Just yesterday, Patrick Greenfield at The Guardian reported on “new research” which is “prompting fears of ecological collapse” as scientists have announced that “bird populations across North America” are rapidly declining:

The study, published in the journal Science, indicates that former strongholds for bird species are no longer safe, particularly in grasslands, drylands and the Arctic.

Now, these brilliant scientists didn’t offer any speculation as to why this occurrence might be happening, but here’s where my brain went: wind turbines.

Those devilish machines are known to be a major killer of birds, including a number of endangered species. And, Greenfield notes that the areas seeing “particularly” high bird deaths are “grasslands, drylands and the Arctic.”

Well, that’s exactly where our wind turbines are concentrated. For reference, the “grasslands” are the prairie states including the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma, and Wyoming; the “drylands” are basically West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, parts of California, and Nevada; and the “Arctic” of North America is Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.

Texas, but specifically West Texas, leads the nation with the most wind turbines (more than 19,000 active machines, followed by Iowa (a prairie state), California (dryland), and Oklahoma (another prairie state). And, from an Arctic energy website: “Today, the use of wind turbines is also growing in the Circumpolar North.”

(Recall that Dr. Thomas Lifson has covered wind turbines and bird deaths on several occasions, found here and here.)

Look at this data and future projections, from the American Bird Conservancy:

The annual loss of birds from wind turbines in the United States was estimated to be around 681,000 as of 2021; more than 1.4 million bird deaths are projected by 2030 or earlier if the U.S. meets its goal of producing 20 percent of electrical energy with wind.

Okay, so I don’t have a degree or background in science, but I could certainly be a scientist—apparently all it takes is the ability to draw simple conclusions from data (birds populations are decreasing because there are fewer now than there were twenty years ago), but totally neglect to connect it to anything else in reality to address or identify the cause of said conclusion.

I wonder how many grant dollars were spent on this “new research” which completely does nothing for me as a taxpayer?

Image from Grok.