The Penguins Are OK

First it was polar bears, now it is emperor penguins. Liberals love to select animals they can anthropomorphize and portray as threatened by “climate change.” Polar bears didn’t work out well for them, since their populations are at record levels. The penguins aren’t promising either, as biologist Susan Crockford explains:

Despite the hype last week over the newly published paper by Peter Fretwell and colleagues, there is no plausible ecological rationale for proposing that a single season’s reproductive failure in four small colonies of emperor penguin (Aptenodytes fosteri), due to La Nina conditions — phenomena unrelated to carbon dioxide emissions — are signs of a future “quasi-extinction” of the species, as proposed in the BAS video here. None of the estimated 282,150 breeding pairs of adult emperors were lost in 2022 off the Antarctic Peninsula and chicks born in several dozen other emperor colonies around the Antarctic continent survived, which means this was a tiny bump in the road rather than a catastrophe for the species.

There is much more at the link, with maps, etc. The bottom line is that this is one more fabricated scare by climate cultists who try to take advantage of widespread ignorance of Antarctic geography, climate and wildlife. This is Crockford’s conclusion:

Activist scientists and the media are shamefully using emotional language to describe an almost inconsequential mortality event in order to manipulate public sentiment and force influential conservation organizations to accept a scientifically unsound political agenda.

That sums up much of “climate science” these days.