Climate change is pushing hurricanes to their extremes. In 2018, Hurricane Michael (shown here in this digitally enhanced image) became the first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall on the Florida Panhandle. (Image credit: Roberto Machado Noa/Getty Images)
Humans aren’t just making Earth warmer, they are making the climate chaotic, a stark new study suggests.
The new research, which was posted April 21 to the preprint database arXiv(opens in new tab), draws a broad and general picture of the full potential impact of human activity on the climate. And the picture isn’t pretty.
While the study doesn’t present a complete simulation of a climate model, it does paint a broad sketch of where we’re heading if we don’t curtail climate change and our unchecked use of fossil fuels, according to the study authors, scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Porto in Portugal. .
“The implications of climate change are well known (droughts, heat waves, extreme phenomena, etc),” study researcher Orfeu Bertolami told Live Science in an email. “If the Earth System gets into the region of chaotic behavior, we will lose all hope of somehow fixing the problem.”
Earth periodically experiences massive changes in climate patterns, going from one stable equilibrium to another. These shifts are usually driven by external factors like changes in Earth’s orbit or a massive surge in volcanic activity. But past research suggests we are now entering a new phase, one driven by human activity. As humans pump more carbon into the atmosphere, we are creating a new Anthropocene era, a period of human-influenced climate systems, something our planet has never experienced before.
In the new study, researchers modeled the introduction of the Anthropocene as a phase transition. Most people are familiar with phase transitions in materials, for instance when an ice cube changes phase from a solid to a liquid by melting into water, or when water evaporates into a gas. But phase transitions also occur in other systems. In this case, the system is Earth’s climate. A given climate provides for regular and predictable seasons and weather, and a phase transition in the climate leads to a new pattern of seasons and weather. When the climate goes through a phase transition, this means that Earth is experiencing a sudden and rapid change in patterns.
If human activity is driving a phase transition in Earth’s climate, that means we are causing the planet to develop a new set of weather patterns. What those patterns will look like is one of the most pressing problems of climate science.
Where is Earth’s climate headed? That depends significantly on exactly what our activity is over the next few decades. Drastically reducing carbon output, for example, would lead to different outcomes than changing nothing at all, the researchers wrote in the study.
To account for the different trajectories and choices that humanity could make, the researchers employed a mathematical tool called a logistic map. The logistic map is great at describing situations where some variable — such as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere — can grow but naturally reaches a limit. For example, scientists often use the logistic map to describe animal populations: Animals can keep giving birth, increasing their numbers, but they reach a limit when they consume all the food in their environment (or their predators get too hungry and consume them).
Our influence on the environment is definitely growing, and it has been for over a century. But it will naturally reach a limit, according to the researchers. For example, the human population can only grow so large and can only have so many carbon-emitting activities; and pollution will eventually degrade the environment. At some point in the future, carbon output will reach a maximum limit, and the researchers found that a logistic map can capture the future trajectory of that carbon output very well.
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Climate Change is “Widespread, Rapid and Intensifying”
The researchers explored different ways that the human logistic map could evolve, depending on a variety of factors like our population, introduction of carbon reduction strategies and better, more efficient technologies. Once they found how human carbon output would evolve with time, they used that to examine how Earth’s climate would evolve through the human-driven phase transition.
In the best cases, once humanity reaches the limit of carbon output, Earth’s climate stabilizes at a new, higher average temperature. This higher temperature is overall bad for humans, because it still leads to higher sea levels and more extreme weather events. But at least it’s stable: The Anthropocene looks like previous climate ages, only warmer, and it will still have regular and repeatable weather patterns.
But in the worst cases, the researchers found that Earth’s climate leads to chaos. True, mathematical chaos. In a chaotic system, there is no equilibrium and no repeatable patterns. A chaotic climate would have seasons that change wildly from decade to decade (or even year to year). Some years would experience sudden flashes of extreme weather, while others would be completely quiet. Even the average Earth temperature may fluctuate wildly, swinging from cooler to hotter periods in relatively short periods of time. It would become utterly impossible to determine in what direction Earth’s climate is headed.
“A chaotic behavior means that it will be impossible to predict the behavior of Earth System in the future even if we know with great certainty its present state,” Bertolami said. “It will mean that any capability to control and to drive the Earth System towards an equilibri
Bob Davis recently retired from the Wall Street Journal where he covered U.S.-China relations and is the co-author of Superpower Showdown, a history of the two nations’ economic battles.
Here’s some good news on the gloomy international scene: Tensions will ease significantly between the U.S. and China soon, as the Biden administration slashes consumer tariffs and Beijing welcomes the move, at least privately. Expect a new round of trade negotiations too. The thaw comes after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen makes a big push for change, and as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, long dismissed as an also-ran, becomes a key player. President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping reluctantly go along.
At least that’s the surprising outcome of a forecasting model that the Central Intelligence Agency has used and praised — and which was deployed for POLITICO Magazine to seek insights on where the most important geopolitical relationship is going next.
Whether the predictions come to pass is anyone’s guess, of course, but we’re already seeing some echoes in the real world as Biden and his top officials debate what to do about China tariffs. And by parsing the potential interactions between policymakers, we can get a clearer picture of the decision-making processes occurring in different capitals. The model basically seeks to answer the question: Who is calling the shots, and how will they exercise power?
The idea for the exercise sprang from the Biden administration’s halting efforts to craft a new Asia economic policy to keep nations out of China’s orbit. (Biden finally launched what he calls the “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework” on Monday.) Jon Grady, a graduate student at New York University’s Stern Business School, proposed running a game theory exercise to forecast the next steps the U.S. and China would take in their economic rivalry. Grady, a preternaturally patient 32-year-old with a shaved head, licensed game theory software from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an NYU game theorist so prominent in the field that he’s known simply by his initials BDM.
BDM’s game theories are different from war games where experts play the roles of political leaders during a crisis. It’s also very different from simply asking experts in the field what actions either government might take. Bueno de Mesquita and other game theorists contend that experts do a crappy job of making predictions and war games lack rigor.
“An expert may be very, very skillful at telling you a very good story about Chinese history and telling good stories about possible future actions,” says Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who has won a Pentagon forecasting competition. “That doesn’t translate all that well” into making predictions. Political experts are only slightly more likely to make accurate calls than a chimpanzee tossing darts, he says.
Forecasting strategies vary. The BDM model looks at power relations, figuring that decision-making is a battle of people following their self-interest and self-aggrandizement. Although the president has the most power in Washington, for instance, he is often thwarted by other power players who are more focused on an issue (i.e., the National Rifle Association on gun control) or inflexible (Joe Machin on Build Back Better). The model doesn’t try to assess the best possible resolution of a problem or the decision that would best reflect the national interest. The BDM model is more akin to assessing scorpions in a bottle.
For our exercise, we recruited experts to serve on the U.S. or China teams. The American team consisted of several people close to the Biden administration, including Matthew Goodman, an Obama National Security Council economic official; Daniel Russel, an Obama State Department Asia official; and Barbara Weisel, a former senior U.S. trade negotiator. Jeremie Waterman, who runs the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s China Center, and I were also part of that team.
On the China side were Lucy Hornby, a former Financial Times China reporter who is now a visiting scholar at Harvard; David Dollar, Obama’s Treasury representative in Beijing; James McGregor, who has spent decades in China representing American business; and Ryan Hass, an Obama NSC China expert.
The Players
U.S. players:
Matthew Goodman, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Daniel Russel, Asia Society Policy Institute
Barbara Weisel, Rock Creek Global Advisors
Jeremie Waterman, U.S. Chamber of Commerce China Center
Bob Davis, former Wall Street Journal senior editor
China players:
Lucy Hornby, former Financial Times China reporter
David Dollar, Brookings Institution
James McGregor, APCO Worldwide, greater China region
Ryan Hass, Brookings Institution
The game was designed in February to forecast whether China would ever meet its obligations to boost purchases of U.S. goods by more than $200 billion, as required under the Phase One trade deal negotiated under former President Donald Trump. And if Beijing didn’t — as seemed certain even before the game started — what the U.S. would do in response.
Ultimately, the game stretched on through the end of April. By that time, the trade deal had become somewhat irrelevant as Washington’s focus turned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the impending midterm elections. Biden’s recent comments on whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan have also unsettled some China watchers. Fortunately, the game also examined broader questions of what economic moves the U.S. would take next to influence China and how Beijing would respond.
The Model
Developed by New York University political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the forecasting model make predictions by assessing power relations among decision makers. The model looks at four characteristics: decision makers’ influence, their positions on an issue, their negotiating flexibility, and their focus on the issue. The model’s algorithms calculate millions of different possible interactions, and using game theory, spits out the most likely outcome.
“The focus on China right now is much more on how they’re going to respond to Russia” than whether they will carry out a trade deal, said Goodman, the ex-NSC Asia hand now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, during an April 8 U.S. team meeting.
Under Grady’s prodding, the two teams were asked to list those in Washington and Beijing involved in deciding what to do next on U.S.-China trade relations. Then they would rank each player on a scale of zero-to-100 on four attributes: their influence, the importance of the issue to them, their position on the issue and how flexible they would be during negotiations.
In Washington, the team came up with two dozen power players, including White House officials, cabinet secretaries, business and labor lobbyists and four shades of lawmakers — progressive Democrats, labor Democrats, free-trade Republicans and agriculture state Republicans. For China, whose political decision-making is wrapped in mystery, the exercise was a struggle. It was tough to know who to pick beyond members of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee and some prominent economic and foreign policy advisers.
“I look at this more as a Tony Soprano setup where if [the top leaders] want something, they’ll figure out the corruption in each of the families and threaten them” to get what they want, said McGregor, chair of APCO Worldwide’s China region, who started in China as a Wall Street Journal reporter.
Next, each team was asked to rank the influence of the players — essentially how much clout they could bring to bear on the decision should they choose to battle for it. Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were ranked as 100. What combination of other players could equal Biden or Xi’s power, Grady asked the teams.
“It forces people to think logically and numerically about an issue,” Grady says.
The question initially stumped the team members. That’s not how decisions are made, they argued. White House chief of staff Ron Klain isn’t going to line up three cabinet members and march into the Oval Office and demand Biden make one decision or another.
Think of it differently, Grady said. Imagine that a group of officials argued to Biden in favor of a decision. Would they be able to convince him to accept their recommendation? Ditto with Xi and Chinese officials? What combination of officials would then equal the leader’s score of 100?
Still, the discussion had an otherworldly feel to it. It was like the conversations I had as a kid: If Batman and Wonder Woman fought with Superman, could they defeat him?
Eventually, the teams came up with rankings. The U.S. team decided that Klain had roughly half the influence of Biden, given his long relationship with the president and the broad mandate of a chief of staff. Then they ranked others compared to Klain. Janet Yellen had just about one-third of Klain’s influence on the China trade issue, they decided, and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai had about half.
On the Chinese side, the decisions were tougher, given how thoroughly Xi dominates politics there. By some accounts, he is the most powerful Communist Party leader since Mao Zedong. Eventually, the Chinese team decided that Vice Premier Liu He, Xi’s economic envoy to the U.S., had about one-third of Xi’s influence largely because of his mastery of economic issues and his deep roots in the Chinese bureaucracy. Premier Li, who has been overshadowed by Xi and seen much of his economic portfolio stripped away, had just about 10 percent.
On and on the assessments went. How would the teams rank each of the players, from zero-to-100 on their passion for the issue — what Grady called the issue’s “salience.” How flexible were they? What was their real position on U.S.-China relations, not just what they said in public?
At various points, the choices seemed arbitrary. How could anyone know what Wang Yang, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee who is viewed as having a shot at succeeding Li as premier, really thought about trade relations with the U.S.? Would he be more flexible in dealing with the U.S. because he might think that could improve China’s economic outlook? Or might he be less flexible for fear of being seen as weak?
McGregor broke the tension in the fourth and last meeting of the China team: “You guys are getting lost in the real world here,” he said. “This is a game.”
Still, the game players’ reactions reflected one of the biggest problems of forecasting. No matter how sophisticated the model, a model’s accuracy depends on the quality of the information it processes. Garbage-in, garbage-out.
To convince the players of the reliability of the BDM model, Grady would point to a Central Intelligence Agency assessment. The CIA compared the predictions by the BDM model in the 1980s to one it used and found BDM’s “got the bull’s eye twice as often.”
“The CIA study found [the BDM model] was accurate 89 percent of the time,” said Stanley Feder, a former CIA analyst who ran the review. “We used it pretty extensively at the CIA.” The study was declassified in 1995 and has been a marketing calling card for Bueno de Mesquita ever since.
Bueno de Mesquita has had some big hits. He correctly forecast the successors to the Ayatollah Khomeini five years before the Iranian leader died. But he admits to some misses too, including getting nearly every prediction wrong about how Bill Clinton’s health care bill would turn out. House Ways and Means Chair Dan Rostenkowski’s indictment, he says, messed up the model’s assumptions about his influence in pushing through legislation.
By the end of the game, Grady had U.S. team members put together a list of possible U.S. actions toward China with the lightest being removing all tariffs immediately and the harshest hitting Beijing immediately with a fresh round of sanctions without even bothering to seek industry input. In between was starting a new trade action that could eventually lead to sanctions.
As the U.S. players assessed how American authorities would look at the options, China’s behavior toward Russia became more important. Since President Richard Nixon unfroze relations with Beijing in 1972, trade has played a crucial role in bringing the U.S. and China closer together. Whatever the vast differences between the two political systems, both countries recognized that trade could benefit them by expanding markets and places for production. Even during the Trump administration, the two countries eventually signed a deal to end trade hostilities.
Russel, the former Obama State official who is now a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank, laid out the dilemma facing Biden officials. “Every week we get closer to the midterms, there will be pressure to do something that looks strong on trade,” he said in the third U.S. session on April 8. But on the other hand, “they don’t want to rock the boat” because they want to convince China to “exercise some degree of restraint in material support for the Russian military operation.”
As the game drew to a close at the end of April, the conundrum had the effect of elevating the power of Janet Yellen. That’s because the U.S. team saw her as laser-focused on removing tariffs, which Yellen complained were having an inflationary impact — although she has been talking tougher on China recently. Easing inflation could help Biden politically as well as act as an opening to the Chinese, which scored well in the forecasting model.
On the Chinese end, a similar dynamic was elevating the importance of Liu, the economic adviser, and Li, the premier. Both are responsible for China’s economy, which was starting to sputter due to unending Covid lockdowns. An easing of tariffs, especially if it indicated a possible rapprochement with the U.S., could help.
The BDM model uses the following equation: Influence X Salience = Power. While the influence of Yellen and Li started out as minimal, their salience — their focus on the trade issue — grew immensely as the game played out. Ergo, their power grew.
“Salience inflates the clout of some players that look like they don’t have much more clout because they care intensely,” says Bueno de Mesquita.
Once the game players ranked officials from zero-to-100 in the various categories, the computer model took over, with algorithms that used those rankings to play out millions of possible interactions between officials in both countries. The formulas look to assess the clout each country’s players have, how focused they are on the issue and other criteria. It also simulates interactions between U.S. and Chinese players.
The bottom line: In the U.S., Yellen’s power grew on the trade issue over time while Klain, who the team viewed as mainly interested in politics, saw his shrink. Biden went along with a position of eliminating most — but not all — tariffs on Chinese consumer goods. The computer model didn’t explain itself. It spit out spreadsheets filled with numbers. But a reasonable explanation for the finding would be that cutting some tariffs, but not all of them, could be presented as an overture to China but not caving in.
On the Chinese side, economic officials, including Premier Li and Vice Premier Liu, turned out to be much more flexible in negotiations than expected and had enough clout to convince ideologically minded officials to go along with them. Although all Chinese officials started off by demanding that the U.S. immediately lift all tariffs, the model forecast that the partial rollback would be welcome, and China would be open to negotiations where it would be willing to increase its U.S. purchases.
None of the experts recruited to play the game predicted the outcome forecast by the model, although a few said they hoped the model would turn out to be accurate. Most figured that the Biden team would pair any tariff relief with some aggressive action toward China too in order not to look weak.
The Takeaways
1) Expect a thaw in U.S.-China relations.
2) Russia’s war on Ukraine changes the equation on trade.
3) Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Premier Li Keqiang both pack a punch.
Grady said it wasn’t unusual for the players to disagree with the outcome of their work. As the U.S. Chamber’s Waterman noted, “We weren’t playing a war game, we were helping build an economic model” through assessments of power and influence.
Biden and Xi, who initially showed no interest in a deal, would go along, the model predicted, in part, because so much of their attention was now focused on other issues and because a deal met their needs. In fact, Biden said earlier this month that he was weighing whether to ease the tariffs. In the game, as in real life, the leaders make compromises they didn’t expect to make.
Carl Icahn speaking at Delivering Alpha in New York on Sept. 13, 2016.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Activist investor Carl Icahn lost his proxy fight withMcDonald’son Thursday, signaling that shareholders weren’t swayed by his animal-welfare concerns.
Preliminary counts of votes during the company’s annual shareholder meeting showed that Icahn’s board nominees only received votes from about 1% of outstanding shares, McDonald’s said.
Carl Icahn speaking at Delivering Alpha in New York on Sept. 13, 2016.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Activist investor Carl Icahn lost his proxy fight with McDonald’s on Thursday, signaling that shareholders weren’t swayed by his animal-welfare concerns.
Preliminary counts of votes during the company’s annual shareholder meeting showed that Icahn’s board nominees only received votes from about 1% of outstanding shares, McDonald’s said.
“Moving forward, McDonald’s Board and Leadership Team remain focused on continuing to take actions that uphold and advance our values while committing to serve the interests of all our shareholders,” the company said in a statement.
Icahn only owns about 200 McDonald’s shares, a tiny stake that didn’t give him much influence over votes. And, as the results show, he failed to win over his fellow shareholders with his criticism of McDonald’s environmental, social and corporate governance commitments and calling out large Wall Street firms for “hypocrisy.”
McDonald’s chairman Enrique Hernandez, Jr., said in prepared remarks obtained by CNBC that Icahn was invited to speak about his nominations at the meeting but he withdrew two days ago. Icahn did not attend the meeting.
A representative for Icahn declined to comment to CNBC.
Icahn’s proxy fight kicked off in February when the billionaire publicly criticized McDonald’s for failing to meet its original deadline for eliminating its suppliers’ use of gestation crates for pregnant pigs. He also claimed the company was supposed to ban the use of crates entirely but has since changed the scope of its commitment.
For its part, the Chicago-based company has blamed the Covid-19 pandemic and African swine fever outbreaks for pushing back the original deadline of 2022 that it set a decade ago. By the end of this year, McDonald’s now expects 85% to 90% of its U.S. pork supply to come from pigs that aren’t kept in gestation crates if they’re confirmed to be pregnant. McDonald’s has said that eliminating the use of the crates entirely would raise its costs and higher prices for customers.
McDonald’s said in a filing in early April that it expected to spend roughly $16 million in the proxy fight with Icahn.
The Humane Society of the United States had put forth a shareholder proposal echoing Icahn’s criticisms but withdrew it. The proposal asked the company to confirm it would reach its prior goal of eliminating the confinement of gestating pigs by 2022. Otherwise, the organization asked McDonald’s to disclose more information about its pork supply chain. Such shareholder proposals are nonbinding but can send a message to corporate boards about public support for company practices.
Josh Balk, the vice president of farm animal welfare for the Humane Society, said in a statement that the group withdrew the proposal because McDonald’s finally acknowledged that its suppliers are still confining pregnant pigs in crates.
Icahn is waging a similar proxy fight at Kroger, the largest U.S. supermarket chain operator in the U.S. Kroger’s annual meeting is scheduled for June 23.
Although the war in Ukraine has put climate action on the back burner for many policy makers, the global climate crisis is spinning out of control. Various climate recordswere smashed in 2021
More than two years after the pandemic began, scientists determined that the novel coronavirus likely originated in a wet market in China, where humans regularly came in contact with wild animals.
But in the early stages of the pandemic, only a select few publications openly discussed the links between the use of animals and the spread of zoonotic disease. Sentient Media was one of the first to address this gap in crucial information, offering extensive, in-depth reporting on how animal agriculture contributed to the spread of COVID-19.
“Inconvenient truths are so common to our era that we may well be inoculated to them,” wrote Macken Murphy as COVID-19 began to surge. “Every time we buy animal products, we directly sponsor a system that will continue to produce pandemics and will ultimately render ineffective our existing antibiotics.”
Over the past two years, Sentient Media has continued to report on the pandemic, exposing the meat industry’s connection to the spread of the vicious disease. As COVID-19 cases on farms skyrocketed, shutting down facilities across the country, we covered mass culls on farms and some of the ethical questions facing consumers.
Veterinarians, farmers endure difficult work in response to deadly epizootic
By Greg Cima
May 24, 2022
This year’s epizootic of highly pathogenic avian influenza has killed tens of millions of poultry as well as unknown numbers of wild waterfowl and raptors.
As of May 23, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials had recorded about 350 outbreaks among domestic birds in 35 states, with about 40 million birds dead from disease or from depopulation to control spread of the virus to more flocks and reduce the risk to humans. The highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain circulating in the U.S.—and much of the world—is unusual for also causing disease and deaths among a range of wild birds such as ducks, crows, and eagles, with crows and eagles likely becoming infected from eating remains of infected birds.
Federal and state agencies have recorded infections in 67 species, about triple the number found during the previous outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza in the U.S., in 2014-15.
Dr. Louise Dufour-Zavala, president of the American Association of Avian Pathologists, said the losses of domestic birds would be even higher if the poultry industry hadn’t improved its biosecurity since 2015. She said the number of outbreaks in commercial poultry houses reflects the wide geographic spread of the influenza virus, the high virus load in the environments near the poultry houses, and the diversity of wild bird species infected.
The egg industry has been the hardest hit, with about 30 million egg-laying hens killed. Dr. Dufour-Zavala said those losses have created a shortage of breaker eggs, which are used for liquid or powdered eggs, whereas the price and availability of meat from broiler hens remained largely unchanged. The outbreaks also had reduced the availability of turkey meat, but the effects were less severe than in the egg industry, she said.
The crisis also has been devastating for veterinarians, bird owners and growers, emergency responders, and poultry caretakers. Ending the lives of these animals, especially after caring for and protecting them, is difficult, stressful, and depressing, she said. Dr. Dufour-Zavala recounted conversations with veterinarians who were grieving the losses along with the farmers and those who kept poultry as pets.
“They take care of these animals,” she said. “They get attached to these animals. And it’s been very difficult.”
One person in the U.S. has tested positive for the H5N1 virus, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers the virus to be low risk for public health.
Animal health authorities in the U.S. and Canada also have identified H5N1 infections in wild red foxes that developed neurologic disease and died. In a May 13 announcement, Dr. Lindsey Long, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources wildlife health veterinarian, indicated there was no evidence so far that foxes are significant sources of transmission of the virus.
Arrival from Europe
The strains of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus currently circulating in North America were identified in Europe in fall 2020, and they spread through the continent and into Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, according to the CDC. They have been the dominant subtype globally since fall 2021.
The H5N1 virus was first detected in wild birds of eastern Canada in late 2021 and the U.S. East Coast in January 2022. In February, a turkey flock in Indiana became the first commercial flock in the U.S. with a confirmed outbreak.
Dr. Dufour-Zavala said that, unlike past epizootics that waned as the weather warmed, Europe’s outbreaks continued throughout 2021. That raises concerns North America’s outbreaks, too, could continue this year.
Bryan Richards, emerging disease coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, said the H5N1 virus appears to have spread from Europe to the U.S. through contact among migratory birds, potentially wild birds in Iceland.
Richards said the virus shares its lineage with the H5N2 and H5N8 viruses that emerged in 2014-15, which also were descendant from an H5N1 avian influenza virus that emerged in 1996 among farmed geese in southern China.
Richards said that in 2014-15, wildlife authorities typically found no more than two or three dead wild birds at a time, with some rare exceptions such as the deaths of eight goslings in Michigan. This year’s wildlife deaths have included larger die-offs.
The USGS has received reports of die-offs among snow geese in the Great Plains, often with more than 1,000 deaths in a single location and some surviving birds bobbing their heads and seeming disoriented. More than 1,000 lesser scaup also died in a single count in east-central Florida, which led to the deaths of vultures and other scavenger birds that ate the contaminated carcasses.
The disease also has been killing bald eagles, great horned owls, and red-tailed hawks, Richards said.
“Now these sorts of events are occurring in Saskatchewan, Alberta, likely Manitoba as well,” said Richards, who described a trail of disease and deaths moving “on the wings of white geese as they migrate north.”
Richards said the data so far do not suggest the virus is endangering the survival of any wild species in North America. None of the confirmed infections involves endangered whooping cranes, for example.
Wildlife infections precede poultry deaths
Pennsylvania had its first confirmed H5N1 infection March 24, when test results came back for a bald eagle found dead in the eastern half of the state. Dr. Kevin Brightbill, state veterinarian for Pennsylvania, said that, soon afterward, ducks in a group in Venango County, to the north of Pittsburgh, were unable to take off from the water and had neurological signs of disease. They, too, were positive for infection.
The disease reached the first commercial egg-laying hens by mid-April in Lancaster County, west of Philadelphia, and that county since had eight outbreaks in layer and broiler houses. Across the state, about 4 million egg-laying hens, 190,000 commercial ducks, and 70,000 broilers have died from infections or depopulation. The state has the third-highest losses behind Iowa and Nebraska.
“I’m happy to tell you that, in most cases, our producers are being very vigilant, and we are catching disease before we’re seeing large portions of the flock affected,” Dr. Brightbill said. “However, when we are not catching the disease early enough, we are seeing an abrupt uptick in both mortality and morbidity on these farms.”
The Pennsylvania Game Commission also has received reports of die-offs among turkey vultures, and Dr. Brightbill’s counterpart in Maryland told him turkey vultures in that state, too, had tested positive for infection.
Dr. Brightbill said these are tough times for farmers, animal health emergency responders, and the communities that support them. About 200 state and federal responders are working with veterinarians, the poultry industry, and academics to respond and support those dealing with infected flocks. That support includes a hotline to provide mental health support to farmworkers and their families.
Dr. Brightbill said biosecurity is paramount for disease prevention, and producers should report any concerns to their veterinarians.
Dr. Dufour-Zavala said the veterinarians and others who are responding to infections for days to weeks at a time struggle with such difficult work, even though they know they are doing what is best for the overall bird populations by helping prevent further spread of the virus. Most veterinarians love nature, she said, and seeing the effects of this virus on wildlife adds to their pain.
But she said veterinarians also know they are supported, and they are enduring this challenge together. She expects the poultry, avian, and wildlife veterinary communities will share experiences from this response and examine ways to better prevent influenza infections, fight the disease, and stop its spread.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency warns that the so-called bird flu is spreading globally and outbreaks have been confirmed in every province except Prince Edward Island.Lindsey Shuey / Republican-Herald via AP
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has confirmed two more outbreaks ofavian influenzain small flocks — one in southern British Columbia and the other in southeastern Alberta.
A statement from the agency says the H5N1 strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza was identified Saturday in the flock inCypress County, Alta., and on Sunday among birds…
May 23—With cases of bird flu confirmed in Washington state, several Washington zoos are taking precautions to reduce risk to certain birds by removing them from public exhibits.
The latest outbreak of avian flu hit North America in December and has led to the culling of about 37 million chickens and turkeys in U.S. farms since February. More than 35 million birds in flocks across 30 states have been affected.
The first case in Washington was detected in an backyard poultry flock in Pacific County on May 6. Since then, the highly pathogenic disease has been detected in nine backyard flocks in seven counties, according to the Washington State Department of Agriculture.
YOUNGSTOWN — Prosecutors will recommend that Kasen J. Smith, 26, of Lake Park Boulevard in Sebring, get four years in prison after he pleaded guilty to firing a weapon in a restricted area of North Lima, hitting a man in the foot in his home.
Smith was hunting Dec. 20, 2020, when the incident occurred.
The victim’s wife and baby were in the room at the time, but were not hit. The gunfire was prohibited because of its proximity to Market Street and a nursing home, prosecutors said. The gunshot crossed Market Street.
Smith, 26, pleaded guilty May 12 in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court to charges of discharging a firearm on or near prohibited premises with a one-year gun specification, injuring a person while hunting, hunting without permission and violating hunting ordinances.
Judge John Durkin of Mahoning County Common Pleas…
