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Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual

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Re: Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual

#11

Post by [deleted] »

sp332 wrote: post #7
ck2 wrote: post #5

They are up to 5,000+ dead blackbirds now in that one town. I find that highly disturbing. If it was 5,000 across the USA, it would be worrisome and sad but somehow in one place (and then more in another place) gets the "alarming" label for me. Don't forget all the fish-kills and how they now think the mass bee extinction is from seemingly EPA approved pesticides.

5,000 birds across the country? That's about one for every area the size of Rhode Island. Blackbirds are the most abundant kind of bird on this continent. A few thousand here or there is literally not going to make any difference. This is not nearly on the same scale as the bee crisis. Edit: Even if there are only 10 million blackbirds living at any given time (I'm sure there are more), and they have a lifespan of 5…

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Re: Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual

#14

Post by roc »

The deaths aren't worthy of concern and investigation only if they're linked.

They're worthy of concern and investigation in each instance because history has shown they tend to happen for one of two reasons: severe weather shock or human activity.

Thus we need to carefully consider and investigate each occurrence, lest we ignore the metaphoric canary in the coalmine on the grounds that 'canaries die all the time'.

Truly the news cycle has latched onto an easy-to-sell trend and narrative. But their behavior, and the laughable connections they imply, don't speak to whether or not any given mass animal death truly is a non-issue.

Re: Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual

#15

Post by runjake »

shawndumas wrote: post #9
metatronscube wrote: post #3

They are perhaps quite common, but I think they are unusual and should be investigated to see if they pose a risk to humans or other species.

investigate? yes. panic? no.

Who's panicking? I've only seen reports of alarm.

Re: Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual

#16

Post by shawndumas »

runjake wrote: post #15
shawndumas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

investigate? yes. panic? no.

Who's panicking? I've only seen reports of alarm.

maybe not you and me but lots of people:

  Technology to blame for animal die-off panic [1].

  Mass Animal Deaths Leading To End Times Panic [2].

  Dead Bird Panic [3].
----

[1]: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40961721/ns/us_news-environment/

[2]: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1974746/mass_animal_dea...

[3]: http://metabunk.org/content/137-Dead-Bird-Panic-How-Media-Fo...

Re: Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual

#19

Post by jerf »

mcantelon wrote: post #18

If mass die offs are so commonplace, why haven't tin foilers started tracking and pointing them out before (as they have with "chemtrails")?

Because you can only conspiracy-theory about what you've noticed. They don't actually notice anything new, or at least not very much new, the essence of conspiracy theories is to weave existing readily-visible facts and a healthy dollop of made up fantasy into some new theory. From what I can see they hardly ever do anything like a real investigation and even when they do there's a lot of the aforementioned fantasy in it. Like, someone writes a book in which they claim to have spent a lot of time investigating UFO issues but it's still mostly just regurgitated theories and a few allusions to trying to get more info but mostly not. Info mostly just circulates and gets endlessly chewed on, very little new info gets added into the morass by the actual conspiracy theorists from what I can see, with a handful of exceptions.

Re: Mass Animal Deaths Are Not in Fact Unusual

#20

Post by jerf »

roc wrote: post #14

The deaths aren't worthy of concern and investigation only if they're linked. They're worthy of concern and investigation in each instance because history has shown they tend to happen for one of two reasons: severe weather shock or human activity. Thus we need to carefully consider and investigate each occurrence, lest we ignore the metaphoric canary in the coalmine on the grounds that 'canaries die all the time'. T…

The canary in the coal mine is only useful because there's only one plausible explanation for it keeling over. If they died all the time for no good reason they'd be useless. It might be really cool if we could extract signal against a noisy background but there's mathematical limits on our ability to do that even in theory, and we're generally better off looking at the less noisy signals.

Plus chasing noise turns out to be really dangerous. 5% of the time or so, random processes will correlate with something else you look at with 95% confidence. Your suggestion is not a good idea at all, it's a recipe for spurious connections and wildly disproportionate responses, no matter how good it feels to a human brain.

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