Amerika

North American birds are moving north and inland to escape climes that have heated up with global warming, according to a report released today that warns that some species risk being wiped out if climate change makes their natural habitats unlivable.

One-hundred-seventy-seven of the continent’s 305 most common birds shifted their range farther north over the past four decades than in previous years, according to the Audobon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. The annual survey is based on reports from 50,000 “citizen scientists” on birds they spot at more than 2,000 locations in the Americas over the last two weeks in December. It’s been conducted for the past 109 years.

“It’s sending us a very disturbing message,” John Flicker, Audobon’s president and CEO, said during a press teleconference today. “The impacts of global warming are being felt right now, here in North America, and have been taking a huge toll on ecological systems.”

Scientific American

Dear John,

Please stop talking about nature as a conscious entity. This perpetuates the myth that it will somehow respond quickly to our equally quick damage.

Nature is a dumb process that ends up with brilliant results. It works this way in order to avoid entropy. Because all of its results occur from the interrelation of small processes, it’s hard for it to wholly fail or reach a lock-up state.

But it’s easy for it, when faced with quickly-destructive talking monkeys with car keys, to not adapt in time and for us to lose billions of years of ecological diversity and refinement.

Sincerely,
The unpopular thinkers

Climate-driven environmental changes could drastically affect the distribution of more than 1,000 species of commercial fish and shellfish around the world, scientists say.

A new study predicts that by 2050, large numbers of marine species will migrate from tropical seas toward cooler waters — specifically the Arctic and Southern Ocean — at an average rate of 40 to 45 kilometers (about 25 to 28 miles) per decade.

These migrations could lead to “numerous extinctions” of marine species outside the Arctic and Antarctic, especially in tropical waters, according to the study’s projections.

CNN

Dear Humanity,

It seems like just yesterday you were a new species, freshly minted from some monkeys that got smart.

Today, I fear, you’re still just a monkey that got smart — but not smart enough. It’s as if you can see one factor at a time, but you lack topographic and prismatic logical abilities as you’ll need to make the decisions before you.

There are some among you who can do this, but apparently they’re unpopular, and that means they don’t win at the monkey power games.

That’s too bad, since I like the rest of the universe act predictably and without consciousness, just like a machine or chemical reaction. So I must do what I’m gonna do which is what I must do because it’s how I’m built.

I guess you’ve gotta ask yourself: did you need to find a garden of Eden, or did you live in it until now?

Sincerely,
Earth

In a paper appearing this month in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, the study authors documented the northward march of 40 major tree species over 30 eastern states based on the distribution of seedlings versus mature trees.

Previous studies of plant migrations had been done using only computer simulations, or they focused on how some species are climbing up hills and mountains, said co-author Chris Oswalt, of the Forest Service’s Southern Research Station in Knoxville, Tennessee.

By contrast, the new study looked at movement based on latitude, using a sampling of the forest service’s most recent ground-based data.

The finding confirms a link between global warming and forest migration, said lead study author Chris Woodall, of the Forest Service’s Northern Research Station in St. Paul, Minnesota.

National Geographic

Tags: climate change, ecocide, global warming