Farmers Goosed by Global Warming

While Right-wingers are still rejecting Global warming with simpleminded arguments, farmers here in Washington state are already suffering financial loses.

Climate change arrives on wings of snow geese
More to come, a biologist predicts

Cookson Beecher
Capital Press Staff Writer

STANWOOD, Wash. - Dairy farmer Ted Oien may not think of the tens of thousands of snow geese that have descended on his fields and wiped out his first cutting of grass hay as a visible sign of climate change, but that's how some biologists see it. ...

... Climate change enters the picture because the snow geese breed and nest on Wrangel Island, Russia, which Davison described as "a volatile arctic environment."

Now that the climate has moderated in that frigid region, more eggs are hatching out and more chicks are surviving.

For some farmers in the Stanwood area of Snohomish County and on Fir Island in Skagit County, those successful hatches and survival rates add up to what has become a financial nightmare. ...(source: Capital Press Agriculture Weekly)