The liberal secular scientists and their friends in the media are at it again:
For decades, the arrival of the first V-shaped flights of Bewick’s swans in Britain’s wetlands after a 2,000-mile journey from Siberia heralded the arrival of winter.
This year, a dramatic decline in numbers of the distinctive yellow-billed swans skidding into their winter feeding grounds could be the harbinger of a more dramatic shift in weather patterns: global warming. Ornithologists at the main reserves that host the birds, the smallest of Britain’s swans, said only a handful had appeared on lakes and water courses. Normally, there would be several hundred.
The latest arrival in a decade of Britain’s seasonal influx of 8,000 Bewick’s swans throws into sharp relief the debate on the effects of climate change as it enters a crucial week. As the Government’s forthcoming Climate Bill is finalised, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist, is expected to warn in a report on Monday that failure to tackle global warming will provoke a recession deeper than the Great Depression.
Anyone with half a brain would realize the reason there are fewer swans arriving is because God is mad at them and let fewer make the journey. Sheesh.
Plus, what is all this crap about global warming anyway? I don’t know about you, but it is cold as hell here.
Keith
Not to be devil’s advocate, because I hate that we as humans take it as our right to destroy natural processes, such as migratory patterns, but let’s say the swans that can’t handle the heat fly colder routes. The ones that stay with the heat….breed. And their offspring will likely take the warmer routes.
It’s all very organic, but it’s unfortunately due to an extermal stimulus – us. Nature will survive; she always does, but the question is, what shape will it take now that we have significantly altered Nature’s parameters.
Zifnab
But according to James Inhofe:
Seriously, John. Who are you going to believe? A bunch of money grubbing Ornithologists, or the distinguished Senator from Oklahoma?
jcricket
OOOOOOOOOKlahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain (in order to sweep away the gays and the secular humanists.)
Ken yehi ratzon! Farm subsidies are God’s Will.
Baby Jane
Y’ever shake-n-bake a swan? Me neither. So what’s the kerfuffle, mate?
If the global warming sympathizers are to have any chance of convincing the masses to appease Mother Nature’s jihad, they better pick a bird you can buy in a bucket.
demimondian
Keith, go look at the population of cod in the Grand Banks. Them, come back here, and we’ll talk about the swans’ offspring. The bottom line is that it is far more likely that the ecological niche the swans occupied will be emptied than that they adapt.
Mary
Shake-n-bake? How uncivilized.
If the swans re-route to Virgina, I think Tunch can look forward to a real treat. And Tim can advise John on what beer goes with swan terrine.
Jess
Nature may survive in the long run, but in the short term, between global warming and peak oil issues, our way of life is not going to survive. Any creature that exhausts its resources and detroys its own habitat goes into a period of severe decline. Sure, its natural and all that, but hardly a joyous experience to suffer through. I hope we’re smart enough to take charge of our own adaptation process, rather than having it thrust upon us in its most brutal form, but I’m not optimistic. Things are going to get ugly.
scarshapedstar
Keith, I guess you can say that, but for every species that leaves an area an ecological niche is left unfilled. I agree with you, though, that nature adapts – the problem is, eventually the parameter that she sets to 0 is going to be us.
Unfortunately, the residents of Dumbfuckistan believe that we’re protected on high by the Sky Fairy, so the chances of us doing anything about it until it’s too late are 0 to -70.
Tim F.
A better approach might be to look at the population of jellyfiish off of southwest Africa. Without a doubt nature adjusts, she always does, but as far as humans are concerned her “adjustments” can seriously suck eggs.
Keep in mind that nature’s capacity to adapt depends strongly on the rate of change. Change that happens over evolutionarily significant time, say a few hundred to a thousand generations, is usually slow enough for adaptation. Change that happens faster than that usually causes the species which cannot go any farther north (e.g., polar bears) to be completely SOL and the next southernmost species will simply move north and replace them. CO2-driven climate change is happpening at a rate that is practically unprecedented in geological time, which means that we will have much more extinctions than we will have adaptations. Stuff will still live everywhere, but ecologists will use the term ‘degraded’ a lot. That means that a parcel of land which could once support a thousand people per square mile, for example, will be able to support only a hundred.
Getting back to southwest Africa, mass fishing killed off the normal predators and, since something has to eat the zooplankton, jellyflish populations exploded. And I mean exploded – fishing simply doesn’t work anymore since more often than not fishermen have to cut their nets rather than haul in hundreds of tons of net-clogging jellies. As far as ecologists can tell the fish simply won’t come back, and now the affected countries have to find some other source of protein.
Don’t mix up nature’s and man’s ability to persevere. Nature in the aggregate can handle practically anything. Individual species, including us, have an expiration date.
Bombadil
Preferably something in a longneck.