August 31, 2010

A unique ‘natural laboratory’ in the Mediterranean Sea is revealing the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels on life in the oceans. The results show a bleak future for marine life as ocean acidity rises, and suggest that similar lowering of ocean pH levels may have been responsible for massive extinctions in the past.

That’s the opening (and headline) of a news release from the Geological Society of London.  The new study is “Modern seawater acidification: the response of foraminifera to high-CO2 conditions in the Mediterranean Sea” (subs. reqd.) in the latest Journal of the Geological Society.

For background on ocean acidification, see Nature Geoscience: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.

The study identified a tipping point at “mean pH 7.8?:

The scientists, from the University of Plymouth and the University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, studied a single celled organisms called Foraminifera around volcanic carbon dioxide vents off Naples in Italy. The study, published in the September issue of the Journal of the Geological Society, found that increasing CO2 levels caused foram diversity to fall from 24 species to only 4.

‘Previous studies have shown a reduction in diversity of 30%, but this is even bigger for forams’, said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, one of the study’s co-authors. ‘A tipping point occurs at mean pH 7.8. This is the pH level predicted for the end of this century’.

The figure below [not from the study] shows the pH trend vs. the CO2 trend around “Station ALOHA, the HOT deep-water station (22 45?N, 158W) located about 100 km north of Oahu, Hawaii:

Uhh, pH 7.8 — here we come.

I would note that this study, based as it on a natural laboratory, doesn’t even include the behind impact of rising ocean temperatures with rising acidification.  For an analysis of what that could mean, see 2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.”

Back to the news release:

Rising carbon dioxide levels acidify the ocean, which has a particularly devastating effect on organisms that have calcium carbonate shells, like Foraminifera.

‘Forams are well preserved in the fossil record, which is why we chose to study them’, says Dr Hall-Spencer. ‘We knew the results were likely to show a decline in foram diversity but we weren’t expecting such a seismic shift’.

Forams record past events in the geological record – in particular, the effect of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period of massive carbon release and rapid warming, 55 million years ago, accompanied by extinctions in marine life. It is also thought to have seen a period of ocean acidification.

‘That was a period when massive changes in marine ecology happened’ says Dr Hall-Spencer. ‘Our natural laboratory provides a glimpse into the future of our oceans’.

‘These are the first CO2 vents to be used to study ocean acidification. They allow us to observe how ecosystems react to changes in ocean acidity. We can see for our own eyes what increasing CO2 levels do to marine communities’.

‘At a mean pH level of 7.8, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non calcifying ones take over. We are headed towards that being the case in this century. The big concern for me is that unless we curb carbon emissions we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae.’

It is self-destructive for the nation and world not to begin rapid and sharp CO2 reductions.

via Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century” « Climate Progress.

Many of Asia’s glaciers are retreating as a result of climate change.

This retreat impacts water supplies to millions of people, increases the likelihood of outburst floods that threaten life and property in nearby areas, and contributes to sea-level rise.

Talk about your well-timed studies — see “One-fifth of Pakistan is under water.”

The U.S. Geological Survey collaborated with 39 international scientists — “the most knowledgeable glaciologists for each geographic region covered” — on “The Glaciers of Asia,” which reports on “the status of glaciers throughout all of Asia, including Russia, China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.”

Here’s more of their release:

“Of particular interest are the Himalaya, where glacier behavior impacts the quality of life of tens of millions of people,” said USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno. “Glaciers in the Himalaya are a major source of fresh water and supply meltwater to all of the rivers in northern India.”

As glaciers become smaller, water runoff decreases, which is especially important during the dry season when other water sources are limited. Climate change also brings warmer temperatures and earlier water runoff from glaciers, and this combined with spring and summer rains can result in flood conditions. The overall glacier retreat and additional melt can increase the amount of water dammed in the vicinity of a glacier, and the added pressure enhances the likelihood of disastrous outburst flooding.

Significantly, an August 8 news article, “Officials point to Russian drought and Asian deluge as consistent with climate change,” reports:

Pakistani glaciologist, Prof M. Iqbal Khan, told the Associated Press of Pakistan that the flooding was linked to melting glaciers in upper Pakistan.

“I have warned everyone about the floods in Peshawar, Charsadda and Nowshera due to the global warming in my previous interviews but nobody took notice and the result is before us,” he said, adding that “it is the glaciers which are adding fuel to the fire and due to the melting of glaciers the flood situation is aggravated.”

Experts say a warming world increases the likelihood and severity of flooding in some regions since warmer temperatures causes increases the volume of water vapor in the air leading to heavier precipitation events.

More water vapor also feeds severe storms, boosting their strength and severity. Asia has not been alone in experiencing unusually severe flooding. A number of record floods also hit the United States over the last six months.

And so we have a double climate whammy — glacial melt plus more atmospheric water vapor (and possibly a triple climate whammy, if changing air circulation patterns also contributed, as somemeteorologists believe).

The USGS release continues:

While most glaciers in Asia are in recession, some glaciers have been found to advance. Some of the advancing glaciers are surge-type glaciers, which move forward more rapidly than average in a short period of time. The reason for this is being studied by glaciologists, and is likely due to unique and local condition

Glacier studies in each area started at different times depending on accessibility of glaciers and scientific interest. For example, the earliest description of glaciers in China was in 630 A.D., while studies in the Caucasus area of Russia began in the mid 1800s and modern studies in Nepal started in the 1950s.

The time period for retreat also differs among each glacier. In Bhutan, 66 glaciers have decreased 8.1 percent over the last 30 years.  Rapid changes in the Himalaya is shown in India by the 12 percent retreat of Chhota Shigri Glacier during the last 13 years, as well as retreat of the Gangotri Glacier since 1780, with 12 percent shrinkage of the main stem in the last 16 years.

Glaciers in Russia and in the four republics once part of the Former Soviet Union have the largest area of glaciers in Asia, covering 30,478 square miles, which is about the size of South Carolina. The glaciers of China have the second largest area of glaciers in Asia, covering 22,944 square miles, which is about twice the size of Massachusetts. In Afghanistan, the more than 3,000 small mountain glaciers that occur in the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountains provide vital water resources to the region.

“This report was a collaboration between U.S. and foreign authors, the most knowledgeable glaciologists for each geographic region covered,” said USGS scientist Richard S. Williams, Jr. “The USGS published historical and modern data authored by local experts. Some analyses of past climate conditions were conducted by studying ice cores from high-mountain areas of Asia.”

The bottom line is that ice is melting pretty much everywhere you look these days, with dangerous implications for human health and well-being:

• Satellite data stunner: “Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass…. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise.”
• Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized.”
• Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
• De-Icer: USGS report details “recent dramatic shrinkage” in U.S. glaciers, matching global decline
• USGS reports dramatic retreat of ice shelves in southern Antarctic Peninsula
• North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely”
• Another one bites the dust, literally: Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier is gone
• Another climate impact coming faster than predicted: Glacier National Park to go glacier-free a decade early
• World’s Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year

July 29, 2010

Scientists may have found the most devastating impact yet of human-caused global warming — a 40% decline in phytoplankton since 1950 linked to the rise in ocean sea surface temperatures.  If confirmed, it may represent the single most important finding of the year in climate science.The headlines above are from an appropriately blunt article in The Independent about the new study in Nature, “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century” subs. req’d.  Even the Wall Street Journal warned, “Vital Marine Plants in Steep Decline.”  Seth Borenstein of the AP explains, “plant plankton found in the world’s oceans  are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world’s oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.”We’ve known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences — see “2010 Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.”  And we’ve known those impacts might last a long, long time — see  2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.”But until now, conventional wisdom has been that big ocean impacts might not be seen until the second half of the century.  This new research in Nature suggests we may have much less time to act than we thought if we want to save marine life — and ourselves.  The study concludes:In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs phytoplankton account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth. Analyses of satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration available since 1979 have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends. Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.

via Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton” « Climate Progress.

via New Species of Frogs Disappearing as Fast as They’re Found | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Can weather change the demographics of an island over the course of a single lifetime? If we take Pablo Preciado’s word for it, it can. Pablo Preciado is the leader of the island of Carti Sugdub, one of the Panamanian islands. Global warming and erosion of the coral reefs are threatening to submerge a lot of Caribbean islands that make up Panama.Pablo Preciado says that in his childhood floods were rare and the water levels barely wetted his toes. Now, it’s a different picture altogether. Rising water levels are forcing Panamanians to leave their coastal homes and move inland.The coral reefs used to be a natural buffer against the buffeting waves, but rampant mining has shaved off the protective barrier. Pablo Preciado is leading a group of his villagers in an imminent move further inland. They are preparing their new settlements by clearing tropical forests. Nearly 2000 people may make the move. The government says that rising sea levels threatens the livelihood of 32,000 of the Carti Sugdub denizens.The retreat of the Panama Islanders could be among the first that’s caused by global warming and rising sea levels. Such a drastic shift in livelihood patterns and migration to the hinterland could become across the world. Already signs are ominous from communities as far apart as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Fiji. The exodus could represent the uprooting of millions and have far-reaching effects.Hector Guzman, a marine biologist and coral specialist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama told Reuters –“This is no longer about a scientist saying that climate change and the change in sea level will flood a people and affect them.”According to Guzman who has been studying the Kuna people of the Carti Sugdub islands, coal mining to build artificial breakwaters and islets has also accelerated their problems. Te people are fiercely protective of their customs and have a belief that God will protect them.The Kuna could rank among the first examples of ‘climate refugees’. It’s a term that will get more common as sea levels continue to rise. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that seas could rise 2 meters 6.5 feet by the end of the century, putting in danger millions of people in cities from Tokyo and Shanghai to New Orleans.

via Rising Sea Makes Panama Islanders Relocate to the Mainland.

We hear a lot of talk about carbon dioxide as the most dangerous climate culprit. And we should. So far, loading the atmosphere with CO2 is the single biggest cause of climate disruption. But, in the final analysis, methane may prove to be the most deadly of all greenhouse gases.

via t r u t h o u t | BP’s Methane Monster: From the Gulf to the Globe.

Last month tied May 1998 as the hottest on record in the NASA dataset.  More significantly, following fast on the heels of easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-May on record [click on figure to enlarge].Also, the combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature anomaly for March-April-May was 0.73°C above the 1951-1980 mean, blowing out the old record of 0.65°C set in 2002.The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”  It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.Most significantly, the 12-month global temperature grew to 0.66°C — easily the highest on record.Software engineer and former machinist mate in the US Navy Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies click here.  In NASA’s dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March — and then easily set in April.Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”In fact, the new 12-month record far outpaced the pre-2010 record of 0.62°C that was set in … 2007NASA’s recent draft paper reported:  “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”For the record, it was the second hottest April in both satellite records UAH and RSS, which are more sensitive to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ENSO than the land records and have biases of their own as Hansen discusses here.

Continue reading via NASA: Easily the hottest spring — and Jan-May — in temperature record « Climate Progress.

See the rest of the pictures here Caught in the oil – The Big Picture – Boston.com.

Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

I was struck by a comment that followed my latest piece on cutting disaster risks, reacting to this line: “Only direct experience seems to trigger change.”

Yeah. It seems Homo S “Sapiens” at large needs to first get hit by the wall before changing path. There will be always someone debating (denying) the science (evidence) of walls and bricks. We can’t falsify the theory about that wall ahead, so it’s no science, blah, blah, blah, … bang. — Florifulgurator (Dadaist, Germany)

David P. Ropeik

This characterization of the human habit of dawdling in the face of looming risks reminded me of earlier contributions here on global warming by David Ropeik, a former journalist and longtime student of risk communication. [UPDATE, 8/4: Some people have concerns about his affiliations with industry.] His book (with George Gray), “Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), is a clear-eyed guide to why we often get in harm’s way and also fear the wrong things. (Here’s a 2002 Times interview with Mr. Ropeik on the “fear factor.”)

I think it’s worth considering his comments as a group here, and opening a conversation about whether we have the capacity to shift from our sprint of the past couple of centuries to a more reasoned marathon pace good for the long haul. Should there be an Intergovernmental Panel on Human Nature?

Here’s one of David’s posts, deconstructing why the psychology of climate makes it such a hard fit for the political arena:

Talking, rather than acting, remains a political option because the electorates on which the pols rely for their jobs are not sufficiently threatened by climate change, personally, to make it an issue on which politicians have to act. The psychological literature on the perception of risk has shown that we fear, and demand protection from, risks that can happen to us, not to polar bears or ice caps.

We say in surveys that we are concerned about climate change, the way we have always said in surveys that we are concerned about the environment. But the environment has never been much of a voting issue, nor will climate change become one, until we as individuals truly feel that something bad might happen to us. Which makes McCain sound perceptive, because long term issues like climate change do not portend tangible imminent threat. And without a sense of being personally threatened, we don’t act much more than those yakking Senators do.

Until a majority of us feel personally threatened by specific and significant negative impacts of climate change, we’re just not going to be concerned enough to act. It’s frustrating, since the discipline of risk communication is available to the climate change communicators, but they don’t appear to be paying attention to what it has to offer.

More on this at onrisk.blogspot.com.

The science of human behavior, particularly the psychology of risk perception, robustly shows that we use two systems to make judgments about risk; reason and affect, facts and feelings. It is simply naïve to disregard this inescapable truth and presume that reason and intellect alone will carry the day. That’s just not how the human animal behaves. Even as potentially catastrophic as climate change might be, if people don’t sense climate change as a direct personal threat, reason alone won’t convince them that the costs of action are worth it.

There are still too few scientists and policy leaders describing the potential impacts of climate change on a local level. This is an admittedly dicey business because it’s hard to know specifically what changing the climate of the planet is going to do to Denver or Delhi or Dusseldorf. But there is plenty of scientific evidence of the harm climate change might do at the local level. These potential local risks need to be emphasized, in the concrete terms that will give people more of an idea of what climate change might do to them.

My concern about the last paragraph above is related to the high level of uncertainty in regional climate predictions. Note how the word “might” has to be used to stay true to the science, which would immediately deflate the concreteness that David says is necessary to trigger action. Does this mean it’s an impossible task?

via Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’? – Dot Earth Blog – NYTimes.com.

John Abraham, an engineering professor at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, MN., is certainly not someone who has a vested interest in climatology funding, but someone who knows how to search scientific papers and how to contact their authors. He thought that many of Monckton’s claims were rather outlandish so he took the time to deconstruct Monckton’s presentation slide by slide and verify the sources cited in them. This turned out to be a rather enlightening exercise that utterly discredits Monckton. He created an 84 minute long presentation of his findings showing Monckton’s slides and then the actual papers cited and/or communications he had with the paper’s authors. You can see this presentation here.

First of all, a large number of Monckton’s slides show graphs and data sets without attribution to the source, a dubious practice at best. Second, he makes many errors of math and consistency, often contradicting himself. But more importantly, in the many cases where he does cite the papers or authors he uses as the source of data to backup his claims, he is either misrepresenting, distorting, or outright lying about the papers and their conclusions and the paper’s authors have confirmed these misrepresentations.

It is really a stunning and undeniable point-by-point evisceration of Monckton’s presentation and it shows the whole thing is just a load of bull.

If a hurricane encounters the oil slick now covering parts of the Gulf of Mexico, the result could be devastating, scientists say. Not only could any hurricane increase the damage that oil does to coastal wetlands, but the presence of oil could lead to a more powerful hurricane, they say.

Nobody knows for sure, though, because there's no record of a hurricane ever crossing paths with a large oil spill.

Trouble Brewing

The Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1, and forecasters expect it to be busier than usual. Meanwhile, oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico from the site where the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20 and sank two days later in 5,000 feet of water.

Since then, oil has been accumulating at the surface. And that could be raising the temperature of the surrounding water, says Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“You have this black surface, and it's doing two things,” Emanuel says. “First of all it's absorbing sunlight. And secondly, it is curtailing evaporation from the Gulf.”

Evaporation normally helps cool the Gulf waters, Emanuel says.

“So theoretically, the Gulf underneath this oil slick should be getting hotter than it normally would be.” And hotter water helps create more powerful hurricanes.

It's hard to know if the water is actually getting hotter, though, because oil prevents satellites from taking accurate temperature readings.

Impact On The Environment

Environmental scientists are already predicting that oil from the spill will damage the vegetation in coastal marshes. And the damage could be worse if a hurricane pushed oil deep into a wetland, or into currents that would carry it down Florida's west coast.

EnlargeJohn Moore/Getty Images

Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace USA, inspects oil-covered reeds along the Gulf of Mexico while visiting the disaster site on May 20.

“That's a big concern,” Emanuel says. “Hurricanes would be pretty effective at dispersing [the oil] and pushing it around.”

Other scientists say the amount of damage may depend on timing.

A hurricane might even be beneficial if it arrives before oil has a chance to damage coastal marshes, says Irving Mendelssohn, who studies coastal plant ecology at Louisiana State University.

“It's very possible that the hurricane will tend to both dissipate and break up the oil faster,” he says. That could dilute the toxic substances and result in minimal damage to plants, he says.

But Mendelssohn says there could be more damage if the hurricane arrived after oil had reached the coast.

“Then the hurricane results in greater erosion of the wetland,” he says, “because the wetland has already lost its vegetation and is already in a degraded state.”

Marsh plants are hardy, and usually recover from a single encounter with oil, especially the less toxic type involved in this spill, Mendelssohn says. His great fear is that some combination of hurricanes, ocean currents and the ongoing spill will cover the same marsh plants with oil repeatedly.

“That type of re-oiling will completely kill the plant,” he says, destroying the wetland, and leaving the coast without a key defense against hurricanes.

via Hurricane, Oil Spill Could Be Troubling Mix : NPR.

How child mortality has changed since 1990

May 25th 2010 | From The Economist online

SOME 7.7m children under the age of five will die in 2010, down from 11.9m in 1990, according to a new study published online by the Lancet from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. This is 800,000 fewer deaths than was estimated by UNICEF in 2009, a difference the authors attribute to a larger data collection and better statistical analysis. Most sub-Saharan African countries have made slow progress, but there is evidence of accelerating declines from 2000 to 2010 compared with 1990 to 2000. The Maldives, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates and Portugal have made the biggest steps in reducing child mortality, with the rate of decline in each averaging over 7% a year. At 2.98 deaths for every 1,000 infants, the UAE now has the sixth-lowest mortality rate in the world. Britain and America are among the worst performing rich nations, ranking 22nd and 44th out of 187 countries.

via Child mortality: Saving the children | The Economist.

Greenland rising faster as ice loss acceleratesWe have several independent lines of evidence that Greenland is losing ice at an accelerating rate. Satellite altimetry find glaciers are sliding faster downhill and dumping more ice into the ocean. Altimetry data also find the ice sheet is thinning. An overall picture is obtained by satellites measuring the gravity around the ice sheet. Another line of evidence has now been added to this picture with GPS measurements finding that Greenland is losing ice so quickly, the land is now rising up at an accelerating rate.These results are published in Accelerating uplift in the North Atlantic region as an indicator of ice loss Jiang 2010. The study looks at high-precision global positioning system GPS data that measure the vertical motion of the rocky margins around Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard. The weight of ice sheets push down on the bedrock it rests on. As the ice sheets lose mass, the bedrock rises. This process, known as Glacial Isostatic Adjustment GIA, has been happening since the planet came out of an ice age around 17,000 years ago. How do we know whether current uplift might be a delayed response to glacial retreats from thousands of years ago? To avoid the effect of past events, this study focuses on vertical acceleration rather than velocities. The results are therefore insensitive to GIA-related motions from past ice mass changes.What they find is crustal uplift in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard is accelerating. Extrapolating the acceleration backwards in time finds the acceleration began after 1990. The acceleration of uplift over the past decade represents an essentially instantaneous, elastic response to recent accelerated melting of ice throughout the North Atlantic region.

via Greenland rising faster as ice loss accelerates.

While the anti-science crowd scours the globe desperately looking for any indication of their imaginary cooling, reality has intruded again.Because they and the media — and even some scientists who don’t follow the subject closely — tend to take a two-dimensional view of the Arctic, they along with much of the public have been fooled into thinking the Arctic “recovered” in the past two years because sea ice extent appeared to recover.  Heck, some even claimed last month the Arctic ice was “recovering” to the 1979-2000 average.Climate Progress readers have long understood that trends in multi-year ice — ice volume — are what matter most in terms of the long-term survivability of the Arctic ice in the summer see New study supports finding that “the amount of [multi-year] sea ice in the northern hemisphere was the lowest on record in 2009?.

via Arctic double stunner: Sea ice extent is now below 2007 levels, while volume hit record low for March « Climate Progress.

Quetzal

Nearly 150 of the 882 land bird species in North America are in sharp decline, especially in Mexico, Greg LawatayA resplendent quetzalaccording to a new report. The report, issued by Partners in Flight — a consortium of academics,conservationists, government agencies, and philanthropists — said that 124 of the 148 imperiled bird species spend much of their time in Mexico, where habitat destruction is occurring more rapidly than in the U.S. and Canada. The threatened birds in Mexico include the thick-billed parrot, the horned guan, and the resplendent quetzal, a green and red bird with long tail feathers that feeds on avocados. The study also identified 24 imperiled land bird species in the U.S. and Canada, including the cerulean warbler, the Canadian warbler, and the black swift. The study found that one third of the 882 land bird species in North America spend substantial amounts of time in at least two of the countries. Species that live in the U.S. often winter in Mexico or breed in Canada, meaning that habitat degradation in any of the three North American nations can adversely affect bird populations.

via Yale Environment 360: Large Number of Bird Species Facing Rapid Decline in North America.