Not a single emperor penguin chick survived spring in parts of Antarctica | Hacker News Reader

Not a single emperor penguin chick survived spring in parts of Antarctica

smh.com.au

104 pointsNoRagrets97 comments

Sort of like p-hacking: If you choose small colonies, all located in a small area known for instable ice conditions, in some years, those colonies have problems. The ice in that area is subject to severe weather conditions, and in some years it breaks up and floats away.

Those problems didn't apply to the rest of Antarctica, but by omitting that information, the article makes good clickbait...

"factual but not truthful"

thats a nice play on words, but fact and truth are synonymous. I think you're looking for the phrase: "factual but not informative"

I guess there is a reason they settled on the phrase "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth".

This article is truth, but not the whole truth.

Knowing some facts and knowing the truth are different things. I'd say "factual but not truthful" is rigorous enough for a quip.

Fact and truth aren't synonymous. The connotation in English is different. A fact implies a verifiable statement with no grey area."A man died from falling". The truth implies you have the full picture and relevant context. "A man was murdered by being pushed off a building". Murder of course can't be 100% proven, it's a legal concept that involves intent and pre-planning and your location etc. Our fictional friend may be able to get a technicality that makes purposely pushing a man off a building not legally murder. But the truth would still be he murdered him.

"A man died from falling" is still truthful, though?

This is why courts have you commit not just to tell the truth, but the whole truth.

“The man did not die from the fall” is another example here. (He died from the impact, not the fall.)

I think that one is false, though? All of the following can be true:

* The man died from massive internal bleeding

* The man died from hitting the ground really hard

* The man died from falling off a building

* The man died from being pushed off a building

Perhaps intentionally misleading?

> "factual but not truthful"

Synonym for "talking points" ?

Isn’t the point that Antarctic sea ice is at a record low extent?

Not a single human survived in parts of NYC is technically true.

Everyone is a billionaire in parts of SF.

I feel silly for asking, however, this comment has 'whooshed' right over my head. Can you please elaborate and explain this to me?

The point is you can always pick a "part" of some place small enough to make any statement of that sort true. Pick a couple of square meter where someone died: "everyone died in parts of X". Pick the area around a couple of billionaire neighbors in SF: everyone is a billionaire in parts of SF. Etc.

Taken a step further, it's not science when the conclusion is based on cherry picked data; and it's not journalism when you ignore the fact the "science" isn't actually science.

This is why mathematicians are so meticulous with their "if and only if", "everywhere except a countable number of points", infinimum/supremum[1] and so on, and of course equations to really nail things down.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infimum_and_supremum

It's related to the cherry picking fallacy. It's like saying, "everybody speaks French in parts of Europe", making it seem like that is the dominant language. While technically true that people speak French in Europe, the statement also completely omits a crucial detail that 92 % rest of Europe doesn't.

Yes it sort of plays on “parts” as an ambiguous quantity. To the reader, they may assume parts to be “the entire north” rather than “half a culdesac”

> Not a single human survived in parts of NYC is technically true.

It is technically true. But, if we're analysing excess mortality to observe extraordinary circumstances, we shouldn't let that truism disregard the observation that not a single human survived in the top 10 floors of a given skyscraperbof NYC on a particular Tuesday.

Very little in the Sydney Morning Herald is true or factual. It's a player in politics of lies.

Meta: well, not sure if it was your goal, but reading your dismissal made me think, "Oh, this HN commenter's pointed out the article is full of crap, so, no need to attribute this to climate change, then.".. luckily another part of my brain said, "Wait a minute, why are you defaulting to thinking that HN commenter knows what he's talking about?!".

For me, once I realize that an article has specifically intended to deceive me (whether by exaggeration or misdirection), I don’t spend time further evaluating or even consuming what they were trying to say.

You could have a solid argument underlying your exaggeration and I just don’t care. Once you’ve intentionally deceived, I stop paying attention to you. You don’t lose just the detected deceitful part of your argument; you lose it all.

In that regard, whether or not the HN commenter knows anything about the underlying issue doesn’t matter. If they correctly clue me in to the deception, I don’t read the article.

That’s a shame. The writers of articles usually are not the writers of headlines. Yet you implicate the writer in the deception of the copywriter.

The writers of articles have far more per-capita influence over headlines than the readers do. If they want to maximize the reach and value of their work, they should exercise that influence.

Meanwhile, I'm doing my best by exercising the only influence that I have in the situation: hitting the X.

On the contrary, they have identical per capita influence: 0. At least as far as I understand how newspapers, magazines, etc. work. Blog writers? Sure.

Writers work for publishers. If a publisher writes misleading headlines, causing your work to be devalued, don’t work with them. If you keep working with them, you’re financially benefiting from and thereby complicit in their deceit.

I mean, that’s about as facile a claim as can be made. Sounds great in theory but in reality people working in print media don’t exactly have an expanding field full of opportunities for work.

Which brings us back to them being part of a system which is deceiving readers for financial gain. Hardly something that I feel a compulsion or obligation to support, even if only half of the partnership is directly involved in lying.

Yeah. So, if you were actually consistent in this stance, I don’t see how you could participate in really any piece of the modern economy. But I suspect you’re not consistent in this stance. I suspect it just bothers you more in this domain than others. But then, it’s normal for us humans to dress up our emotional responses in principled justifications.

Now why are those ice conditions instable?

"Record low 2022 Antarctic sea ice led to catastrophic breeding failure of emperor penguins"

"This is the first recorded incident of a widespread breeding failure of emperor penguins that is clearly linked with large-scale contractions in sea ice extent."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00927-x

Published and peer-reviewed. But according to you it is clickbait?

Yes? Title has no mention about specific regions. Abstract mentions specific regions. Even your comment is clickbait: you only include the title and a sentence that does not mention specific regions, despite you being aware of it, since you presumably read the abstract.

Let's stop pretending "peer-reviewed" means anything, please.

Means a lot more than a comment on Hacker News.

your comment has been peer-reviewed.

it was found to be subjective and unsupported.

Peer review raises the bar, but that bar is quite low, and not high enough to ensure anything like scientific truth.

I will leave it here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/19/stanford-pre...

I guess someone "peer reviewed" all his papers

This is a bad faith and ignorant take. As with anything at the edge of our knowledge, it’s not bulletproof, but peer review certainly does mean plenty. It is one of the most rigorous standards we have for the validity of observation and theories.

I think reproducibility is the gold standard. It’s hard to call peer review as practiced today “rigorous” when it comes to discerning truth.

Is it? If I'm not mistaken this is exactly what journal editors, and reviewers, claim each and every time a new scandal blows up.

Yes, a comment on a website that just says “no” is way more truthy and should be taken at face value. Anything published and peer reviewed can just be assumed to be false.

Great call. Thanks for really bringing up the level of discourse.

Nature is not immune and has been leveraging clickbait articles as of not so late.

A significant portion of peer reviewed papers are biased, poorly backed claims making junk.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

This article highlights some (known) deficiencies, but doesn't seem to remotely support your assertion of “significant portion” being junk.

It also seems extremely likely that such things vary wildly by field, journal, etc.

Which is to say that throwing the whole thing out in preference to a completely unsourced and anonymous comment on HN seems, frankly, idiotic.

They do vary wildly yes.

Even within the same publication.

Nature has historically proven to be one of the top journal. Not taking that away from them. But being published by nature and peer reviewed does not mean such article cannot use a clickbait title and/or be non scientific.

So you concede that saying a “significant portion” was an outright lie with no basis in reality?

No I wouldn't concede that.

I took some precaution and made sure to not mention an estimate of what that portion represents. I think it fair to call it significant given it isn't breaking news.

Blame me for not providing references proving it is based on some interpretation of reality not only I, have.

Can you explain which of the article's claims you believe are unsubstantiated?

I was not referring to the article claims but to the argument that it was "peer reviewed"

As if that meant nature or the title couldn't be a clickbait, or the conclusion/claims dubious. They can be, that's all I called out.

The thing is: all five colonies are close together, on the peninsula. So "widespread" is false, incorrect, a lie, pick your favorite term.

So, yes, clickbait.

Article says there are 600–3000 penguins per colony. Charitably, let’s say the authors studied 15,000 penguins. Total penguin population estimate: 600,000. So this survey counted at most 2.5% of all penguins by reasonable estimates.

“Not a single emperor penguin chick survived” seems unsupported.

Is that a wild guess to “reinforce” your point or do you actually have knowledge that this is common and zero survivors happens freqently?

Either that or it sounds like you are blaming the penguins for nesting somewhere historically stable..

What is their point?

Careful readers will see the qualifier “parts” stick out like a sore thumb, look further, and find out this represents 4% of breeding pairs’ chicks.[1]

Sensationalized headlines ruin the conversation. How many people in this post alone are talking about the quality of this coverage rather than how rapid increase in temperature causes extinctions and kicking the can down the road makes are problems larger and more expensive than sensibly addressing them now.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/emperor-penguins-aba...

"Recent efforts to predict emperor penguin population trends from forecasts of sea ice loss have painted a bleak picture, showing that if present rates of warming persist over 90% of emperor colonies will be quasi-extinct by the end of this century"

It's a very real problem, we are only seeing the start of it.

How about, instead of hoping for the best, we start assuming the worst. And for once act accordingly. It baffles me that people are willing to ignore a potential threat until the threat and impact have been proven completely, utterly and without even a shadow of a doubt.

> Scientists have recorded significant decreases in sea ice around Antarctica since 2016. While there have been small rebounds in recent years, they remain far below the record high of 2014.

The record high was only nine years ago? That seems like a weird fact, and it needs some explaining. Also, the first sentence:

> no chicks surviving the spring of 2022 in four of five colonies observed for a new study

Is waaaaay more alarmist than the later reveal of “about 30 per cent of emperor penguin colonies across the Antarctic coastline had been impacted by the low sea ice.” The first sentence makes it sound like they’re gonna be extinct in a year or two. 70% of the colonies being totally unaffected is a much different story.

Anyway, this is still an important story. But the authors are doing themselves no favors running around with their hair on fire like this.

30% of the entire penguin population is a massive number though. That's tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of penguins affected. If we wait for a problem to have to affect more than 50% before we worry then it'll already be long past a lost cause.

Not 30% of the population. Not 30% dead. It’s 30% of colonies affected.

While I think the evidence of man-made climate change is 100% irrefutable we need to be careful and not attribute every event to climate change. That's how you lose credibility. Even if you're right, people get sick of hearing it at a certain point. That matters.

Consider [1]:

> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)

I guarantee you these sudden warmings also caused problems for many species.

Bad years will happen for breeding. This is particularly a problem for species who all breed in one place. One failed season almost certainly isn't the end or the species already wouldn't exist. Also, species will inevitably go extinct (as 99% of the species we've ever had have).

[1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...

As if their lives are not already hard enough as it is.

By what standard? Ours?

Almost every animal has a simpler, easier life than the average human.

Penguins have a far easier life than the fish they eat. I feel sorry for the small fish; everyone is after them; big fish, sea gulls, octopuses, pelicans, penguins, dolphins, seals, humans... What creature on this earth does not eat herring or sardines? Humans even started feeding their ground up bones to chickens and other farm animals (who would otherwise not eat them)! Give the sardines a break!

I'm interested in how did emperor penguins survive previous warmer periods on Earth? The last time there was no ice at all in Antarctica was 33 mln years ago. That's a very long time in a species evolution, but during these last 33mln years there were many times when the amount of ice in the Antarctica shrunk by a lot. Most recently about 140k years ago.

Have emperor penguins not been evolved yet 140k years ago?

Have they just barely make it through? (just like humans during the last ice age - various estimates claim around 1k humans ~ 200 females that managed to survive at some point during the last ice age are the ancestors of all humans alive today).

For an interesting chart of temperatures in recent geologic record see this link https://iceage.museum.state.il.us/content/when-have-ice-ages...

But what killed the chicks? There's no mention of it in the article!

Neither the eggs or penguins require ice... And if there is no ice, the penguins would surely go on to land, eg nearby Rothschild island.

I don't get it - lack of ice doesn't kill things.

In the article:

> Emperor penguin colonies rely on sea ice between April and January to breed, but any change to their habitat impacts whether chicks develop waterproof feathers, and ultimately survive.

AIUI they breed on sea ice. If the ice melts before the chicks have developed waterproof feathers they drown.

Possibly lack of waterproofing leads to constantly getting cold water in contact with their bodies and they freeze to death.

Yes, we can imagine this or that, but we don't find it from the article.

Of course there is also the issue that no information about Antarctica can be confirmed by citizen journalists as the whole world (US, UK, Russia, China, etc) all agreed to preserve this continent and Antarctica can never even be felt explored by the public. Anyway, Antarctic information is certainly mediated for us.

Cheers. So the chicks did survive, but then drowned because their feathers weren't waterproof, when they went to swim? Or the ice melted from under them, before they were ready?

Emperor penguins can be breed in captivity, btw. So it can't be that ice is required. It must be that the environment needs to be stable. But then the article says it was the lack of ice that did it, not the changing of the environmental conditions.

> Emperor penguins can be breed in captivity, btw. So it can't be that ice is required.

You think the technology to create ice has not been invented, yet?

Ha! I believe it exists. :)

I probably should have said that the temperature in captivity isn't likely to be the same as that in Antarctica. I might be wrong, but I don't see them dropping the temperature to -70 degrees or whatever in captivity.

If the sea ice melts and the chicks drown before they develop waterproof feathers, then the melting ice could easily be the culprit, and still captive breeding would work.

Captivity environments for Emperor penguins are kept around 0C (32F), which is easy to do. Your fridge can do it.

In Antarctica, they usually live on the coast, where average temperatures are around -10C to 10C, not as extreme as in the interior (-40 to -60C).

Your explanation makes more sense, but that's not what the quoted text is saying. The text makes it seem that if the chicks don't grow up on (sufficient) sea ice, they may not develop waterproof feathers at all. Or is there some Australian-specific meaning of "impacts" that I'm unaware of?

https://www.science.org/content/article/emperor-penguins-aba...

Thank you so much for this link. This article is so much more informative than the article of the title of this thread, which does, in my opinion, more harm than good to the pro-climate change crowd with its misleading catastrophizing.

We did. As can be inferred from the title alone.

It’s a bit anthropomorphic to assume that large populations of birds can adapt their behavior to rapid changes in their environment on a short timescale. There’s no central planning to penguin behavior as far as I’m aware of. The fact that some emperor penguins can be made to breed in captivity without ice does not mean that enough penguins in the wild will do so without human intervention.

Evolution is trial and error. Maybe eventually they would change their breeding behaviors to rely less on ice in the wild. Or maybe a rapidly changing environment will cause enough members of this endangered species to go the “error” route, and trigger a population collapse.

Extinction is what happens to a species when all of its members look and act the same. Adaptation is the only alternative to extinction in the long run.

So what happened 13 years ago?

What happened in 2014? What months are the images from? Why 2014 and not 2009/2010? Why not a widget handling 20 years?

What is an actual solution? What would be be proposing if we just so happened to reach our peak humanity in the midst of a natural change in climate?

What part of Antarctica had 'not a single' survivor?

The idea that presenting information in the harshest way possible is somehow beneficial has obvious problems. Be honest in your analysis or you will push people away. Given the listing of plausible remedies, one has to write for all audiences.

*I'm already doing more than anyone for climate change this year in parts of Canada.

Can you clarify what you’re doing for climate change? Always looking for new ideas!

It is a quip against the article. The "... in parts of Canada..." can be as small as a room in their house. No competition for that achievement.

It's a bit of both worlds, but mostly for the purpose you mentioned.

My household doesn't produce garbage nor recycling(we reduce and reuse). We have no car.

I need some more info here! This sounds interesting. Do you compost your waste with spoilage too?

Do you live in a urban or rural environment? I was thinking urban without a car but anything is possible.

He’s holding his flatulence in. If all 8 billion humans hold our flatulence in we can reduce methane release by 72 metric tons a year.

As I jokingly typed this comment I googled to see how much methane was released per day by a human and there’s actually quite a bit of interest in it. A sort of interesting post linked below about cows with some data regarding cow numbers. I always thought blaming cows was ‘bullshit’ given how many more bison used to be in NA before our illustrious ancestors decided to obliterate them for idiot reasons:

https://medium.com/climate-conscious/do-humans-fart-more-met...

It's actually cow burps.

And a slight diet change to include a red seaweed has shown to decrease methane produced by cows by 80% https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces...

This is another way decreasing meat consumption can help humans, high fiber diets, with less red meat reduce our personal emissions.

I'm in favor of meat consumption because I believe that cows deserve to live. Without us eating their meat, much fewer cows would be born. I believe that cows are our friends, we need them and they deserve to be given a chance at life and a noble death... When death cometh for them (with a little help from our friendly local butcher), their bodies ought to be respectfully incinerated and then buried between two buns along with a slice of cheese and ketchup.

I'm failing at all my startups and thus ensuring that I can't afford to fly often. What are you doing to save the planet?

This makes me wonder about evolution. If, as the article says, they have no other culling other than climate change, it seems a crazy lack of adaptability that they can have large scale “breeding failure” due to a few degrees difference in average temperature. Like how did they survive this long in the first place? Surely the environment hasn’t been that stable on evolutionary time scales? Or perhaps a large portion of the population is just an overfitted population and now there is a corrective coming? Can it really wipe out the entire species?

Maybe the temperature has been that stable over evolutionary time scales: perhaps climate change has changed temperatures much faster. Adapting to a 1 degree change over 500 years might be a lot easier than doing the same in 50.

> Can it really wipe out the entire species?

Yes, climate changes historically have led to rapid and mass extinctions.

> an overfitted population and now there is a corrective coming?

More commonly, there's just rapid declines in populations, and the species survives and adapts and eventually - after enough adaptation - can evolve.

> Surely the environment hasn’t been that stable on evolutionary time scales?

Man-made climate change has done/will do in hundreds of years what normally takes tens of thousands...

Evolution is more of a long live the king thing. Evolution producing hardier species relies on death and loss of other species. It is pretty much replication based, and nothing more.

Evolution does not mechanically produce hardier species. It merely eliminates species that are poorly suited for the current environment and recent past.

This is an important distinction because your framing suggests rapid environmental changes would just more rapidly produce hardier species. This is not what happens. Extremely rapid environmental changes frequently just lop off whole branches of the evolutionary tree. Something will likely re-emerge to take its spot, eventually, but there is zero reason to believe that new thing will be “better” in any way than the prior thing, and definitely no reason to believe it’ll be better in terms of human preference in sharing a planet with it.

This should help put what’s going on into an evolutionary context:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

This is good. For the bigger picture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record

The earth's climate stabilized 10k-20k years ago, that allowed agriculture and all of human civilization in the last 10k years in the holocene.

We are rapidly ending the holocene through climate change and agriculture is probably going to fail, and billions of people will probably starve. The species might survive, but civilization won't and we will have to revert back to hunter gatherers.

Well, certainly the climate is mostly very stable unless there is an external stimulus like a meteor or valcano or humans.

> Surely the environment hasn’t been that stable on evolutionary time scales?

We're about at the maximum temperature that has ever been seen over the past few million years. The ice age cycles normally don't exceed about where we're at, normally it was colder. We're also changing the temperature exceedingly quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com