Pirate's Cove

Do the cultists how insane this all sounds? Do they care?

Cold, Rain, and Climate Change: Why Baby Birds Are Losing the Fight to Survive

Sixty years of data from more than 80,000 wild great tits in the UK reveal a troubling pattern: cold snaps and heavy rain can stunt nestling growth and slash their odds of surviving to adulthood. The culprit, researchers say, is a changing climate that is making extreme weather events both more frequent and more severe.

The findings, published March 11 in Global Change Biology by scientists at the University of Oxford, draw on records from Wytham Woods in Oxfordshire, one of the longest-running wildlife monitoring programs in the world. By pairing individual bird data with detailed daily weather records across six decades, the team was able to isolate precisely when extreme weather hits hardest during a nestling’s brief but critical development window.

The research pinpoints two weather extremes as especially damaging, and their timing matters enormously. According to the study, extreme cold during the first week after hatching is particularly detrimental, a period when chicks have no feathers and cannot yet regulate their own body temperature. Rather than converting food into growth, hatchlings in a cold snap must burn energy simply staying warm, often falling behind in body mass in ways that can never be fully recovered.

This is a perfect example as to why they changed it from anthropogenic global warming to anthropogenic climate change: it allows what morphed into a doomsday cult to blame everything on Mankind. Hot? Your fault. Cold? Also your fault. And we can fix this with a tax and removing your freedom, liberty, and life choices.

Read: Your Fault: Baby Birds Having Trouble Surviving From HeatCold »

There was a time when Liberals, who comprise the vast majority of Warmists, were adamant about Darwanism. This peaked, seemingly, when Bush 43 was in office, being a big Christian, and there being lots of talk about Creationism and Intelligent Design. But, with the slide from being concerned over anthropogenic global warming to being Warmists to being members of a doomsday cult the notion of adaptation quickly died. But, no fear, a flower is changing!

Can evolution keep up with climate change? This flower offers hope.

People have been trying all sorts of strategies to help species keep up in a warming world. They have bred hybrid coral from different parts of the world to create heat tolerant variants, worked to protect habitat projected to stay cooler as temperatures rise, even moved migratory birds to help them keep pace with the seasons.

But species aren’t just waiting for humans to help them out. In the latest example, the scarlet monkeyflower, a low-to-the-ground perennial with showy red blooms, has shown it contains the genetic capacity to rapidly evolve in the face of a punishing drought, according to research just published in Science.

The discovery suggests there is hope that at least some species can keep up with the speed at which the climate is changing. And it offers genetic clues that might help guide selection of specific plants within a species that are better suited to a hotter world.

Darwin noted changes to the life in the Galapagos, with things like the length of the beaks of birds changing according to whether it was a longer wet or dry period. The science involved is, of course, a bit suspect and way too short to make any true adaptation determination, but, life adapts. It adapted during the previous warm and cool Holocene periods. And, sometimes it dies out, like during the last glacial age.

“The concern has been that climate change is happening too fast and its changes are too big for evolution to keep up,” Amy Angert, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the paper’s senior author. “Our research shows that for monkeyflower, and likely similar wild plants, they can indeed keep pace and ‘rescue’ themselves.”

By fast they mean a whopping 1.6-1.7 Fahrenheit increase since 1850. That’s nothing.

The new insights arose from a fortunate coincidence. Angert and colleagues began collecting scarlet monkeyflower seeds from different parts of Oregon and California in the early 2000s, at a time when the region was already in the grip of what has been termed a “megadrought.” What they didn’t know at the time is that the most severe episode in that drought would strike from 2012 to 2015, creating the driest conditions California has witnessed in more than 10,000 years.

They cannot prove that, only infer it. Oh, and what caused the dry period 10K years ago? They never say. They also can never let go of the doom.

Read: Warmists Dump Darwin In Face Of Climate Doom »