More On The Heat Obsession

This is amazing. The evidence just keeps piling up while the ReThugs & Bu$hCo just keep ignoring what's happening. I love duck hunting, although the last couple of years I've thought about it way more than I've done it, mainly due to the lack of a BOAT. A canoe is fine, if you don't have far to go, but to get to the big water, or the sloughs, you need a BOAT. OK, enough whining about a BOAT, back to the inability of the "leaders" of this country to do anything about global warming. They are supposed to be protecting us, but it has been clear that they don't even want to have a clue.

"North America's premier duck breeding grounds will be much drier and in many places will disappear, according to a study on how climate change could affect the Upper Midwest in the next 50 to 100 years.

Carter Johnson, a professor of ecology at South Dakota State University and co-author of the research, said that the number of ducks could plummet by 50 percent or more as early as 2050 if global warming dries up the wetlands where they nest.

The area, known as the prairie pothole region, contains an estimated 5 million small ponds spread across more than 300,000 square miles of the Dakotas, western Minnesota and Iowa, northeastern Montana and three Canadian provinces. It is notorious for episodic wet and dry spells, but is large enough for waterfowl to adapt and migrate past localized areas of drought to find other ponds in the region with enough water and cover.

That would end if climate change increases average temperatures across the entire prairie pothole region, Johnson said.

Most of the area would become too dry for ducks and other birds, he said. Only the fringes of the region -- in western Minnesota and northwestern Iowa -- might still have wetlands, he said.

Johnson and a team of researchers from Minnesota and Montana reached these dire conclusions after studying 95 years of climate data and using hydrologic models to simulate how the Northern Great Plains would change during this century. Their report, published in the journal BioScience, offers detailed predictions on how global warming might affect the prairie potholes, which produce between 50 to 80 percent of the continent's ducks."

Emphasis added.