By Jim Steele
Chicken Littles vs Adelie Penguins
Throughout recorded history dooms day cults attract thousands of gullible people. Charismatic cult leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple or Heaven’s Gate convinced their followers to commit suicide due to a coming “environmental apocalypse”. To prevent environmental collapse, a recent mass shooter justified his killings as reducing over-population, while a Swedish scientist has suggested cannibalism. Thus, it’s worrisome that charismatic congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez similarly warns our world is doomed in 12 years. Equally disturbing is the carefully orchestrated fear-mongering, such that the United Nations gave ill-informed, 16-year old Greta Thunberg center stage to rage that CO2 is causing ecosystem collapse. Terrifying children with ‘the sky is falling’ fears will only bring about dire, unintended consequences.
Who is filling our children’s heads with stories of ecosystem collapse?
For one Al Gore wrote in 2012, “The fate of the Adelie Penguins, A message from Al Gore”: “As temperatures rise along the West Antarctic Peninsula and the winter sea ice blankets the ocean three months fewer per year than 30 years ago, the local ecosystem is in danger. Everything from the base of the food chain – the phytoplankton (microscopic plants and bacteria) and krill (shrimp like creatures), to one of the continent’s most iconic inhabitants, the Adelie penguins, are under threat…There is an important lesson for us in the story of the Adelie penguins.”
Indeed, Adelie penguins provide an “important lesson”. Don’t trust apocalyptic hype!
Adelie penguins may be the best studied bird on earth. In 2009, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated between 4 and 5 million adults, happily listing them as a species of “Least Concern”. However, using dubious IPCC climate models, scientists led by ornithologist David Ainley predicted the most northerly Adelie colonies would soon disappear as ice-melting warmth crept southward. They predicted between the years 2025 and 2052, 70% of the total Adelie population would be lost. Bullied by that virtual death count, the IUCN downgraded Adelies from “Least Concern” to “Near Threatened”.
In real life, by 2016 Adelie abundance had nearly doubled to 7.6 million, and once again Adelies are a species of Least Concern. So how were scientists so misled?
Ice Age glaciers had forced Adelies to abandon most of Antarctica’s coast. With warming, glaciers retreated and Adelies rapidly returned to breed and multiply. However, there was one exception. For over 5400 years Adelies avoided ice free coastlines along Antarctica’s northwestern peninsula. Scientists dubbed this the “northern enigma”. Due to the region’s unfavorable weather, breeding Adelies still avoid much of that region, currently labeled the “Adelie Gap”. As might be expected, breeding colonies adjacent to the “Adelie Gap” are the least stable with some colonies experiencing population declines, and those declining colonies were enough to confirm some scientists’ climate fears.
In the 1990s, the northwestern sector of the Antarctic peninsula coincidently experienced rising temperatures and declining sea ice. Although Antarctica sea ice was not decreasing elsewhere, researchers believed the melting ice and warmer temperatures were just what CO2-driven climate models predicted. But then the peninsula’s winds shifted. The peninsula’s sea ice has now been growing and temperatures have been cooling for over a decade. Furthermore in contrast to Ainley’s models, colonies at the most northerly limits of the Adelies’ range are not disappearing. Those colonies are thriving and increasing such as the Sandwich Island colonies, and northerly colonies on the Antarctic peninsula’s east side.
Media headlines are guided by the maxim ‘if it bleeds it leads.’ Likewise, scientific journals. Good news about thriving colonies, or no change, fail to capture headlines. But the addiction to eye-catching catastrophes misleads the public and scientists alike. Despite no warming trend at an Emperor penguin colony, David Ainley was so inebriated by global warming fears, he fabricated a warming temperature graph to falsely explain the colony’s decline! Similarly, extreme researchers of polar bear populations wrongly argued, “we’re projecting that, by the middle of this century, two-thirds of the polar bears will be gone from their current populations”. Again, in reality polar bear abundance has increased.
By perpetuating bogus claims of a world ending in 12 years, the Chicken Littles are doing far more harm than blinding children to scientific evidence that many species, from polar bears to Adelie penguins, are thriving. Our children miss the “important lesson” that a “climate crisis” is only a theory supported by scary narratives, not facts. So how do we protect our children from Chicken Littles who seek to enroll vulnerable minds into their doomsday cults? How do we motivate our children to be good critical thinkers, and not blind group thinkers mesmerized by fear and ‘end of the earth’ scenarios?
Jim Steele is director emeritus of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, SFSU and authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism.
I think the answer to your final question, Mr/Dr/Professor Steele, is either to set up your own schools which teach children how to gather evidence, analyse data and draw conclusions; or simply to home school them.
To change public education radically will induce huge inertia and resistance unless 67%+ of parents are clamouring loudly, insistently and publicly for it to happen.
Sorry to say it, but your country is too much dominated by your MSM for that number of parents to be free of the brainwashing.
And the madness begins with believing in a theory before and despite the lack of verified observations, or in ignorance of verified evidence that run counter to the theory.
As with most things in the science realm today, all to often observed evidence gets reinterpreted by some scientists to some hypothetical form, and then all of it is trotted out by MSM as facts.
The observed evidence is real when verified by others. The theory gets closer to reality when all the conditions of the observations (and any changes) match the theory.
‘Indeed, Adelie penguins provide an “important lesson”. Don’t trust apocalyptic hype!’
I agree that one shouldn’t trust apocalyptic hype. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t trust science in general. One should always distinguish between what the media say, what shows up on websites (like Ainley’s penguin/temperature graph), and what is published by partisan think tanks vs. what is generally held to be true by most scientists.
Of course, there will always be scientific studies that are disproved. That is part of science. Sometimes a “wrong” study even leads to a line of thinking that is also wrong – also part of science. But another part of science is that eventually these faults are found and replaced by better understanding; by highlighting predictions that don’t come true, even science that draws the wrong conclusions can further the scientific enterprise as a whole.
Focusing on predictions made decades ago regarding a single Antarctic species doesn’t prove anything about climate science as a whole. (I don’t care what Al Gore says or when he said it. He is a politician, not a scientist or a good spokesman for climate science.)
It seems odd to scoff at population predictions made about the years 2025-2052 (penguins) or mid-century (polar bears) are wrong, given that we have not entered that time frame. I think such decreases seem unlikely, but why should I then dismiss all the research, or accept the idea that polar bear numbers are actually increasing (no link provided!)? Polar bears are difficult to count, and a quarter of the subpopulations have no reliable estimates. Using catch-and-release methods, there is evidence that at least one group has declined; some say four have. Not all bear subpopulations are subject to the same climatic or human influences. Where populations were severely depressed due to hunting which was subsequently curtailed, the rebound could last for many years since it takes time for animals with a low reproductive rate to achieve the carrying capacity of the habitat. On the flip side, even if adult polar bears can survive climate change, it may impact their ability to have cubs and raise them to adulthood, so there could be a lag time between climate change and bear populations. For such reasons, studying things like energetic balances, prey taken, prey abundance, body condition and cub production are at least as important as trying to estimate change in overall numbers of bears. I mention all this to point out that it’s simplistic to draw conclusions based solely on numbers and sea ice extent; similar complexity could apply to penguins.
I don’t know enough about the research into penguins or polar bears to draw my own conclusions. Like others here, I am dependent on what I read. Posts on WUWT serve as a stimulus to read further, rather than taking the word of someone who is not a penguin or polar bear researcher, and is clearly biased. That is simply healthy skepticism. Nor will I take the word of Susan Crockford (whose c.v. includes no original peer reviewed polar bear research that I can see) rather than that of dozens of polar bear researchers. Why should I? Why should you? Rebelling against the majority is not adequate reason, and the fact that she is associated with the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate change skepticism think tank, does nothing to assure me of her lack of bias.
Arguments may sound plausible, but unless one knows the arguments, methods and reasoning on all sides, it’s not rational to trust contrarians just because they support one’s own biases. And expertise – years of experience doing original research in a particular field – counts. It should count, anyway.
Kristi says “I don’t know enough about the research into penguins or polar bears to draw my own conclusions”. Clearly that is true LOL
Kristi you are simply arguing to defend your own bias that apparently favors doomsday predictions that supports end of the world cults.
“By highlighting predictions that don’t come true,” we show where models and theory have failed. i.e. catastrophic climate change!
You suggest it is “odd” to scoff at “predictions made about the years 2025-2052”. Seriously???
How can we take you seriously when predictions of a 70% loss of Adelie by 2025 is shown to be an ultimate example of climate hysteria failure when reality reveals populations have nearly doubled??
Kristi are you predicting Adelies will now experience devastating population losses in the next 5 years? Based on what? Your blind belief in catastrophic climate change?
Jim,
There is no shame in saying I’m not an expert, and that I have to depend on the expertise of others. It’s arrogance that makes people think they know more than they do, and wind up believing falsehoods, half-truths and misleading facts. Look at Al Gore, for instance, and all the BS he made people believe. People are uncomfortable with uncertainty, and don’t take the time to look beyond the surface of what’s presented to them..
You don’t know my views at all. I don’t deal in “doomsday predictions,” and the idea that the world will end is ridiculous. Associating concern about AGW with cults is propaganda.
If you only highlight the predictions that don’t come true, without discussing those that have or the observations made that weren’t necessarily predicted, you are misrepresenting the whole body of knowledge.
The point is, you can’t call the predictions “wrong” if the time frame hasn’t occurred. I’m not suggesting they are right – I think it seems unlikely. But who knows what will happen in Antarctica in the next 31 years? Do you ? I don’t.
My belief in climate change is not blind. There is wide range of evidence that it is happening, from bird migrations to flowering phenology to changes in the ranges of oceanic animals to record-setting temperatures to regional increases in high-precipitation events…on and on. Considering the theoretical basis of the greenhouse effect and the fact that many of the changes we are seeing were predicted over 100 years ago, it’s hard to understand why so many people are he11-bent on denying it. I guess it’s political, partly, and fear of having to sacrifice anything for the sake of mitigation. And lots of prop’ganda.