Climate change already is affecting the range and behavior of many North American bir

BY THE LATE 21ST CENTURY, says scientist Jeff Price, the distribution of North American birds will almost certainly look nothing like the species’ range maps found in today’s popular field guides. Some startling possibilities: State birds such as the Baltimore oriole (Maryland) and black-capped chickadee (Massachusetts) will have vanished from their official residences; there will be painted buntings in southern Minnesota but no bobolinks; the golden-cheeked warbler of Texas Hill Country will be extinct, along with other endangered songbirds whose habitat is sharply limited; and Neotropical migrants like the Cape May warbler will have moved farther north, leaving the southern boreal forest more vulnerable to devastating outbreaks of spruce budworms, which the birds now feast on during the breeding season.

Price, director of climate change impact studies for the American Bird Conservancy, is coauthor with NWF researcher Patricia Glick of a recent report, The Birdwatcher’s Guide to Global Warming. The report’s projections of avifaunal chaos are based on his computer models, which assume a doubling of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) over levels found in preindustrial times, as well as substantial increases in other heat-trapping greenhouse gases. According to the world’s leading climatologists, such changes may happen sometime over the next 50 to 100 years. And although the past decade was the warmest on record so far, scientists also project average global temperatures will rise another 2.5 to 10.4 degrees F by the year 2100. “That’s ten times faster than the sustained rate of temperature change since the last ice age,”says Price...

For more visit: http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?articleid=706&issueid=58

 

Re: Climate change already is affecting the range and behavior of many North American

Im gonna buy me some West Virginia land; planning for it to be Ocean Front Property for my retirement home!