The Birds Are Not Being Wiped Out

The Birds Are Not Being Wiped Out

Another pillar of global warming alarmism is proven to be totally wrong by fresh scientific studies


http://www.infowars.net/articles/april2008/170408birds.htm



'A common assertion amongst global warming alarmists contends that bird populations inhabiting cooler habitats are set to significantly decline, with most species becoming extinct as a result of increased carbon emissions leading to a rise in temperatures.';



Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Thursday, April 17, 2008


A common assertion amongst global warming alarmists contends that bird populations inhabiting cooler habitats are set to significantly decline, with "most" species becoming extinct as a result of increased carbon emissions leading to a rise in temperatures.
However, a new peer reviewed scientific paper, which set out to test the contention, has found that current trends show the exact opposite to be true.
As reported by Co2 Science, the paper, written by Javier Seoane and Luis Carrascal of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain, found that "one-half of the study species showed significant increasing recent trends despite the public concern that bird populations are generally decreasing," while "only one-tenth showed a significant decrease."
The authors studied breeding population changes for 57 species of common passerine birds between 1996 and 2004 in areas without any apparent land-use changes.
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Seoane and Carrascal, whose paper was recently published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, state that "the coherent pattern in population trends we found disagrees with the proposed detrimental effect of global warming on bird populations of western Europe."
In 2006, Prince Phillip's World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) predicted that unchecked climate change could "wipe out most birds", forcing up to 72 percent of the world's bird species into extinction.
"Birds now indicate that global warming has set in motion a powerful chain of effects in ecosystems worldwide," the WWF report to a UN conference said.
These claims were echoed by research scientists at Stanford last year who incorporated the most recent climate change scenarios set forth in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).


Even Al Gore, in his now widely debunked documentary An Inconvenient Truth, alluded to declining bird populations, declaring that species such as pied flycatchers could no longer feed their young due to global warming impacting insect species.
However, the Seoane and Carrascal study, which has predictably garnered no media attention whatsoever, puts such claims into perspective and highlights the fact that while such apocalyptic predictions serve as excellent soundbites for climate change alarmists, they ultimately undermine the contention that increased CO2 emissions are significantly impacting global temperatures.

"Birds are the quintessential 'canaries in the coal mine'" the WWF points out. Indeed they are, and according to the latest studies their populations are flourishing.
Seoane and Carrascal cite several other studies similar to their own:
They note, for example, that "one-half of terrestrial passerine birds in the United Kingdom exhibited increasing recent trends in a very similar time period (1994-2004)," citing Raven et al. (2005); and they note that "there is also a marked consistency between the observed increasing trends for forest and open woodland species in the Iberian Peninsula and at more northern European latitudes in the same recent years," citing Gregory et al. (2005). Likewise, they write that "Julliard et al. (2004a), working with 77 common bird species in France, found that species with large ecological breadth showed a tendency to increase their numbers throughout the analyzed period."


The authors also point out that many species have flourished due to the so called "greening of the earth" phenomenon that has seen a vast increase in plant growth in middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere since the 1980s, primarily induced by increased CO2 levels in the air.
Of course, anyone with any rudimentary knowledge of life on this planet knows that CO2 has never been shown to be other than benign. Life on Earth is carbon based.
Despite this large environmental bodies and institutions are calling to reduce CO2 outputs to ZERO, in order to combat global warming. It is blatantly obvious that such a move would return man to the stone age if not end civilization as we know it and kill billions.

Any scientist knows that climate models struggle to predict weeks and months into the future, let alone years. The reason why bird species are not being wiped out as predicted by these fundamentally flawed models, but are actually increasing, is that there is now no net warming, and during the rapid increase in production of CO2 via human emissions between 1940 and 1970, the planet cooled.