Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now endangered
iucn.org
iucn.org
We could "manhattan project" ourselves out of this mess if we wanted to. China, in a sense, is doing just that.
"Trump Administration Seals Extinction Fate for Rice’s Whale in Offshore Drilling Decision"
https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/03/trump-admi...
Hope this time around we do a better job of avoiding complete doom for these species.
I bet some emus will survive though, tough bastards.
Oh dear god.
0. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26353120M/Effective_awk_Prog...
This indeed a sad story.
My local zoo has a little event during winter where the king penguins get to go for a little walk around outside their enclosure. I've been a few times this year and they are just such fun animals. It has made me want to get involved with the zoo somehow, maybe not working with the animals directly but something. I don't know.
It makes me so sad how we humans know that we are messing things up on the planet but we keep doing it anyways because the economy must grow
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2024/01/08/cincinnati-...
It's a pretty fun little event. The penguins seem to really enjoy it, they're always checking out the crowd
The Penguin walk doesn't run all year, something like Nov-March. It's ended for this year unfortunately
But: what are we trading it for? Higher living standards for more people is a noble and good but I don't think there's evidence it requires this rate of ecological destruction. Have we ever seriously tried to decouple growth from extraction?
I'm not convinced a solar punk future exists where technology will eventually close that gap in time. Maybe it will. So far it seems that every efficiency gain gets swallowed by expanded consumption. What seems most probable now is that we don't get a better world but the same dirty one plus a Starbucks on Mars.
I'm not so sure. I'm reminded of this quote:
“How did you go bankrupt?" “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Ignoring any ethical or esthetic arguments, every species of living beings that disappears today, regardless if it is a beetle or a whale, is a definitive loss of very important information, whose value we are not yet able to assess. It is equivalent to the burning of a library containing very valuable research papers containing results obtained after many years of work, for which there are no copies elsewhere.
Despite the huge progress of technology during the last few centuries, there are still a lot of essential things that living beings can do, but which we have not learned yet how to do. An example is the energy-efficient capture of the diluted carbon dioxide from air and a huge number of other chemical processes that would be very useful, if mastered by humans.
Every species that is lost might be the one who could save us a lot of work in the future, when we will become able to determine in much more detail how a living being works, which could provide solutions to important technical problems, some of which are actually critical for the survival of humanity, because our current technologies cannot sustain human life without help from a great number of different kinds of living beings.
For some species that have disappeared or that are disappearing we have DNA sequences. However that is not the complete information about a living being, which would allow its reconstruction.
We are still unable to read the complete information about a living cell, because there is a lot of necessary information besides that stored in nucleic acid sequences. It is likely that we will become able to read the entire information in less than a century from now, but by then it may be too late and a very large number of species will be already lost, and even the survival of the human species is not certain, due to its great median stupidity.
Even for the species where you see claims that the DNA has been sequenced, that is only very seldom true.
Especially for the eukaryotic species, where the structure of the genome is much more complex, with many chromosomes and epigenetic information, for a very small fraction of the "sequenced" genomes we have complete information, e.g. including the actual composition of the chromosomes and the locations of the genes on them, which may be important for gene regulation. For most of the existing sequenced genomes, we only have the sequences of a great number of random fragments of the genomes, from which we can make an estimation of the full genome, by examining the overlaps between the known fragments and hoping that they cover most of the genome.
There are only relatively few genomes that are known with great accuracy. Even the human genome, whose study had priority, has features that were finally discovered only decades after the first announcement claiming (falsely) that the sequencing of the human genome has been finished. Determining the sequence of the last unknown 1% of a genome can take more than the sequencing of the first 99% of the genome.
I saw a speech by Carl Sagan that might be relevant - he said (sometime in 1990 judging by haircuts) that the US had spent 10 trillion dollars on defending itself from the threat of Soviet attack since 1945, but that the attack was not “certain” - not 100% sure. So if we were willing to spend trillions to prevent an uncertain catastrophe, why does the same logic not apply to climate chnage?
Literally everything he described in there is precisely the world we live in today
Many people do not see climate change as certain. Those same people have become convinced that all solutions to climate change involve their lives getting worse. Finally, for those who accept the science of climate change, the “what to do” is not obvious.
In short: not everyone agrees it is a problem. Those that do, don’t agree on the mechanics of the solution.
Also IUCN, with only 180,000 individuals the Emperor penguin is now classified as Endangered.
I think someone has been out hunting headlines.
https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/categories-and-criteri...
No one is farming for headlines.
if "something might happen in the next 60 years to wipe out half the population" counts as making a species endangered, every species on the planet counts as endangered.
The die off is accelerating. Krill shortages (mostly due to commercial fishing) and warming temperatures will ensure it’s not going to take 60 years and that’s what the tag means.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/record-maximum-sea-ice-in...
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=3613794165505253&set=gm...
Meanwhile long term trends in Antarctic and arctic ice cover: https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-indicators/ice-sheets#...
Personally I'm on the not side.
And also
The only people I have seen deny climate change are the AGW idiots who think the climate has ever been stable, and who demand global action to try to put it into some sort of climatic stasis.
The rest of us have always accepted the SCIENTIFIC FACTS that:
(a) The Earth's climate has always changed and always will.
(b) The Earth's climate is EXTREMELY COMPLEX and cannot currently be accurately modeled in a computer.
(c) While humans, like EVERYTHING ELSE, have SOME effects on climate, there are plenty of other causes of change including many we probably do not know/understand. Some of these other sources, like the sun, have a far greater impact than humans.
(d) The Earth has been both significantly hotter and extremely cold many times in the past before there were enough humans to have had ANY effect on any of those previously very extreme changes.
We ALSO embrace things like the laws of economics, the record of human history, and accept basic human nature - so we:
(a) Believe humans will continue to advance technologically and thus we as a species become better able to deal with climate change with every passing decade, making it retrograde to go nuts trying to offset it now - even if we could, and if we could afford it, and if its happening.
(b) Know that far more people are dying today from other sources than from climate, and that reducing some of the deaths and suffering of people TODAY is achieved using some of those fossil fuels people like you want eliminated or made too expensive because YOU claim it will save some future persons from some imagined future horror.
(c) WE actually believe a pet theory should be PROVEN before we implement policies that have a negative impact on the lives of millions of people in the name of "solving" the supposed problem. In fact, we'd like to not only see the problem PROVEN to exist, but we also want to see that the proposed solution will actually work, will be the most cost-effective option, and will have the least impact upon the lives and liberty of the people who are alive today.
What proof would you accept? What are the goalposts. You have the standard counterpoints for every scientific argument, what is the point of trying to prove anything to someone who so adamantly doesn’t want to believe something? The people that actually work on this stuff are very sure that the greenhouse gas effect has been proven beyond a doubt. Thousands of studies, and billions of dollars have been spent and the huge majority of it points towards human caused climate change being real. People have been giving you the proof, and they have been giving you the solutions, but you demand more?
Fine, flip it around: why does the majority of evidence, expertise and smart money think that it is real? I need better proof of your “pet theory” that this is natural. As you say: “ WE actually believe a pet theory should be PROVEN…”
By definition: if human climate change hasn’t been proven or disproven, then the opposite idea of natural climate change is just as unproven, but has the added problem of being the chosen theory of people who mostly aren’t domain experts, but do believe that they will be made personally worse off in the short term by mitigation efforts.
https://courses.ems.psu.edu/earth107/sites/earth107/files/Un...
We are due to enter another ice age, quite possibly in our lifetime. It has already been warmer longer than 2 of the past three warm periods. Quite possibly because of/thanks to AGW.
The oil has run out and now 2 miles of ice above new york is coming to a store near you.
Everything else is a distraction and propaganda.
But either way the Penguins will be fine.
Great.
Do you understand sea levels rise when it is warmer and fall when it is colder?
In our very recent history, sea levels were 10 meters higher than they are now, that means in our very recent history it was significantly warmer than now. back when the nile was the green cradle of humanity.
From here the only way is colder - enough ice formed in the last few thousand years to drop the sea level by 10 meters, and even if it did warm and melt enough ice to rise the sea levels back to 10m higher than now, Penguins already survived it. We will to.
going back to 2 miles of ice above your fav city puts us back in the era passing bible stories verbally (but at least we know now they will use gaza and tel aviv instead of soddom and gommah).
Oh, and btw, the decline in the Penguin population is almost certainly China overfishing, do you have any idea how huge Antarctica is?
But don't let a few facts stand in the way of you believing what you read in the local tabloid.
For example: the singular graph that you linked above is from a course that has an entire module on sea level rise, that actually addresses and rebuts the exact arguments that you are making: https://courses.ems.psu.edu/earth107/node/1494.
When the materials you are citing preemptively entire sections debunking your specific arguments and use of the evidence, it is - at best - a sign that you have misinterpreted your own sources by not considering all of the available evidence. It also might mean that your misinterpretation is so common that they can see it coming, leading to the conclusion that you aren't following the evidence, but being led. There are less charitable interpretations, as well, but they aren't in the spirit of the site.
Posting a link that says exactly what I said: "but you can easily appreciate that sea levels have been much higher than today for much of this period of the Earth's history"
Is pretty much the opposite of debunking as far as I know.
The full quote for those that care:
"We don’t need to go into a lot of detail, but you can easily appreciate that sea levels have been much higher than today for much of this period of the Earth's history. Scientists have correlated these fluctuations with changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and ocean and atmospheric temperatures, using methods described in the next few pages.
We also must acknowledge here that some people may argue that sea levels have always fluctuated, so why is sea level rise today a big deal? Hopefully, we can shed some light on this question by looking at the changes in sea level through the history of the Earth, while considering the causes for these changes. But, perhaps the simple fact that seas are rising faster than ever before in human history is enough to facilitate action and adaptation. You also may ask, “What can we do about it?” This question will be addressed in later modules."
Going back to where I originally jumped into this conversation, its pretty clear that no level of evidence will change your position. You ask for conclusive evidence where plenty exists, and treat inconclusive evidence as unimpeachable proof of your position. You are backfilling evidence to support your position instead of building a position from the evidence. You will continue to ignore inconvenient scientific evidence, while stretching misunderstood evidence to the breaking point.
In short, there is no point continuing to debate science with someone so utterly set on their position.
I'm done here. You can have the last word if you want to keep digging your hole.
Do you know why the earth is so much colder when the southern hemisphere is in winter than when the northern hemisphere is in winter?
Because anyone not seeking money from the green energy VCs will tell you all about that and how the earths axial precession causes 26k year ice age cycles - what happens to the climate when the sun is mostly shining on ocean rather than land. Guess which phase of that cycle we are in right now...
what was your rationale for accelerating that descent into the next ice age again? Cos yeah, no amount of claims based on zero facts is going to convince me of anything, I find your assumption that humanity under miles of ice a worthy endeavour to be nothing short of grotesque malthusian snake oil.