From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
A study in the journal PLOS Biology found that 65% of Antarctica’s plant and animal species, including penguins, will likely disappear by the end of the century if the world does not do something to decrease fossil fuel emissions.
The study also showed that the current conservation efforts in Antarctica are not working on the rapidly changing continent.
Researchers concluded that implementing an extra layer of cost-effective strategies, which they lay out in the study, could save up to 84% of Antarctica’s vulnerable biodiversity.
“Antarctica is not really contributing to climate change; there’s not a large-scale number of people living there, so the greatest threat to the continent is coming from outside the continent,” Jasmine Lee, lead author of the study, told CNN.
“We really need global action on climate change, as well as some more local and regional conservation efforts, to give Antarctic species the best chance of surviving into the future.”
Thursday’s study shows that disappearing sea ice will threaten emperor and Adelie penguins that rely on ice from April through December.
“These iconic species, like emperor penguins and Adélie penguins, are at risk and it’s really sad to think that Antarctica is one of the last great wildernesses on the planet and human impacts are being seen and felt there,” Lee said.
“It’s just incredibly sad to think that we could drive those kinds of species towards extinction.”
Lee said that more action is needed to save one of Earth’s vast, pristine biomes.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Lee said.
“We’re at this huge turning point now not just for Antarctica, but globally, when it comes to climate. We’ve got the opportunity to stop it and if we don’t do something now, then the impacts are going to be much, much worse than what they could be.”
There’s only one slight problem – the Southern Polar regions have barely got any warmer since 1980:
https://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html
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Penguins are doing just fine on the Galápagos Islands on the equator!
The sky is falling!!!!!!!!!
The Antarctic midge (Belgica antarctica) at 3-6mm is the largest LAND animal in the antarctic. They manage to exist in these extreme conditions and I am sure they will adapt to whatever is thrown at them by Gaia.
Without CO2, earth would be a dead planet. Because life on earth is entirely composed of little carbon sacks of water we call cells. More CO2, up to at least 2,000ppm of the atmosphere, makes life greener, stronger, more drought tolerant, and abundant. Greenhouse growers routinely pay to add up to 1,600ppm CO2 to their operations to make their products greener, healthier, and more productive. Just like using coal, oil, and gas does for our atmosphere for free today. And today recycling more CO2 makes it easier to feed eight billion people than it took to feed 3.5 billion a century ago. How? With arguably, the most important and powerful aspect of life’s metabolism – photosynthesis. Whose formula is sunlight plus CO2 plus H2O, with the green enzyme chlorophyll, converting sunlight into the high-energy bonds of life’s carbon compound sugar. And as a bonus, also produces 100% of our atmospheric oxygen! While, as Dr. John Christy has clearly proven, CO2 is insignificant in climate. EVERY one of the over 100 CO2 driven climate model projections massively overestimates temperatures compared to actual weather balloon and satellite data. Our normal, natural ever changing climate has moved twice during human existence through 12°C cycles. 100 thousand year cycles driven by Milankovitch Eccentricity. And in the warmest 4°C portion of that massive normal, natural range of earth’s temperature, earth’s orbit is in its warmest, near circular shape. We call these warm periods interglacials. In our current interglacial, the Holocene, we invented agriculture and civilization. In our CO2 driven life on earth, warmer with more CO2 is always better.
Let me know when Antarctic sea water rises above -1.8 deg C all year, will you? Because that is the prediction this study must make. Otherwise the sea water will freeze just as it always has.