From the “I told you Angry Penguins were the new icon” department
The world’s polar regions are warming up faster than the global average, but the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula is especially steamy. Over the past 50 years, winter temperatures have shot up by an almost unbelievable 6°C—more than five times the global average, according to a paper just published in Science.
The new study, part of a special report on oceans and climate, focuses on the Antarctic Peninsula not only because it represents an extreme, but because it gives scientists a chance to look at a marine ecosystem under rapid climate change (the other polar hotspots, in Siberia and western North America, are well inland).
Rapidly rising temperatures—mostly driven by warmer ocean currents–have transformed the West Antarctic Peninsula’s landscape. The massive ice shelves that sit just offshore at the peninsula’s southern end have begun collapsing en masse . Overall, say the authors, 87% of the region’s glaciers are in retreat, the ice season has shortened by 90 days and, they write ominously, “These changes are accelerating.”
That being the case, it’s not surprising that the creatures who live here are under enormous stress. Adélie penguin populations, which need ice and cold weather to survive, have plummeted by 90% in the northern part of the peninsula over the past three decades, says lead author Oscar Schofield, a marine scientist at Rutgers University, while chinstrap penguins, which prefer more temperate climates, have increased. “The penguin populations near Palmer Station [the largest U.S. base in that part of the continent] have flipflopped,” says Schofield. “The area will probably be completely devoid of Adélies in five or ten years.”
Bah! It’s just as likely that the penguins are being impacted by the huge amount of industrial trawling going on around Antarctica:
http://www.grist.org/article/overfishing-antarctic-krill
The Chinese, Russians, Koreans etc. treat Antarctic krill as if it were a gift that keeps giving, and they are scraping the oceans clean of anything that swims. An inconvenient truth for ya!
However, if it is trendy to blame global warming, well, then, who doesn’t want to be trendy?
After signing the Unesco’s Santa Cruz Declaration….:
Galapagos will have a special prosecutor to investigate environmental crimes
http://www.latercera.com/contenido/739_269246_9.shtml
jakers says:
June 18, 2010 at 10:48 am
I see the Antarctic sea ice has gone just outside the 2 stnd deviations.
Houston, we have found the missing Arctic Ice…
Penguins??
What about Variola Major and Variola Minor?
Wiped out! Deliberately! Extinct!
Is there no end to the wickedness of Mankind (or should that be Personkind?)
Send more grant money, quickly!
The old chestnut comes to mind:-
“I have told you a million times not to exaggerate”
This is terrible news about Antarctic ice; it’s much, much worse than we thought. :o(
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html
It get even worse, much, much to much worse than we could ever have believed!!!
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
Cherrypicking season has arrived!!! They talk of Antarctic Peninsula I say look at the whole of Antarctica. Global ice hasn’t changed much in donkey’s years either.
Adélie penguin sushi must be pretty good! It must taste like chicken too!!!
see http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0610-hance_penguin.html .
Wow, help! At this rate, by 2300 Antarctic sea ice will cover the world’s entire ocean surface. Time to panic.
No offence to any alums , but what is it with Rutgers anyway ?
mpaul says:
June 18, 2010 at 10:51 am (Edit)
I imagine this comes from only a single station. Anyone know which one?
I can figure it out if nobody else steps forward
I was at the tip of the WAIS in February. We spoke with locals in Port Stanley, Falklands, before heading down to Elephant Island and Paradise Bay. First, the residents of Port Stanley said the penguins there have been doing great, with slight population increases at all the rookeries.
Cruising down through the Gerlache and over the next several days, we saw many chinstraps and gentoos…all happy campers.
As for albedo, there is significant concern, and once again, the law of unintended consequences strikes. After 2011, ships carrying more than 500 passengers will not be allowed to cruise to Antarctica. The ship we were on carried 2200 passengers, and used gas turbines to power the ship at speeds up to 22knots. There were no “shore excursions” as those are allowed on ships carrying more than 900 passengers. So 2011 is the last year the big ships will get down there.
So instead, people will cruise down there on russian ice breakers and other smaller vessels. Our friend is going down in November. The small ice breaker he’ll be on will be making helicopter flights to the “mainland” and is also equipped with several zodiacs for shore excursions as well.
My bet is that the small icebreaker will PROBABLY have more of an impact than our large cruise ship did, and certainly had more impact per person than we did.
JimB
I thought things like ice, climate, etc had something called natural variability.
Where do they get that “average” line from anyway?
None of it really matters, we’re not smart enough to do anything about it one way or the other.
Could it be weather and air masses are changing where they appear?
It’s too hot in the Antarctic but too cold in Africa?
http://www.iceagenow.com/Cold_weather_kills_500_penguins_in_Cape_Town.htm
What an upside down world…
“The area will probably be completely devoid of Adélies in five or ten years.”
Perhaps this is the problem?
http://tinyurl.com/242fl62
Palmer station and a few others in the area.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=-67.80++-67.90&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=33.02306,71.894531&ie=UTF8&ll=-67.809245,-67.851562&spn=15.979209,71.894531&t=h&z=4
Adelaide
-67.80 -67.90
PALMER STATION -64.77 -64.08
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=-64.77++-64.08&sll=-67.809245,-67.851562&sspn=15.979209,71.894531&ie=UTF8&ll=-64.774125,-64.072266&spn=8.908507,35.947266&t=h&z=5
ROTHERA POINT -67.57 -68.13
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=-67.57++-68.13&sll=-64.77,-64.08&sspn=0.008671,0.035105&g=-64.77++-64.08&ie=UTF8&ll=-67.575717,-68.115234&spn=16.136651,71.894531&t=h&z=4
There are others.
A lot of people seem to be missing a key point, which is sadly because the reporter chose not to put much emphasis on it: Even though it is an article about a large change in climate, and about it’s “negative effects”, they are actually NOT blaming AGW!
The warming is “mostly driven by warmer ocean currents”-last time I checked, Ocean Heat Transport was a natural phenomena, and there is no obvious reason to attribute a recent shift in ocean current behavior in a small part of the global to climate forcing by well mixed greenhouse gases.
The reality is that the behavior of the Peninsula is quite anomalous, there is simply no way that the forcing from CO2 etc could cause-or would cause-such an extremely localized and large warming.
Alternative explanations maybe?
Volcanoes in Antarctica V Temperature trends
Active ‘subglacial’ volcano on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Lakes Beneath Antarctic Ice Sheets Found To Initiate And Sustain Flow of Ice To Ocean
Hydrothermal Vents
Not to worry. Penguins are tough old birds, having been around for 50 million or more years. They’ve seen many, many climate changes, and far warmer ones at that.
So have polar bears of course. But, this faux concern for the “endangered” species for them is of course just a pretext, useful for swaying people’s emotions.
“the changes going on in the Antarctic may well be a preview for what’s on the way, in a rough sense, for the rest of the world’s marine ecosystems.”
Since there aren’t any real changes in the Antarctic besides in the West Antarctic Peninsula, which is just a tiny portion of it, then yes, that (i.e. climate stasis) could well be a harbinger of things to come closer to home. But we’re actually more likely to see cooling in the coming decades.
I still don’t understand what the warming Antarctic peninsula has to do with man-made global warming? They found warm currents affecting temps there, so what? Please someone help me to understand because I must be missing something.
Lie, lie….
Cold weather kills 500 penguins in Cape Town
http://www.iceagenow.com/Cold_weather_kills_500_penguins_in_Cape_Town.htm
Shub Niggurath says:
June 18, 2010 at 10:55 am
And that means it’ll drag the average up and we can all be alarmed about ever smaller drops when the occur in the future. 🙂
That’s measured against the 1979-2000 average, so no.
Regarding the notion that warming in the West Antarctic Peninsula is driven by warm currents. I am definitely not an expert in this area, but from what I’ve read the dominant current at work down there is the Antarctic CIRCUMPOLAR Current. By most reports it is the largest and fastest surface current on the planet. Any descending warm currents from the tropical Pacific would be intersected at its northern limit, called the Subtropical Front, then pass through two further transitions in the ACC, the Subantarctic Front and the Polar Front
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctic_Circumpolar_Current.jpg
to get to the coast of Antarctica. Although the WAP is the tightest choke point on the ACC, it doesn’t seem entirely logical that warmth sufficient to account for the temperature changes supposedly observed there would be dissipated in that relatively small area and completely disappear just east of the WAP.
BTW, in doing a quick Google to check my recollections on this, I came across this blurb about a study that seems to suggest that intensification of the ACC may be responsible for increased release of CO2 from abyssal upwellling.
http://sify.com/news/rise-in-greenhouse-gases-linked-to-changes-in-ocean-currents-news-international-kgsn4dbbhjf.html
I haven’t had time to search out the paper, but it could indicate another aspect of the “settled science” which has been left out of the calculation.
Antarctic max and min for last 30 years.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/SeaIce/images/antarctic_max_min_extent.gif
vs. Arctic, if interested –
http://chartsgraphs.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/nsidc_sie_trends.png