By Jo Nova
Who knew? Penguins are not only a “sentinel species” warning us about climate change in Antarctica but “Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature“. More warming equals more penguins.
So just as we can use trees as thermometers, we can use penguins as thermometers. And when we do, we find that there was a veritable boom in penguins in the Ross Sea 1,000 years ago.
It’s all there in the peer reviewed Zheng paper, 2023 — thanks to NoTricksZone and KlimaNachrichten for finding the paper.
As one of the most important ‘sentinel species’ in the Antarctic ecosystem, the Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) is widely distributed in the Ross Sea region and its population is extremely sensitive to climate change (Ainley, 2002; Ainley et al., 2010). Since the International Geophysical Year in 1957, researchers have conducted extensive field investigations on climate change (including temperature, SST, sea ice, and polynyas) and Adélie penguin populations in Antarctica.
Modern monitoring data also show that Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature…
After comparing with historical records of penguin populations at Cape Bird, Dunlop Island, and Cape Adare, all were found to have a common increase during the 750-1350 AD period in the Ross Sea.
So at the same time the Vikings were getting into the spirit of Greenland, the penguins were having some parties of their own on the far side of the Earth. And even though climate experts have told us a million times that the Medieval Warm Period was just a localized phenomenon in Europe, it was also warm in Antarctica, and most other places, and no one seems to be able to find the part of the planet that was colder which would bring that average back to normal.
As it happens, another study last year showed Elephant seals and penguins lived on the Ross Sea for thousands of years until the horrible cold of the Little Ice Age wiped out them out. Seriously, researchers refer to the era three or four thousand years ago as “The Penguin Optimum”. So this is yet another study using different markers but reinforcing the same finding. (That one used diatoms, this one looked at a footprint of elements in penguin guano — P, Cu, Zn, Sr, Cd, Ca, and As.)
The climate experts also told us a million times that global warming would wipe out the penguins, but instead it turns out, global cooling does.
In the full figure we can see a whole stack of climate variables that all rise and fall in cycles that bear no resemblance to changes of CO2:
See these posts for references:
- Medieval Warm Period found in 120 proxies. Plus Roman era was similar to early 20th Century.
- Climate helped drive Vikings from Greenland
- The Medieval Warm Period hit west Antarctica
- Antarctica was warmer one thousand years ago — and life was OK
REFERENCE
Just about all lifeforms, including humans, love and seek warmth, at least to the tolerance of their cold adaptation which would cause them to overheat if they were to live in a place with an excessive temperature.
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The penguins might like it, but what about the polar bears?
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They are possibly an example of an animal that is so well cold adapted that it can overheat in warmer than expected temperatures.
However, they can survive. The key to keeping them in zoos in warmer climstes, is to reduce their fat layer by feeding them a low fat diet like fish, apart from giving them a freezer to sleep in.
Also, it gets much colder in Antarctica than the Arctic where the bears are adapted to.
I think the bears will adapt to natural temperature changes through migration. For example, during the Medieval Warm Period they moved north out of northern Europe and Canada.
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Polar bears are mammals. The mammalian metabolism is an active system that adjusts to the exterior conditions to keep body temperature within a narrow range. The bears will happily adapt to environmental change. And if they nevertheless overheat there is always the option of a cool swim.
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There are no polar bears in Antarctica. Perhaps we should send say twenty breeding pairs there to aid survival of the species, after all the loonies reckon they are endangered. I’m sure penguin will be a suitable replacement for baby seals.
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However in 1936 Lars Christensen introduced King Penguins to Norway.
And reindeer were introduced to the Antarctic Island of South Georgia from 1909 to 1925.
https://sorpolen2011.npolar.no/en/did-you-know/2011-12-05-penguins-used-to-live-in-lofoten.html
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I was attempting a little geography/zoology joke.
Sad, polar bears would likely find penguins tasty.
Maybe some of the bears are trans-polar?
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I’d suggest such bears would be bi-polar.
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They get browned off when it gets too warm
sarc.
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Climate catastrophe, climate armageddon, biological system collapse – the descriptors for the never proven theory of anthropogenic global warming never end. I think we need to break it down and use terms like climate “panic” or my favourite, climate “scam”. Even the damn penguins know it’s all hyperbole.
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Last week someone posted a link to palaeontologist Patrick De Deckker who used the terms
Climate Improving & Climate Comfortable
for our present Brief Modern Warm Period when comparing previous cold/dry or hot/wet stages of Earth’s never-ending changes in climates (plural).
Having used both terms during the weekend when chatting with overseas travellers – who brought up the subject of CCC™️ – you could see a light going off in their brain as if they realised, oh yeah, the climate is pleasant, and perhaps the shouty ones (alarmists) were riding the gravy train scam after all.
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Climate Alarmism is all ‘hyperbowl’.
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Is that what you call a ‘Gillard’?
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And in accordance with the Tali Band
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Yes and well spotted.
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The sun is like a hammer thrower close to the centre of the solar system with multiple hammers of different length spinning.
If you watch a hammer thrower you see that they need to lean back to counter the pull of the spinning hammer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6UwokP8BEg
Jupiter is the big hammer that the sun keeps spinning. But all the planets influence the sun and are constantly shifting the point that the centre of the sun rotates around and the rotational velocity of the sun around its moving point of rotation. The sun gains and loses rotational energy about that moving point depending on the alignment and misalignment of the planets. The larger outer planets have as much influence as Jupiter on the movement of the sun because their change in pull angle is slower.
This linked chart shows the torque on the sun due to the changing pull from the planets:
https://1drv.ms/i/c/cdb8a3183f0262ad/Ea1iAj8Yo7gggM2OBAAAAAABiUQExBYpJW4Yk01ZrNYQCQ?e=7uF5R0
This torque aligns well with solar activity because there is a related “tidal” force that alters the axial spin of the sun and creates surface shearing due to the tidal force being greatest at the equator of the sun.
The MWP aligned with high negative torque on the sun’s motion about its changing point of rotation.
The planets influence on the Sun cause the change in solar activity but the big driver of Earth’s ever changing climate is the precession cycle.
This table has the solar intensity at 60S for the summer solstice for the past 1000 years:
-1.000 511.773509
-0.900 511.550578
-0.800 511.309654
-0.700 511.051205
-0.600 510.775733
-0.500 510.483767
-0.400 510.175853
-0.300 509.852542
-0.200 509.514386
-0.100 509.161925
0.000 508.795691
So daily solar input down 3W/m^2 over the past 1000 years (you would expect the Ross Sea and Southern Ocean to have a cooling trend as observed. So if an imaginary CO2 forcing of 1.3W/m^2 by the time it gets to 550ppm can cause global boiling, imagine the impact of real 3W/m^2.
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Excellent catch, the natural variables illustrate exactly what is happening.
For starters, la Nina dominated during the LIA and El Nino is prevalent in warm times. This suggests that climate change has nothing to do with humans.
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Further to that, the Southern Annular Mode was negative from the start of the LIA until around 1600 when it became very positive.
The negative state of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation throughout the LIA is also of interest.
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We also know that the Eemian inter-glacial was 8 c warmer than our Holocene and sea levels were 6 to 9 metres higher then.
In fact our climate today is much cooler than it was in the earlier Holocene climate optimum, when boreal forests grew up to the Arctic coastline for thousands of years and today there’s just tundra and ice. See MacDonald et al study.
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I’m still waiting for the mummified remains of a pre-Maori adventurer to appear out of one of our ‘rapidly disappearing’ glaciers – stranger things have happened – which would throw a kumara amongst the apple-cart or a spanner in the waka/canoe.
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I’d love to see that day too, but don’t get your hopes up.
Here in Australia when we had the bony remains of pre “first-Australian” Australians emerge from the dry sands of Lake Mungo, (and other non “first-Australian” Australians appear from Kow Swamp), it changed nothing. As I recall they were quickly explained away by the dominant woke sector of academia, generously claimed by “first-Australians as their own, taken to a secret location and reburied accordance with modern “first-Australian” traditional ceremony, (although Kow Swamp remains are held at Melbourne University).
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Years ago I read that Australian Aborigines and people from Papua New Guinea, Torres Strait Islands as they now camped around a lake now known as the Gulf of Carpentaria during the last Ice Age
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Talking penguins ?
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Of course. Haven’t you seen the Madagascar animated film?
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Here they are –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4NVcQ_EOYw
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And flying Penguins as well?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4
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Most excellent … back when the Pythons still had a sense of humour.
Sadly Terry Jones, and even Michael Palin, later fell for the scam called The Anthropocene.
RIP Mr Jones.
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Now, how about a ‘Pigs might Fly’ video. AI anyone?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pigs-might-fly
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The closest I could get.
Pigs Can Fly: Pink Floyd Animals album cover reconstruction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXa7G3kQKLY
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Found an AI one Johnny although it’s not actually a pig but a Piggle.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MEIRi7bMoSE
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ha, ha, ha……………..
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I love it and what a magnificent Coal Fired Power Station and Architecture. Like St Pauls the German bombers couldn’t bomb it.
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I like this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7VcEyuEEGk
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Clever. I like it.
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“The climate experts also told us a million times that global warming would wipe out the penguins, but instead it turns out, global cooling does.”
Exactly. And Humans nearly got wiped out in the last Ice Ages.
Somehow, we do better when it’s warmer.
Crops don’t grow very well under a mile of ice either.
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It’s funny how one can be labelled a climate change denialist. Of course l believe in climate change, I just don’t believe in the same brand of climate change that prevails.
Indeed, if climate didn’t change we wouldn’t even be arguing about it. If the last Ice Age persisted, the human population would never have grown exponentially. There would be small groups of us huddled in caves deciding arguments with grunting and clubs.
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Sadly, I think that most people, present company excepted, think that after decades of climate change propaganda, that the climate is unchanging except for the intervention of man. They have no clue, for example, that we are in a rare interglacial period. A relatively warm climate as we have now has not been the norm for most of the existence of modern humans.
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Schools have been indoctrinating children with climate doomsday propaganda for at least 25 years now, and when they attend college they are inundated with it. Virtually every old school geologist I know laughs at the climate doomsdayers, but virtually every 20-something geologist I know are full blown climate doomsday believers. It’s hard to take.
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Please tell me this isn’t the same Turkey who had to be rescued from Antarctic summer sea ice on his way south to prove that very ice had all melted because of my Toyota diesel and butane lighter?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/audio/2018978269/the-science-of-swells
CQ University in Brisbane’s Professor Steve Turton spews forth a diatribe of nonsensical non-scientific back-to-front mumbo-jumbo dogma regarding last week’s weather – now referred to as Ex-TC Alfred.
Bigger! Badder! Worserer! Never happened before! Fossil fuels! Oh the calamity – of a Russian diesel-powered ship saving his sorry butt when his pet theory was proven wrong before he even stepped ashore at Mawson Base… or is he yet another cookie-cut Prof. Turkey?
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That was Chris Turney of “Ship of fools” fame.
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CO2 is a simple molecule which like all non-radioactive molecules does not generate heat so it cannot raise the temperature of anything. Molecules are matter, heat is energy an entirely different entity.
Climate data clearly shows that temperature change precedes CO2 change so it is impossible for the later CO2 change to be the cause of temperature change.
Furthermore the data shows that CO2 changes with the seasons, that is, climate change causes CO2 change not the reverse as promoted by the UN IPCC and WEF as part of their attempt to gain “One World Government” and rule us all.
Wake Up World !
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BTW here’s that link to the co2 Coalition scientist’s fact 15 and there’s also a link to the study, showing the Eemian then was 8 c warmer than today and much more melting of Greenland by 122 K years ago.
Of course very few Humans then and no FFs like Coal or Gas or Oil were used to make that much warmer Eemian Interglacial. GEZZZZ it couldn’t be natural warming, could it????
https://co2coalition.org/facts/the-last-interglacial-was-8c-14f-warmer-than-today/
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This website shows that daily average sea surface temperatures are around 6 degrees C warmer than surface air temperatures.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/
If these figures are correct, surely the heat transfer is from the oceans to the atmosphere and not the other way round. There seems to be little interest from the scientific community about this but I found a Sceptical Science article from 2011 which purported to show that a “cool skin Layer” less than 1mm thick on the ocean surface created by CO2 stops the transfer of heat from ocean to air. It sounds like garbage to me but is there any truth in it?
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You are correct about sea surface being warmer than the air immediately above, and heat transfer being from ocean to atmosphere but I haven’t checked your number (I think it might be too high). The flow is: sunlight (modified by clouds) passes little changed through the atmosphere and penetrates into the ocean. That warms the ocean, which then warms the atmosphere mostly by convection, which maintains clouds and sends energy back into space.
The idea that CO2 creates a cool skin layer seems absurd, but of course I am open to correction. Thevprocess is that CO2 traps virtually no incoming sunlight, but does trap some upward infrared radiation (IR) from the ocean surface. When CO2 sends some IR back to the ocean, unlike sunlight it cannot penetrate the ocean and therefore warms the surface ‘skin’ layer. But that heat very quickly disappears via evaporation.
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Jo,
I might have missed a valuable point in my reading of this paper, but I do not consider it more than weak beer. The main objection that I have is that there was nobody to count and verify ancient penguin populations back to 200 AD. There is an element of circular logic in using statistical parameters from a model to show the model can be used. Assuming their models to be correct for me is just a bridge too far. Geoff S
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Fair enough Geoff. I thought it was interesting that their findings fitted similar papers suggesting the Ross shelf was warmer, and that other colonies of penguins were booming then too.
Other people have gone out before and found the bones and whatnot, and the diatoms and sediments suggesting warmth and penguins. (and Elephant Seals) They were trying to estimate the size of populations of penguins known to exist by other means. This study is not out the blue and not controversial.
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There was a lot of hysteria about iceberg A23a in Antarctica last year – will ruin the penguins, will hurt the environment bla bla.. It is impressive as the drone footage below shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNZKKdQ5cBI
However, at 40 Nm long (46 miles), it is a baby compared to to the one reported below from historical records:
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I guess we are witnessing YouTube videos that may be looked upon by likeminded people in a century or so and they may comment WTF?
So much recorded history gets overlooked by climate change enthusiasts in deference to modern technology and modelling.
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