Longtime readers of WUWT may remember this story from 2008:
Nutty Story of the Day: “Global Warming” is Killing the Penguins in Antarctica
The root of this goes back as far as 2006, such as this MSNBC story:
Now it appears that assertion of a link between global warming and penguin deaths is dying faster than the penguins themselves. In what appears to be a manifestation of the observer effect problem in science (the act of observing changes the outcome) we have this article from the science journal Nature that says the act of tagging penguins so they can be tracked by researchers, seems to have a significant side effect on their life expectancy (mortality) and ability to reproduce. The article goes on to question a climate connection.
The cover page headline in Nature:
Flipper-banding reduces penguins fitness and skews climate data
Here’s a news story:
PARIS (AFP) – Tagging penguins with flipper bands harms their chances of survival and breeding, a finding which raises doubts over studies that use these birds as telltales for climate change, biologists said on Wednesday.
The metal bands, looped tightly around the top of the flipper where it meets the body, have long been used as a low-cost visual aid by researchers to identify individual penguins when they waddle ashore.
Foot tags are not used because of the penguin’s anatomical shape.
But, says the new study, the seemingly harmless bands affect the penguin’s swimming performance, causing it to waste more energy in foraging for food, sometimes with life-threatening consequences.
Publishing in the journal Nature, French and Norwegian scientists reported that they took 100 king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus), selected at random on Possession Island on the Crozet archipelago, a sub-Antarctic group in the southern Indian ocean.
All were tagged with a minute, electronic transponder that was implanted under the skin, which can only be read by using specialist equipment placed close to the bird. Fifty of the 100 birds were additionally given a flipper band.
The team then recorded sightings of the group over the next 10 years.
Banded birds were 16 percent likelier to die than non-banded counterparts, and had 39 percent fewer chicks, they report.
“The picture is unambiguous,” researcher Yvon Le Maho told AFP. “Among banded penguins, the least-fit individuals died out in the first five years of the study, which left super-athletic birds.
“In the remaining five years, the mortality rate between the two groups was the same, but the reproductive success of banded penguins was 39 percent lower on average.”
Le Maho said he had warned many years ago against banding penguins on ethical grounds but was sidelined. Opponents argued that the birds were not affected by the practice or got used to the tag after a year or so.
The latest findings, though, are unequivocal, he said.
Entire story here
Here’s a video from Nature on the issue:
You can add “Penguins killed by AGW” to the trashbin along with the now disproven Frogs being killed by AGW hype.
Oh and let’s not forget the fact that the whole of the continent of Antarctica has been shown not to have any statistically significant warming (except in the peninsula, which may be affected by weather station issues, since most Antarctic weather stations are near a warm pocket of humanity, i.e. researchers) by our skeptical scientist friends Jeff Condon and Ryan O’Donnell.
Yeah, it’s all about the warming in Antarctica, it couldn’t possibly be anything else.
Also, Disney herded the lemmings off the cliff to demonstrate that lemmings commit suicide.
…but of course, everyone loves Disney, they could never harm animals.
This reminds me of the nature show where the camera crew followed the young bear until it starved to death… how successful do you think he could be with their zippy little camera’s swirling around him and a group of noisy smelly humans around. Sometimes I think scientists do more harm then good and don’t even realize it. I could mention drowning bears .. but I think my point is made. Humans in general apparently aren’t smart enough yet to understand the law of unintended consequences.
“Yeah, it’s all about the warming in Antarctica, it couldn’t possibly be anything else.”
Anthony, it just can’t be that you’re bitter about the years of careless, ideologically driven conclusion-mongering pap passed off as science by leading journals and organizations … can it?
But all penguins die either of cold or starvation (which is apparently why they freeze to death) or getting eaten or being in an accident or, lastly, old age.
The only way for penguins to die extra from global warming, since they, apparently, eat as close to home as, we all and, they can, is if global warming leads to even colder weather and climate.
Funny how the penguins, apparently, thrive come summer, even around the fringes of South Africa in the years when it is extra warm around the fringes of South Africa.
WHY ENVIRONMENTAL FORTUNE-TELLING IS ACCEPTED
a.n.ditchfield
A recurrent thought of Nigel Lawson is that much of the current malaise in the West is due to the erosion of traditional religion and education. The West has lost its bearings. In this he echoes G.K. Chesterton: “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything”. The epigram expresses what anthropologists have long known: that religiosity seems to be hardwired into the human brain; if suppressed in one form it returns in another.
Before the French Revolution all of Europe was referred to as Christendom and since then, secularisation has advanced by the hand of governments with agendas. In France, the Catholic clergy was disbanded, church property was confiscated and forked out to politicians in power while a state sponsored Humanist creed promptly enthroned a supporting Goddess Reason at Nôtre Dame cathedral in Paris. Bismarck sought to bolster the power of the Prussian state by instituting political control over religious activities, the Kulturkampf. Similar action was taken in Italy, Spain and Portugal at various times, often aimed against religious educational institutions, so as to ensure the indoctrination the young at secular schools. The Soviet Union went the whole hog to establish atheism as the official creed and to exorcise or burn dissenters. While such state action eroded the hold of traditional religion, in more recent times Environmentalism has crept in as the religion of choice of urban dwellers, even in English-speaking countries that had seemed to hold immunity to European-style anticlericalism.
“Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop”. The pagan-like worship of Nature has rites, such as planting a tree to atone for an air trip; believers neither fake nor dissemble the sin of consumerism, but acknowledge and confess it; the faithful make weekly trips to the countryside to enter into communion with Nature; their children attend Sunday school to hear Inconvenient Truths, the sayings of the high priest Al Gore. The congregation dutifully joins processions to sing hymns for green causes, of all things nice and beautiful for creatures great and small. It observes a calendar with red-letter days, such as Earth Day; perhaps green-letter days would be more to the point. There is a hagiography of saints, the followers of the righteous path of Rachel Carson, and a rogue’s gallery of demons, the big bad oil companies and the dirty coalminers that tempt mankind with the unclean combustion that lights the fires of Hades. Railroads that carry coal are merchants of death. The holy waters of the Gulf of Mexico were profaned by an oil spill. Religious orders such as Green Peace and Friends of Earth propagate the true faith. The green religion even sells indulgences, in the form of Carbon Credits for those who cannot stop sinning.
These beliefs could be as harmless as a football match, were it not for consequences on a practical plane when they inspire misguided policies designed to de-industrialise the West and block the ascent of hundreds of millions in India and China to the amenities of an adequate diet, clean drinking water, electricity, and basic education and health care. The undoing of two centuries of achievements of the Industrial Revolution is on the march, a retreat back to poverty and want.
Worse may come for democratic rule of law. Horrible penalties are publicly demanded for heretics who deny the reality of Anthropogenic Global Warming or question, on rational grounds, the Articles of Faith that underpin the warning message that the end of the world is nigh:
· We are running out of space. The world population is already excessive for a limited planet, and grows at exponential rates, with dire effects.
· We are running out of means. The planet’s non-renewable resources are being depleted by runaway consumption; further expansion of the world economy is unsustainable.
· We are running against time , as tipping points of irreversible climate processes are reached. Carbon dioxide emitted by the economic activity causes global warming. It will soon bring catastrophic climate disruption that will render the planet uninhabitable.
When such issues are quantified, the contrast between true and false becomes clear. Acts of faith have no place when dealing with measurable physical issues.
Is overcrowding a serious problem? It may seem so to the dweller of a congested metropolitan city. This is local discomfort, but not something that can be generalised for the planet. The sum of U.S. urban areas amounts to 2% of the area of the country, and 6% in densely populated countries like England or Holland. And there is plenty of green in urban areas. If the comparison is restricted to the ground covered by buildings and pavements, the occupied area amounts to 0.04% of Earth’s terrestrial area. It was estimated that 6 billion people could live comfortably on100 000 square miles, the area of Wyoming, or 0.2% of the total. With about 99.8% of free space available the idea that the planet is overpopulated is an exaggeration. Demographic forecasts are uncertain, but the most accepted ones, of the UN, foresee the stability of the global population, to be reached in the 21st century. According to some, world population will start to decline at the end of this century and an aging population emerges as a matter of concern. With so much available space is untenable that the world population is excessive or has the possibility of ever becoming so.
It is argued that, ultimately, a limited planet cannot allow unlimited growth. It can also be counter-argued that, ultimately, non-renewable natural resources do not exist, in a universe governed by the Law of Conservation of Mass, which in popular form states that “nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes.” Not a gram of human usage was ever subtracted from the mass of the planet and, in theory, all material used can be recycled. The feasibility of doing so depends on the availability and low cost of energy. When fusion energy becomes operational it will be available in virtually unlimited quantities. The source is deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen found in water in a proportion of 0.03%. A cubic kilometre of seawater contains more potential energy than would be obtained from combustion of all known oil reserves in the world. Since the oceans contain 3 billion cubic kilometres of water is safe to assume that energy will last longer than the human species. Potable water need not be a limitation, as is sometimes said; an innovation like nano-tube membranes holds the promise of reducing energy costs for desalination to a tenth of current costs, which would make feasible the use of desalinated water for irrigation along the coast of all continents (750,000 km). What grounds are there to assume such technologies never will come to fruition?
There is no growing shortage of resources signalled by rising prices. Since the mid-19th century a London periodical, The Economist, has kept consistent records of commodity values; in real terms, they dropped over a century and a half, due to technological advances, to the cheapening of energy and to its more efficient use. The decline was benign. The cost of feeding a human being was eight times higher in 1850 than it is today. Even in 1950, less than half the world population of 2 billion had a proper diet of more than 2000 calories per day; today 80% and have it and the world’s population is three times greater.
There is no historical precedent to support the idea that human ingenuity is exhausted and that technology will henceforth stagnate at current levels. Two centuries ago, this idea led to the pessimistic Malthus prediction of the exhaustion of land to feed a population that seemed to grow at exponential rates.
There is a problem with the alleged global warming. It stopped in 1998 after rising the previous 23 years, sparking the current alarm about global warming by human hand. Since 1998, warming has been followed by 12 years of stable or declining temperatures, a sign of a cold 21st century. This shows that there are natural forces modifying climate, more powerful than carbon dioxide generated by burning fossil fuels. Natural forces include cyclic fluctuation of ocean temperatures, sunspot activity and the effect on cosmic rays of the sun’s magnetic activity. All these cycles are known, but mankind can do nothing for or against forces of this magnitude. Measures to adapt to changes make sense; not the de-industrialization of a world where a quarter of mankind still has no electricity.
Caution in public policy must be exerted because climate change predictions are subject to great uncertainty. The existing knowledge about climate comes from numerous fields such as meteorology, oceanography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology, etc., with partial contributions to the understanding of climate. There is no general theory of climate with predictive capacity and perhaps there never will be one. Chaotic phenomena, in a mathematical sense, cannot be predicted. Climate forecasts that extend to the next century carry as much substance as readings of tea leaves by fortune-tellers.
With no basis on solid theory and empirical evidence, the mathematical models that support alarmist predictions are nothing more than speculative thought which reflect the assumptions fed into models, and chosen in the interest of sponsors. These computer simulations provide no rationale for public policies that inhibit economic activity “to save the planet.” And carbon dioxide is not toxic or a pollutant; it is a plant nutrient in the photosynthesis that sustains the food chain for all living beings on the planet.
Stories about disasters circulate daily. Anything that happens on earth is attributed to global warming: an earthquake in the Himalayas, the volcanic eruption in Iceland, the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean; tribal wars in Africa, heat wave in Paris; plague of snails on the tiny Isle of Wight; forest fires in California; sandstorms during the dry season and floods during the wet season in Australia; recent severe winters in North America; the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota; the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, known for five cycles centuries. Evo Morales blames Americans for summer floods in Bolivia.
Such reckless allegations of cause and effect indicate that global warming is not a physical phenomenon; it is a political and journalistic phenomenon, which finds a parallel in the totalitarian doctrines that once incited masses deceived by demagogues.
As Chris Patten put it: “Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off”. In the opinion of Professor Aaron Wildavsky, global warming is the mother of all environmental alarm: “Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population’s eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.” It is the hippie’s dream of a life of idleness, penury, long hair, unshaven face, blue jeans, sandals and a vegetarian diet; a lifestyle to be foisted upon the world by dictatorial decree of a supra-national eco-fascist dictatorship and justified by the fantasy of a limit to lebensraum on a finite planet.
Anyone who doubts this as hyperbole should read what James Hansen himself has to say at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20101122_ChinaOpEd.pdf
“the least-fit individuals died out in the first five years of the study”
“Opponents argued that the birds were not affected by the practice or got used to the tag after a year or so.”
===========================================================
obviously
At least they didn’t say Arctic………………..
Along with the observer effect, this also illustrates the elite’s refusal to acknowledge the difference between living and dead, and even the elite failure to distinguish male and female. If you understand penguins as living creatures with intention and desire, and you understand the requirements of male and female, you’ll recognize that a visible imperfection will interfere with suitability for mating. If you start from the egalitarian/feminist myth that all things can be treated as indistinguishable passive elementary particles, you’ll miss this recognition.
Here, as in the crime against nature known as the Endangered Species Act, our elites claim to be Darwinists but actually violate Darwin at every step.
[snip – funny, but will be misconstrued by the humorless]
Banding kills penguins or a 50 part per million increase in carbon dioxide kills penguins? Smart money is on the carbon dioxide….duh!
The word “unequivocal” seems to pop up everywhere. Together with “robust” and “unprecedented”.
Interesting article.
It is nice to see that some scientists can figure out the obvious. Anyone that ever saw a penguin swim underwater would release that they are exceptionally hydrodynamic and the tag is going to have a serious negative effect not to mention the fact that it probably makes it look less fit to other penguins. Too bad other scientists don’t seem capable of getting the obvious fact that in order for there to be an effect to study, there has to a reasonable cause that can explain it. Significant warming can’t be the cause they are desperately trying to prove if it doesn’t exist in the first place.
It’s worse than the report. From the Knight Science Journalism Tracker and Seth Borenstein …
It’s unequivocal . Not disputing the story , just noting that the word has been seen a lot today . How many buzz words do these guys use ?
Maybe if they used more attractive tags …….. This reminds me of the frog / toad researchers who, it was later discovered, were spreading disease, while claiming AGW was reducing the critters ability to survive.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php?s=frogs
“Scientists” seem to kill more of nature’s animals by banding,tagging, capturing, hugging, and all other forms of so called studies. Follow the money just like the whole AGW thingy. I am ashamed of all of them.
Is this the beginning of Nature actually publishing real science again?
Once again here is proof that scientists who may be expert in their field, in this case penguin research, lack common sense in their use of flipper tags.
I’ve always wondered whether tags of any kind affect wildlife, but assumed that the scientists had checked that out. Now they have.
The study was started in 1998 and five years later they knew they had a problem – that means the S.H. summer of 2003. This is currently the seventh summer since then – if I’ve got the arithmetic correct. So, how many penguins have been tagged?
I guess I’ll have to modify this to refer to penguins instead of Polar Bears:
Duh! Researchers depend on funding and to get funding they need to find out important things. The whole idea of handicapping animals with metal banding is so so that the animals do indeed die out quickly and catastrophically.
Duh! How else do you think you get more research funds for the next antarctic boondoggle?
That’s the secret.
If the researchers found that Penguins were doing just fine then their research grants would be much more difficult to justify.
Hey, doesn’t everyone realize that the Bling these scientists were giving to these poor creatures would help with their mating chances? Remember Lovelace from Happy Feet? He had those cool rings around his neck, he had the chicks digging him! These poor fellas can’t help it if the female penguins didn’t realize what a fine addition these cool armbands were. I wanna go out and get one myself…
/Sarcasm off
OT, but look at the advert top right of article – Build wealth through investing in real estate. Based on the assumption that, of course, real estate never falls in value. Another article of faith, just like CAGW, that has been blown out of the water in the past few years.
Re the snip. Quite understand.
[snip, funny, but will be misconstrued by the humorless]
Are the penguins drowning like the polar bears?
“Le Maho said he had warned many years ago against banding penguins on ethical grounds but was sidelined.”
I am sure his results are correct but in science (and climate science especially) I hate to see someone promoting a point of view on ethical grounds – then confirming it with his own research and data (observations unverifiable over a long period of time). Hopefully his research will be confirmed by others in a few years.