RE: [cayugabirds-l] New Mexico mass mortality

[Leo Thomas Sack]

In case this hasn’t been mentioned yet, BirdCast has a short but well-written 
news article on the mass mortality, with links to further reading. It was 
published a few days ago on Sept. 18: 
https://birdcast.info/news/mass-mortality-in-the-southern-rockies-smoke-climate-change-and-bird-migration/

-- 
Leo Sack
Public Programs Assistant
Visitor Center & Adelson Library
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
birds.cornell.edu/home/visit<https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/visit/>



From: bounce-124972305-83239...@list.cornell.edu 
 On Behalf Of Tom Schulenberg
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2020 3:20 PM
To: CAYUGABIRDS-L 
Subject: Re: [cayugabirds-l] New Mexico mass mortality



I just learned of the mass mortality of migrating birds in New Mexico.  I read 
a CNN report.  Is there any new information on the cause?  They’re talking 
hundreds of thousands, even millions.

here's one well-researched suggestion:

https://www.aba.org/the-data-behind-mysterious-bird-deaths-in-new-mexico/

tss

--
Thomas S. Schulenberg
Research Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
159 Sapsucker Woods Road
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Re: [cayugabirds-l] New Mexico mass mortality

[Tom Schulenberg]

I just learned of the mass mortality of migrating birds in New Mexico.  I
> read a CNN report.  Is there any new information on the cause?  They’re
> talking hundreds of thousands, even millions.
>

here's one well-researched suggestion:

https://www.aba.org/the-data-behind-mysterious-bird-deaths-in-new-mexico/

tss

-- 
Thomas S. Schulenberg
Research Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
159 Sapsucker Woods Road
Ithaca  NY  14850
http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/home
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist

voice:  [moot now: working from home during covid lockdown]
email:  ts...@cornell.edu, tschulenb...@gmail.com

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Re: [cayugabirds-l] New Mexico Mass Mortality

[John Luther Cisne]

This long discussion about global change, weather, and climate points up the 
advantages of cooperation among all of us concerned in one way or another with 
ongoing changes in weather and climate and how they relate to birds.

I sent around a request for information regarding the question of whether or 
not “Record cold of this magnitude is not consistent with global warming” to my 
colleagues in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and so far I 
have received these responses, all from acknowledged authorities on weather and 
climate.  All sent pdfs of the articles they recommend, but unfortunately not 
even one would fit through the knothole, as I’ve discovered from getting 
various versions of this message with successively pared-down versions of this 
email:
“Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:
“CAYUGABIRDS-L 
(cayugabird...@list.cornell.edu)
“Your message couldn't be delivered and there was no valid enhanced status code 
being issued by the remote mail system to determine the exact cause, status: 
'552 Requested mail action aborted; exceeded storage allocation; 976kb maximum 
message size'.”

Natalie Mahowald — 
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/PeoplePlaces/Faculty/mahowald/ — writes
“The fundamental issue is that your authority does not understand the 
difference between weather and climate.  Climate is a 30 year average.  Weather 
is one event. Global warming is a long term change in climate.
“If temperatures averaged over a 30 year period went back to preindustrial 
levels, that would be inconsistent with climate change.
“Weather is really highly variable: a chaotic system, and the weather is highly 
variable due to natural variability.  Under climate change we expect more 
record highs, and fewer record lows.  But we expect to see record lows. And 
indeed, this is what the record shows.  There are even some theories that 
suggest that there is an increase in high AND low records under climate change, 
but I do not believe those are yet proven to be robust (but happy to be 
corrected).
“This misunderstanding on the role of this natural variability is actually 
widespread in both the public and the scientific community. The role of natural 
variability and how to detect when something is anthropogenic is a big question 
right now, and one that our new hire, Flavio Lehner, cc’d here, is an authority 
on.
“A good paper (which looks on longer time scales), about the issues of 
communicating climate change is this one by Clara Deser.”  [Clara Deser, et 
al., Communication of the role of natural variability in future North American 
climate, Nature Climate Change, 26 OCTOBER 2012 | DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1562]
The Deser paper’s abstract: “As climate models improve, decision-makers’ 
expectations for accurate climate predictions are growing. Natural climate 
variability, however, poses inherent limits to climate predictability and the 
related goal of adaptation guidance in many places, as illustrated here for 
North America. Other locations with low natural variability show a more 
predictable future in which anthro­pogenic forcing can be more readily 
identified, even on small scales. We call for a more focused dialogue between 
scientists, poli­cymakers and the public to improve communication and avoid 
raising expectations for accurate regional predictions everywhere.”

Toby Ault — https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/faculty-directory/toby-r-ault — 
sends along a pdf of another pertinent paper that’s too big to fit: Gerald A. 
Meehl et al., US daily temperature records past, present, and future, PNAS 
[Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] | December 6, 2016 | vol. 113 
| no. 49 | 13977–13982.  He writes,“I believe this paper addresses the issue of 
record temperatures. Specifically, the ratio of [record warm] to [record cold] 
days should be constant in a stationary climate (spoiler alert: it isn’t).”
The paper’s abstract, with the gory details:
“Observed temperature extremes over the continental United States can be 
represented by the ratio of daily record high temperatures to daily record low 
minimum temperatures, and this ratio has increased to a value of about 2 to 1, 
averaged over the first decade of the 21st century, albeit with large 
interannual variability. Two different versions of a global coupled climate 
model (CCSM4), as well as 23 other coupled model intercomparison project phase 
5 (CMIP5) models, show larger values of this ratio than observations, mainly as 
a result of greater numbers of record highs since the 1980s compared with 
observations. This is partly because of the “warm 1930s” in the observations, 
which made it more difficult to set record highs later in the century, and 
partly because of a trend toward less rainfall and reduced evapotranspiration 
in the model versions compared with observations. We compute future projections 
of this ratio on the basis of its estimated dependence on mean