“Climate crisis” is starting to become the laziest explanation for why anything unusual happens in this country. Are you telling me these birds never did their migration above forest fires? Tell us why it’s different.
It isn't necessarily different. Mass die-offs with birds happen periodically, and it is always jarring and always causes some form of investigation or introspection. Sometimes the introspection rules out any human involvement, other times it doesn't.
This article is about noting its happening and looking at what's visibly different right now, while the actual investigation goes on.
Scope and scale. A larger part of the country is on fire than is typical, and the resulting smoke is denser and deadlier.
But to broadly address your question, the answer will usually be "Scope and Scale" (and occasionally quantity), with both being larger for a given natural phenomenon.
The way humans drive species to extinction is we push them right up to the very edge of it, removing 99% of their habitat and forage, and then we wait for a normal adverse event to finish the job. That these events happen from time to time does not absolve us.
Sometimes, if you find something like this to be unbelievable, you have to step back and ask yourself: What would things look like if the "climate crisis" answer was true? Take the premise that you disagree with, assume that it's true, and try to follow logically from there.
In this case, a real climate crisis would have incredibly broad effects. It could very plausibly be pointed to as the cause for the many things people are pointing to as being related to a "climate crisis."
So the idea that climate change as at least a significant factor in many unusual happenings in the country (and the world) is a "lazy" explanation doesn't follow logically. Either significant climate change is happening, in which case it is affecting basically everything, or it isn't, in which case it's not "lazy", it's just wrong, but based on a premise that makes it reasonable. (And also, we would need a whole bunch of new explanations for why all these previously-extremely-unusual events were happening, which, honestly, isn't that actually even scarier than the idea that it's climate change? We can see all these crazy things happening; if we don't even have a clue what's causing them, how is that not much scarier than what we already know?)
I believe the premise, that doesn't mean the research isn't intellectually lazy and hand-wavy. Believing in climate change doesn't mean I have to turn off my brain when I hear research.
