Climate Change vs. Waterfowl Migration

Interesting read, though, as you said Carl, this is something that most of the hunters already knew. At least future policy/season makers will have something more scientific (in their minds anyway) than hunter's imperical perspective when adjusting seasons. Makes me glad I'm a diver hunter and don't have to worry about the peculiarities of the mallard migration.
 
Thanks, Carl. I,too, enjoyed the read like Pete did. I am glad that I have hunted ducks since 1954. That makes me lucky. I guess if I had a second life, I would only wish that my parents lived in Canada. Maybe I could follow the ducks and geese from the Arctic tundra to southern Alberta or Saskatchewan. At the turn of the century, maybe that will be how far south they get before heading north again.
Al
 
Climate Change is the last thing Waterfowl have to fret about... Having places to Live, Eat and Breed, will wreak havoc long before "Global Warming". Glad I got to see it, enjoy it, and had the opportunity to hunt The Duck Factory prior to the oil and ethanol boom.
 
I remember back in the mid 90's when the climate models predicted the ice that would still be floating in lake superior into june of 2014......

oh wait, nevermind. I think that was the 70's
 
Thanks for posting it Carl. I already do some hunting in Canada and heck I practically live there so I guess I wont be affected as soon as you. Sorry about that, if you like your lakes frozen longer then they are not then come on up we have a little room left.
 
If there is one wild card in a warming climate for ducks its the fact that more of the arctic may become viable breeding grounds as the summers become warmer. But it could also mean that the permafrost melts and all the potholes on the tundra drain.
 
I have never bought in to the climate change thing and have always believed it is a political movement and definitely not by any means established fact. The climate changes over millennia for various reasons and always has and there has been actually very little in the last 100 years, and the earth has been warming for a couple hundred. And Vikings established colonies in Nothern climes that eventually got colder and forced them out. That being said, there is no way of knowing that the way ducks migrate today is different than the way they migrated 200 or 300 or 400 years ago, other than that there were a lot more of them then. I really have never noticed a change in duck migrations here on the East Coast in the 35 years I have hunted here in significant way. Most of the ducks that I hunt come through on a calendar basis as much as anything else. Yes, ice pushes some later and bigger ducks down and concentrates them on open water, but not to the degree that it makes that much of a difference overall in the total season. Thinking the arctic is going to melt and things like that comes from hearing this stuff pounded in our heads. And I do not mean to be insulting or dismissive in any way to anyone here who may not share my thoughts. Agricultural and land use practices probably have a much greater impact on changing waterfowl migration habits than anything else, and I think that it is pretty well agreed that those factors have had huge impacts over the time that North America has been settled. There can be big shifts in crops annually and over 5 and 10 year periods, depending on economic and other factors. Waterways change also as does the food in them and can change for diving species too. Canada geese have become established in many areas where they were once only migrants as well and have really changed goose hunting. And the periods that we see changes over are rather small compared to trends over centuries. So maybe your ducks don't come down like they did 10 years ago, I really don't know. But climate change, in my obviously not so humble opinion, likely has little or nothing to do with it.
 
I have never bought in to the climate change thing and have always believed it is a political movement and definitely not by any means established fact. The climate changes over millennia for various reasons and always has and there has been actually very little in the last 100 years, and the earth has been warming for a couple hundred. And Vikings established colonies in Nothern climes that eventually got colder and forced them out. That being said, there is no way of knowing that the way ducks migrate today is different than the way they migrated 200 or 300 or 400 years ago, other than that there were a lot more of them then. I really have never noticed a change in duck migrations here on the East Coast in the 35 years I have hunted here in significant way. Most of the ducks that I hunt come through on a calendar basis as much as anything else. Yes, ice pushes some later and bigger ducks down and concentrates them on open water, but not to the degree that it makes that much of a difference overall in the total season. Thinking the arctic is going to melt and things like that comes from hearing this stuff pounded in our heads. And I do not mean to be insulting or dismissive in any way to anyone here who may not share my thoughts. Agricultural and land use practices probably have a much greater impact on changing waterfowl migration habits than anything else, and I think that it is pretty well agreed that those factors have had huge impacts over the time that North America has been settled. There can be big shifts in crops annually and over 5 and 10 year periods, depending on economic and other factors. Waterways change also as does the food in them and can change for diving species too. Canada geese have become established in many areas where they were once only migrants as well and have really changed goose hunting. And the periods that we see changes over are rather small compared to trends over centuries. So maybe your ducks don't come down like they did 10 years ago, I really don't know. But climate change, in my obviously not so humble opinion, likely has little or nothing to do with it.
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Greg, is it that you know better than the 99% of scientists that study climate or is it that you just don't care about the scientific consensus that human caused climate change is real and measurable?

T
 
Even if we accept your 99% assertion and stipulate that they are in no way influenced by the huge amount of government grants available to the global warming believers, how do I reconcile that with the reports that the earth has in fact not warmed in the last 18 years?

Add to that the total failure in hurricane prediction.

If your predictions don't match observations shouldn't that at least raise a little doubt?
 
Dont believe the BS................
1) There hasn't been any global warming since 1997: If nothing changes in the next year, we're going to have kids who graduate from high school who will have never seen any "global warming" during their lifetimes. That's right; the temperature of the planet has essentially been flat for 17 years. This isn't a controversial assertion either. Even the former Director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, Phil Jones, admits that it's true. Since the planet was cooling from 1940-1975 and the upswing in temperature afterward only lasted 23 years, a 17 year pause is a big deal. It also begs an obvious question: How can we be experiencing global warming if there's no actual "global warming?"

2) There is no scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and caused by man: Questions are not decided by "consensus." In fact, many scientific theories that were once widely believed to be true were made irrelevant by new evidence. Just to name one of many, many examples, in the early seventies, scientists believed global cooling was occurring. However, once the planet started to warm up, they changed their minds. Yet, the primary "scientific" argument for global warming is that there is a "scientific consensus" that it's occurring. Setting aside the fact that's not a scientific argument, even if that ever was true (and it really wasn't), it's certainly not true anymore. Over 31,000 scientists have signed on to a petition saying humans aren't causing global warming. More than 1000 scientists signed on to another report saying there is no global warming at all. There are tens of thousands of well-educated, mainstream scientists who do not agree that global warming is occurring at all and people who share their opinion are taking a position grounded in science.

3) Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012: The loss of Arctic ice has been a big talking point for people who believe global warming is occurring. Some people have even predicted that all of the Arctic ice would melt by now because of global warming. Yet, Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012. How much Arctic ice really matters is an open question since the very limited evidence we have suggests that a few decades ago, there was less ice than there is today, but the same people who thought the drop in ice was noteworthy should at least agree that the increase is important as well.

4) Climate models showing global warming have been wrong over and over: These future projections of what global warming will do to the planet have been based on climate models. Essentially, scientists make assumptions about how much of an impact different factors will have; they guess how much of a change there will be and then they project changes over time. Unfortunately, almost all of these models showing huge temperature gains have turned out to be wrong.

Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer says that climate models used by government agencies to create policies “have failed miserably.” Spencer analyzed 90 climate models against surface temperature and satellite temperature data, and found that more than 95 percent of the models “have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH).”
There's an old saying in programming that goes, "Garbage in, garbage out." In other words, if the assumptions and data you put into the models are faulty, then the results will be worthless. If the climate models that show a dire impact because of global warming aren't reliable -- and they're not -- then the long term projections they make are meaningless.

5) Predictions about the impact of global warming have already been proven wrong: The debate over global warming has been going on long enough that we've had time to see whether some of the predictions people made about it have panned out in the real world. For example, Al Gore predicted all the Arctic ice would be gone by 2013. In 2005, the Independent ran an article saying that the Artic had entered a death spiral.

Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years....The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a “tipping point” beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.
Meanwhile, Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012. James Hansen of NASA fame predicted that the West Side Highway in New York would be under water by now because of global warming.

If the climate models and the predictions about global warming aren't even close to being correct, wouldn't it be more scientific to reject hasty action based on faulty data so that we can further study the issue and find out what's really going on?
 
Even if we accept your 99% assertion and stipulate that they are in no way influenced by the huge amount of government grants available to the global warming believers, how do I reconcile that with the reports that the earth has in fact not warmed in the last 18 years?

Add to that the total failure in hurricane prediction.

If your predictions don't match observations shouldn't that at least raise a little doubt?
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Mike,

You don't have to accept the 99% of climate scientists figure, here is some data on the number of papers published presenting evidence for vs. against man made climate change. See the figure below for the summary of the exhaustive analysis done by James L Powell. This is not a peer-reviewed analysis, but he lists his methods and bibliography used, so anyone can check his work. Powell's work is supported by the peer-reviewed paper by Oreskes in 2005 and published in Science that found the same thing, but covers a smaller time window (1993-2003). The Journal Science is the top science general science journal in the world covering the entire range of scientific topics and papers submitted are extremely rigorously reviewed. Oreskes found no evidence in the years she looked at in support of the idea that climate change is not occurring (here is a quote from her paper: “analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change” (9). “ “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”). There is lots of debate about the specifics of what will happen, but not that it is happening and is human caused.

stacks_image_733.png


As far as the 17 or 18 year period without temperature change, I do not know where that data comes from. I’ve spent hours in the past looking in the primary literature for support for that statement and spent hours looking on the web. I found the statement that the earth’s temperature has been static repeated dozens of times, but the statement had never been referenced to a specific scientist, or more importantly, to a published paper in the literature.
Take a look at the earth temperature data provided by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/) and answer for yourself if you think that it is true that earth surface temperature as not changed in 18 years (or 100 years for that matter). The scientific consensus is that the temperature changes we are seeing are human caused, they are occurring faster than normal and they are occurring on top of the background changes that are natural. There are more figures to look at on the page I linked, but the one below is a good summary of earth surface air temperature since 1880.


Global annual mean air surface temperature


Fig.A2.gif



T
 
Dont believe the BS................
1) There hasn't been any global warming since 1997: If nothing changes in the next year, we're going to have kids who graduate from high school who will have never seen any "global warming" during their lifetimes. That's right; the temperature of the planet has essentially been flat for 17 years. This isn't a controversial assertion either. Even the former Director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, Phil Jones, admits that it's true. Since the planet was cooling from 1940-1975 and the upswing in temperature afterward only lasted 23 years, a 17 year pause is a big deal. It also begs an obvious question: How can we be experiencing global warming if there's no actual "global warming?"

2) There is no scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and caused by man: Questions are not decided by "consensus." In fact, many scientific theories that were once widely believed to be true were made irrelevant by new evidence. Just to name one of many, many examples, in the early seventies, scientists believed global cooling was occurring. However, once the planet started to warm up, they changed their minds. Yet, the primary "scientific" argument for global warming is that there is a "scientific consensus" that it's occurring. Setting aside the fact that's not a scientific argument, even if that ever was true (and it really wasn't), it's certainly not true anymore. Over 31,000 scientists have signed on to a petition saying humans aren't causing global warming. More than 1000 scientists signed on to another report saying there is no global warming at all. There are tens of thousands of well-educated, mainstream scientists who do not agree that global warming is occurring at all and people who share their opinion are taking a position grounded in science.

3) Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012: The loss of Arctic ice has been a big talking point for people who believe global warming is occurring. Some people have even predicted that all of the Arctic ice would melt by now because of global warming. Yet, Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012. How much Arctic ice really matters is an open question since the very limited evidence we have suggests that a few decades ago, there was less ice than there is today, but the same people who thought the drop in ice was noteworthy should at least agree that the increase is important as well.

4) Climate models showing global warming have been wrong over and over: These future projections of what global warming will do to the planet have been based on climate models. Essentially, scientists make assumptions about how much of an impact different factors will have; they guess how much of a change there will be and then they project changes over time. Unfortunately, almost all of these models showing huge temperature gains have turned out to be wrong.

Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer says that climate models used by government agencies to create policies “have failed miserably.” Spencer analyzed 90 climate models against surface temperature and satellite temperature data, and found that more than 95 percent of the models “have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH).”
There's an old saying in programming that goes, "Garbage in, garbage out." In other words, if the assumptions and data you put into the models are faulty, then the results will be worthless. If the climate models that show a dire impact because of global warming aren't reliable -- and they're not -- then the long term projections they make are meaningless.

5) Predictions about the impact of global warming have already been proven wrong: The debate over global warming has been going on long enough that we've had time to see whether some of the predictions people made about it have panned out in the real world. For example, Al Gore predicted all the Arctic ice would be gone by 2013. In 2005, the Independent ran an article saying that the Artic had entered a death spiral.

Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years....The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a “tipping point” beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.
Meanwhile, Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012. James Hansen of NASA fame predicted that the West Side Highway in New York would be under water by now because of global warming.

If the climate models and the predictions about global warming aren't even close to being correct, wouldn't it be more scientific to reject hasty action based on faulty data so that we can further study the issue and find out what's really going on?
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Bob, I expect more than a "cut 'n paste" job presented as you own thoughts. Here is a link to where you likely cut the text from: http://conservativecontacts.com/articles/5-scientific-reasons-that-global-warming-isn-t-happening

Sorry, but don't pretend to present a thoughtful rebuttal and just snip some text and paste it. I presented data that addresses #1 in your statement. As far as #2, that is flat out wrong and full of untruths and does not at all represent the thinking of the scientific community. #3 is simply misleading. Antarctic Sea ice extent expanded the past couple years, but look at Arctic and that is just extent, not thickness. Thickness is down so while there was a small increase in Antarctic ice extent the thickness is down, so there is less ice. And so on....

1262-64578-sea_ice.png

 
Nice discussion Bob, thanks for taking the time to write up your thoughts.
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Actually he just cut and pasted the text, see my comments above. What he posted was full of rubbish and uncited.
 
Sorry guys but arguing over global warming with some is worse than arguing over the right to have an abortion. Both not worth my time because Im never gonna get you to see the facts.

IMO the climate is changing as part of a natural cycle.
BTW I'm 100% for abortion too.

Best
Bob
 
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[font=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Greg, is it that you know better than the 99% of scientists that study climate or is it that you just don't care about the scientific consensus that human caused climate change is real and measurable?

[/font][font=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Todd, that is silly. 99% of any group of people pretty much never agree on anything. Your ridiculing of those that disagree with you is a sign of the times and is the new tactic for those that would not buy in to this or other "progressive" theories on a vast array of topics. You should be more accepting of things that you may disagree about and be willing to question those things that you hear and may agree with. Critical thinking is the source of greater knowledge, not complacency and acceptance. The educational system today reflects that too, and it is really sad.

It might be more interesting to stick with the original topic, a change in migration patterns, rather than descend into disparaging fo what others may say or think.
[/font]
 
[font=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Greg, is it that you know better than the 99% of scientists that study climate or is it that you just don't care about the scientific consensus that human caused climate change is real and measurable?

[/font][font=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Todd, that is silly. 99% of any group of people pretty much never agree on anything. Your ridiculing of those that disagree with you is a sign of the times and is the new tactic for those that would not buy in to this or other "progressive" theories on a vast array of topics. You should be more accepting of things that you may disagree about and be willing to question those things that you hear and may agree with. Critical thinking is the source of greater knowledge, not complacency and acceptance. The educational system today reflects that too, and it is really sad.

It might be more interesting to stick with the original topic, a change in migration patterns, rather than descend into disparaging fo what others may say or think.
[/font]
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Greg, the stats I cited indicate over 99%, so far from silly, very far. You may not have "bought in to the climate change thing", but the vast majority of the scientists that study climate have. You have a right to your opinion, be it baseless or uninformed.

As far as the original topic, yes climate change, not much drift in my posts here - climate change is what I posted on.
 
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