Climate change and "The Birds"

The real cause of this is SAD (Seasonal Affect Disorder). After a long dark cold winter, many birds get so depressed, they become suicidal. “Goodbye cruel world!” SPLAT

I forgot to mention the suicidal birds that fly into the blades of a wind mill!
What a nonsense!

I knew it! CAGW is for the birds!

Yeah, and I have heard of the birds committing suicide by flying directly into wind turbines in California, too. I suppose that is due to “climate change” as that is what prompted the installation of so many windmills.

Causes of death:
Collisions in heavy fog.
Slammed into cliffs by strong winds.
Bleeding from bites of mosquito swarms.
Landslides.
Foot stuck in crack.
Driven into ocean by strong winds.
“Curiously a high proportion of the adult birds we see die tend to be dying [due] to factors related to climate and weather,”
What do you expect, it’s a harsh climate up there. And weather is not climate, mmmkay.

Enjoyed your explanation. I thought that the birds were killing themselves because they thought Al Gore was coming to the arctic to speak about Global Warming. But I like yours better.

“If temperatures warm and intense storms in the Arctic increase, along with other climate factors, “we might see mortality in these birds from these things increase from what they are now.” But Mallory adds that he and his team are not sounding an alarm bell that climate change is going to kill off all of the seabirds.”
Unbelievable. And they call themselves scientists?

Putin made a comment about Kyrgyzstan’s ex-leader that he had stepped on the same rake as the former president. Leif shows us a cartoon about stepping on a rake. Pictures from May appear in April. In WA State a winter snow storm shuts the Interstate. In the east they have a heat wave. Birds die. Have we just gone through a radioactive cloud or something? Let’s blame George Bush and global warming.

“”” Leif Svalgaard (16:25:00) :
Many years ago I was in the commercial Computer Programming Tools business. Here was my Gary Larson moment discovering tools:
http://www.leif.org/research/The%20Discovery%20of%20Tools.png “””
you are going to have the “farside police” come and destroy your lab.
There is NO LEGAL usage of far side cartoon panels available to anybody for any reason at any price.

They’re flying into the cliffs because they’re mistaking them for windmills. It’s a thrill kind of thing.

It is not uncommon to see all sorts of birds flying into buildings with a splat where there is no ice anywhere around. Except for crows, I have never seen or heard of a crow flying into a building.

It’s well understood that birds’ navigation systems and brainwaves are directly effected by geomagnetics and it’s fluctuations…
So how are they linking a bird flying into a cliffside with climate change ? Since when is climate change and geomagnetics one and the same ??

more fun in the following, with Naomi Oreskes, William Freudenburg, Riley Dunlap plus amusing comments from abc’s own Robyn Williams:
3 April: ABC Radio Australia: The Science Show: Climate change scepticism – its sources and strategies
This week The Science Show presents excerpts from a symposium at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego which looks at the sources and strategies of scepticism to climate change science….
Stephen Schneider: …Where’s the fourth estate? How about trying to balance? Scientists are pretty incompetent at doing that because all the incentives, unless you’re at my age or you’re crazy and don’t care what your colleagues think, you just go out there and tell it, very few scientists will do that because the incentives are so strong against it, especially young people pre-tenure…
I’ve got to be real blunt; how many old men who have nothing to do with climate science are out there saying it ain’t so and getting coverage in the newspaper when they would have no prayer based on anything they’re still capable of doing? There are a lot of reasons why this goes on. Why are they being covered? Who cares what a petroleum geologist thinks about climate? They’re as competent to discuss climate as I am horizontal drilling. They are not experts, they don’t belong in that debate. ..
Why do you think the media, in my opinion, have grabbed on these three IPCC errors so far? This disinformation engine is investing all that money and all they could do is find three? I’m more arrogant. I think if I took my best students and you gave me a month I think we could probably find ten, maybe even 20. But there’s about (I haven’t counted them) 1,000 conclusions roughly in a report, 1,000 pages, one a page, something in that order. ..
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/2859986.htm
the the scientists on WUWT:
8 April: ABC TV Australia: Catalyst: LIDAR (with transcript)
Greenhouse gas emissions are heating up the lower atmosphere, but 50 kilometres above Antarctica the mesosphere is cooling. Mark Horstman visits a small hut on the edge of Antarctica to find out why
Andrew Klekociuk: LIDAR stands for light detection and ranging. It’s a technique very similar to radar except we’re using light pulses from a laser, rather than radio waves, to probe the atmosphere, sending out these pulses and listening for the echoes that are coming back.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2867591.htm

A couple of thoughts come to mind.
1. Did the scientists establish if the increase bird suicide is a statistically significant trend?
2. It is well known that the Arctic had consistently nice weather, no erosion and very few storms prior to the invention of the SUV.
http://www.surfersvillage.com/gal/pictures/ArcticSunbathe-Francois_Len.jpg

Who’s doing the peer review on these papers? Jim Carrey and Carrot Top?

African or European swallows?

RE: Steve in SC (17:47:18) :
“… Except for crows, I have never seen or heard of a crow flying into a building…”
I’ve seen a crow, on a fence, shot with a pellet gun that hit him square in the chest. The crow staggered for a second, ruffled its feathers and the pellet fell to the ground. Crows are tough.
Chickens and .306’s are a different story…

The msnbc story makes me want to fling myself into a cliff as well.

Before the advent of the internal combustion engine all birds used to die peacefully of natural causes surrounded by their relatives.
This reminds me of some documentary I saw on cable, which claimed that whales would all die because they were unfamilar with the landscape (for lack of a better word) of the melting ice at the south pole and therefore would get lost underneath it as if Whales can’t adapt to variable landscape of ice. I’m sure the ice patterns must have varied quite a bit over the millenia.

Leif Svalgaard (18:36:29) :
George E. Smith (17:16:55) :
There is NO LEGAL usage of far side cartoon panels available to anybody for any reason at any price.
I actually do have permission [1991, from Chronicle Features, San Francisco, CA] to use this particular cartoon in connection with my Programming Tool, called ETK back then.
—–
YOU TELL ‘IM, LEIF! I mean, really…if anyone on this blog is going to do something by-the-letter perfectly, I’d expect it to be Dr. Svalgaard!!

There are a number of comments here about the Altemont Pass Wind Farms in Livermore and Windmill Bird Strikes. I believe Smallwood’s environment reports on this topic are another Climategate in the making albeit much smaller.
For example, there appears to be attribution of 10x higher burrowing owl deaths during Jan. Except in Jan, the windmills barely turn if at all. How do I know that, I see the windmills from my house, the power generation curves say they don’t (<3% of the power is generated at this time), and the physics of cold racing from the pacific ocean to fill the warm air rising over the central valley is not as applicable during the winter time.
Birds die, Birds die in greater numbers during the winter time. N. California does not have lots of Birds running into non-spinning windmills.
Smallwood even has Bird Strikes rising dramatically, even though there are less operational windmills since the last study a trend that has been going on for a long time. And yet each report keeps increasing the rate of the strikes.

The only thing NOT caused by climate change is an elevation of an AGWers’ IQ. There’s apparenly an inverse relationsip.
’nuff said!

Ahhh, Schools of Climatology and Broadcast; Schools for the Gifted.

Layne:
“Next thing you know they’ll blame climate change for killing the dinosaurs.”
They already have….. 🙂
Note: if true, it got COLDER!!!!!

Dr Svalgaard – I could care less about copyright rules at the moment. I snorted up my mouthful of water when I saw it! Thanks for that lighthearted moment 🙂

“Mallory’s team didn’t go into new the study looking for climate-change-related deaths, but that’s what they found.”

Yeah, right!! More funding please. This sort of event has probably always occured and it has just occured to these researchers that if they could tie in the birds deaths to the normal change in climate from season to season they could apply for further cash to feed their families and pay their mortgages.
I claim warmer oceans causes whales to beach themselves I need to do some further research to examine the exact process. Can I get some funding :o)
——

The Guardian – 11 June 2008
“Dolphin deaths: Expert suggests ‘mass suicide'”
“The dolphins had swallowed and inhaled big chunks of mud from the estuary. Their lungs and stomachs were full of it. That is very bizarre indeed.””

These birds are registered Democrats. 2 left wings will not fly. The aerodynamics just do not work.
They also have given up on hopenchange.

Crows at the Bainbridge Island ferry dock, (across Puget Sound from Seattle), pull mussels off the pilings at low tide and fly up about twenty feet and drop them on the pavement to crack the shells so they can pick out the meat. They are way too smart to let cars run over them and squish the meat into an in-edible mush of shell, meat, and road grit. And ravens make crows look like CAGW believers. Read Bernd Heinrich’s books.

Larson was ok, but Kliban was much deeper and very underrated: http://www.coldbacon.com/pics/kliban/bksubjective.jpg

This is from the pseudo-science manual of novel phenomena.
Observing any previously unobserved phenomenon constitutes a novel phenomenon without precedent.
(If you’re going to repeat that at a party, make sure it’s before your second drink. :-))

With journalists lacking any basic level of curiosity about things that for some strange reason I learned as a child at school, (eg; weathering of rocks including freeze thaw cycles) we are destined to have still more and more uncritical rubbish splashed across the media.
The only giant leap made by this “Scientist” is from the results to a AGW CC conclusion.
I feel more like the owner of a Norwegian Blue Parrot as each day passes.
Is it any wonder more skeptics are coming out of the closet.

“The researchers note that despite the strange endings, the percentage of dead birds was relatively low — just a few thousands out of millions of birds in the area.”
This statement shows how dire the situation is… for the scientists’ future prospects of grant money. Perhaps some rework of their paper/study geared towards successful animal adaptation and selection processes in the arctic would help.
While void of science the article was at least entertaining in an unintended sort of way… especially if you strategically segment it, such as “strange Arctic birds” or “You see a bird for apparently no good reason”.
Climate happens.

In1973 I spent 6 weeks at a U of Queensland research station on Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. It was nesting season for the pelagic birds. Every evening at dusk there was a crash as a Wedgetailed Shearwater would smack into the side of barracks hut next to my bunk. I would go out to find the bird sitting dazed on the ground. I guess the hut had been built in the flight path of the landing pattern among the trees. It went on until the young had fledged and they all had gone their merry way. Does the term “Bird Brain” ring a bell?

Leif Svalgaard (16:25:00) :
Fun cartoon. Made me think that Josh could do a “Mann discovers tools” in a similar vein involving a hockey stick.

Liberal media running back movies taken by naturalist-racists of lemmings jumping off cliffs then running the tape backwards.
Reply: You do know that the films of lemmings mass suicide were faked right? ~ ctm

Mike J (17:02:55) :
“If temperatures warm and intense storms in the Arctic increase, along with other climate factors, “we might see mortality in these birds from these things increase from what they are now.” But Mallory adds that he and his team are not sounding an alarm bell that climate change is going to kill off all of the seabirds.”
Unbelievable. And they call themselves scientists?
————–
They call themselves ‘Conservation Biologists’ which is a new ‘mission-oriented’ pseudoscience that begins with the premise that everything is doomed or heading for imminent extinction and is as utterly bogus as the worst of IPCC climate ‘science.’
The EPA is loaded with them and so is the Canadian Wildlife Service. So is the mothership, the IUCN. The whole ‘endangered species’ research-industrial complex is based on this junk science. Not surprisingly, they’re big on models now.
Hopefully when we get past this first priority, the global climate crisis fraud, we can look harder at this branch of the ‘save the world’ industry. They are linked. How do you think they came up with the very convenient ‘scientific’ predictions of polar bear ‘extinction’ to fit the big scare campaign and give the AGW gang their best poster child?

Everything and anything can be attributed to climate change is a grant renewal depends on it.

The researchers suspect as the ice goes through freezing and melting, and the consequential expanding and contracting, it puts pressure on the rocks and causes these rock falls.
There are many old quarries near where I live. This winter I have noticed some new (still clean) fallen rocks, after all the freezing weather. However, I have not made a dramatic new discovery. I learnt at school (age 11) that water expands when it freezes. These guys should get out more before they start ‘suspecting’.

That explains everything! Climate change must be why kamikazes and suicide bombers do their dirty work.

Ah yes, The Birds — a scary picture, Peter Finch and Walter Pigeon did excellent work.

Senior seagull moments.

George Turner (18:31:44) :
I would think that the major killers of arctic birds are unusual accidents and weather related events. I mean, what else is going to eventually end their lives, smoking and drug addiction?
Suicide by CWS “biologists”.

Bulldust-those are hilarious ads. Loved the one with the trucker…

I expect that these event occur just before or after noon, when the sun casts small dark shadows below small outcrops in the cliff. These dark, somewhat triangular shadows would appear as a ‘hole’, a place to land, in the otherwise brightly lit cliff face. The bird thinks it has a good, sheltered landing or nesting site and attempts to go into the ‘hole’.
So, lets see some video of these events.
AWG: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Beth Cooper (03:01:50) :

Maybe these birds are lemmings? What about beaching whales, could they also be possible victims of CAGW ? Hmmm, so many questions, so few answers

You could be on to something here…. Perhaps the birds understand that there is no better time than now to try have themselves included politically as yet one more ‘victim class’ hoping for increased handouts, set-asides and special rights. I had a parakeet once; he was one sharp little guy. He would have tried for something like this, (but he would have goaded one of my Java Temple birds into taking the fall for the cause).

Karl Gustav Jung thought that the subconscious mind (in this case those minds who think or feel an armageddon) projects itself ouside. This phenomenon he called it the “constellization” of a symbol. It is evident that this kind of projection has been and it is happening among the english speaking countries, specially in the US. Let me tell you that we, the people from other countries, do not feel anything of the like. Does this mean somtehing to you?
From HAARP to Al Baby and Al-Qaida, you are in a kind of almost WANTING THE END.

There was a grotesque ad some time ago showing some animals killing themselves after thoughtful consideration. A monkey hangs himself from a tree, a bear jumps off a cliff, and a kangoroo hops in front of a train. This is from a Portuguese environmental organization called Quercus. At the end, the caption says: “Global Warming: If we give up, they give up.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/warmists_using_suicidal_animal.html

Is there any more info on these birds? I mean, do they taste good? I’m thinking, if we can get our hands on some stimulus money, we could start a government funded program to bring these birds to the US. The lack of good, fresh food for inner city kids seems to be a big problem. Lets boost their nutrition!! Don’t you people care about the children?? Seems like we could kill two birds with one stone here.

Perhaps there are two sides among these birds: The tea-baggers and the coffee drinkers fighting among them!!☺

I got it: They got confused because of the north magnetinc pole splitting in two!:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Ydipole.gif

” ‘We saw birds dying of what at best could be called Gary Larson events,’ said Mark Mallory of the Canadian Wildlife Service in Iqaluit.”
“In another slapstick, albeit sad, event, a thick-billed murre was found dead after getting its foot stuck in a crack in the cliff face on Coats Island.”
“Scientists observed six species, including the fulmars, dying in slapstick, albeit tragic, ways.”
Just imagine all of the hilarious ways animals die when no-one is even around to witness it.

Pure Guano. All of it.

“George Turner (18:31:44) :
I would think that the major killers of arctic birds are unusual accidents and weather related events. I mean, what else is going to eventually end their lives, smoking and drug addiction?”
tty (06:25:19) :
Gyrfalcons, Rough-legged Buzzards, White-tailed Eagles, Snowy Owls, Great Skuas, Broad-tailed Skuas, Glaucous Gulls. Ravens, Polar Foxes, Arctic Wolves, Polar Bears
Northern Fulmar cacciatore for members of the Catlin expedition.

Damn shame these birds are not Canada Geese.
We have many thousands here in SC that we would like to deport or kill.
(no preference there)

“But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered – not a feather then he fluttered –
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before –
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.’
Then the bird said, `Nevermore”
Edgard Allan Poe (fragment)

You mean birds, lemmings, President Ubama citizenship, and the Moon Landing are all hoaxes along with computer programs from GreenPiece?

Reply: You do know that the films of lemmings mass suicide were faked right? ~ ctm

Come on, Charles! You can’t let facts get in the way of a good cliche’! I mean, everyone KNOWS that full moons cause people to do strange things, just ask any cop or ER nurse… /sarc

dood (14:43:02) :Birds are funny, their eyes are on the sides of their heads to watch for predators, so they’re actually not that great at seeing where they’re going. Except for birds that are predators, o’course.

In relation to that, I have my own theory of why birds behave the way they they do when you approach them in an airplane. Unless they are heading straight at something they have no parallax information so distance is initially based on only recognizing what the object is and how big it is. So they first notice you, just a weird looking bird on an intercept course with them, they turn away to head in an opposite direction. But because they have no genetically imprinted information concerning the size of ‘airplane birds’ and no parallax information from one eye, they think you are much closer to them and smaller than you actually are. Thinking you are very close also makes them initially think that you are going slow. But after they turn and see you with their other eye, they are startled that there is another airplane bird(!), and a much bigger one, that somehow snuck up behind it. So it turns back to its original heading only to find that it was wrong about airplane bird number one – it’s actually huge and closing fast! So it then goes into panic mode, draws its wings in and drops like a rock.
So that’s generally what most birds do when you are heading toward them in a small airplane – turn, turn, sometimes turn one more time, rarely turn even a fourth time then panic drop.
Just a theory.

I sort of suspected something, when one of the lemmings “jumped” in a flat spin. Sort of like someone was throwing it.
Burrowing owl deaths? The highest I saw one fly was about 6 feet, over a fence.

Birds are exceptionally sensitive to changes in geomagnetism. There have been changes recently. Also, if they eat mountain ash berries (which don’t grow in Iqualuik afaik) they sometimes get fermented berries, become drunk and fly into stuff.