar imaging technology of the 1960s so they must be dead! :lol:
Click to expand...

Perhaps but there is that other UN peer reviewed thing that Alarmist ignore:

"But the challenge is immense. All countries except the US have ratified the 1992 UN Convention of Biodiversity and are supposed to be conserving biodiversity and promoting its sustainable use.

Despite this, more than 80 per cent of the agreed international targets for 2020 will not be met, says the report. In fact, as of 2016, half the signatory countries hadn’t yet drawn up plans on how to meet the targets.

The problem isn’t just our focus on economic growth regardless of the impact on the natural world. Current plans for reducing carbon dioxide emissions to net-zero to limit climate change rely heavily on bioenergy, which requires a lot of land. This will accelerate species loss as well as threatening food and water security, says the report."



Read more: Destruction of nature is as big a threat to humanity as climate change | New Scientist
 
bubbabgone said:
I'm sure someone has a reason why that must be different.
Click to expand...

I think the difference is rather obvious.

Windmills are a danger to some birds...the ones that fly into them.

The change in climate is a danger to all birds, and any and all life forms on the planet.

These are clearly two separate issues, though I see the funny joke you made. :lol:
 
[h=2]Let’s Welcome Warming! 2 New Studies Show Species, Biodiversity Harmed More By Cooling Than Warming[/h]By P Gosselin on 8. September 2019
[h=3]Two recent scientific publications underscore how mass extinction events are associated with global cool-offs, glaciation and sea level fall, and NOT warmer climates.[/h]
Life thrives when the globe gets tropically warm. Photo credit: NASA, public domain​
There’s been a lot of hype and hysteria surrounding the claims that the recent, modest global warming supposedly will have dire impacts on species diversity and survival.
But the wild claims fly in the face of what the earth’s history shows us: Biodiversity and species thrived in warm periods, and struggled during the cooler ones.
Now scientific results published in two recent papers suggest this yet again. What follows are the abstracts from the 2 papers along with links to them: . . .
 
Jack Hays said:
[h=2]Let’s Welcome Warming! 2 New Studies Show Species, Biodiversity Harmed More By Cooling Than Warming[/h]By P Gosselin on 8. September 2019
[h=3]Two recent scientific publications underscore how mass extinction events are associated with global cool-offs, glaciation and sea level fall, and NOT warmer climates.[/h]
Life thrives when the globe gets tropically warm. Photo credit: NASA, public domain​
There’s been a lot of hype and hysteria surrounding the claims that the recent, modest global warming supposedly will have dire impacts on species diversity and survival.
But the wild claims fly in the face of what the earth’s history shows us: Biodiversity and species thrived in warm periods, and struggled during the cooler ones.
Now scientific results published in two recent papers suggest this yet again. What follows are the abstracts from the 2 papers along with links to them: . . .
Click to expand...

I sure am glad I don't have any kids or grand kids hating on me into the future.

Greta Thunberg: The teenage old soul of the climate crisis - CNN

And, hate us the kids will.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom