By Jo Nova
Who knew? Penguins are not only a “sentinel species” warning us about climate change in Antarctica but “Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature“. More warming equals more penguins.
So just as we can use trees as thermometers, we can use penguins as thermometers. And when we do, we find that there was a veritable boom in penguins in the Ross Sea 1,000 years ago.
It’s all there in the peer reviewed Zheng paper, 2023 — thanks to NoTricksZone and KlimaNachrichten for finding the paper.
As one of the most important ‘sentinel species’ in the Antarctic ecosystem, the Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) is widely distributed in the Ross Sea region and its population is extremely sensitive to climate change (Ainley, 2002; Ainley et al., 2010). Since the International Geophysical Year in 1957, researchers have conducted extensive field investigations on climate change (including temperature, SST, sea ice, and polynyas) and Adélie penguin populations in Antarctica.
Modern monitoring data also show that Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature…
After comparing with historical records of penguin populations at Cape Bird, Dunlop Island, and Cape Adare, all were found to have a common increase during the 750-1350 AD period in the Ross Sea.
So at the same time the Vikings were getting into the spirit of Greenland, the penguins were having some parties of their own on the far side of the Earth. And even though climate experts have told us a million times that the Medieval Warm Period was just a localized phenomenon in Europe, it was also warm in Antarctica, and most other places, and no one seems to be able to find the part of the planet that was colder which would bring that average back to normal.
As it happens, another study last year showed Elephant seals and penguins lived on the Ross Sea for thousands of years until the horrible cold of the Little Ice Age wiped out them out. Seriously, researchers refer to the era three or four thousand years ago as “The Penguin Optimum”. So this is yet another study using different markers but reinforcing the same finding. (That one used diatoms, this one looked at a footprint of elements in penguin guano — P, Cu, Zn, Sr, Cd, Ca, and As.)
The climate experts also told us a million times that global warming would wipe out the penguins, but instead it turns out, global cooling does.
In the full figure we can see a whole stack of climate variables that all rise and fall in cycles that bear no resemblance to changes of CO2:
See these posts for references:
- Medieval Warm Period found in 120 proxies. Plus Roman era was similar to early 20th Century.
- Climate helped drive Vikings from Greenland
- The Medieval Warm Period hit west Antarctica
- Antarctica was warmer one thousand years ago — and life was OK
REFERENCE
Just about all lifeforms, including humans, love and seek warmth, at least to the tolerance of their cold adaptation which would cause them to overheat if they were to live in a place with an excessive temperature.
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The penguins might like it, but what about the polar bears?
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They are possibly an example of an animal that is so well cold adapted that it can overheat in warmer than expected temperatures.
However, they can survive. The key to keeping them in zoos in warmer climstes, is to reduce their fat layer by feeding them a low fat diet like fish, apart from giving them a freezer to sleep in.
Also, it gets much colder in Antarctica than the Arctic where the bears are adapted to.
I think the bears will adapt to natural temperature changes through migration. For example, during the Medieval Warm Period they moved north out of northern Europe and Canada.
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Polar bears are mammals. The mammalian metabolism is an active system that adjusts to the exterior conditions to keep body temperature within a narrow range. The bears will happily adapt to environmental change. And if they nevertheless overheat there is always the option of a cool swim.
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There are no polar bears in Antarctica. Perhaps we should send say twenty breeding pairs there to aid survival of the species, after all the loonies reckon they are endangered. I’m sure penguin will be a suitable replacement for baby seals.
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Climate catastrophe, climate armageddon, biological system collapse – the descriptors for the never proven theory of anthropogenic global warming never end. I think we need to break it down and use terms like climate “panic” or my favourite, climate “scam”. Even the damn penguins know it’s all hyperbole.
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Last week someone posted a link to palaeontologist Patrick De Deckker who used the terms
Climate Improving & Climate Comfortable
for our present Brief Modern Warm Period when comparing previous cold/dry or hot/wet stages of Earth’s never-ending changes in climates (plural).
Having used both terms during the weekend when chatting with overseas travellers – who brought up the subject of CCC™️ – you could see a light going off in their brain as if they realised, oh yeah, the climate is pleasant, and perhaps the shouty ones (alarmists) were riding the gravy train scam after all.
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The sun is like a hammer thrower close to the centre of the solar system with multiple hammers of different length spinning.
If you watch a hammer thrower you see that they need to lean back to counter the pull of the spinning hammer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6UwokP8BEg
Jupiter is the big hammer that the sun keeps spinning. But all the planets influence the sun and are constantly shifting the point that the centre of the sun rotates around and the rotational velocity of the sun around its moving point of rotation. The sun gains and loses rotational energy about that moving point depending on the alignment and misalignment of the planets. The larger outer planets have as much influence as Jupiter on the movement of the sun because their change in pull angle is slower.
This linked chart shows the torque on the sun due to the changing pull from the planets:
https://1drv.ms/i/c/cdb8a3183f0262ad/Ea1iAj8Yo7gggM2OBAAAAAABiUQExBYpJW4Yk01ZrNYQCQ?e=7uF5R0
This torque aligns well with solar activity because there is a related “tidal” force that alters the axial spin of the sun and creates surface shearing due to the tidal force being greatest at the equator of the sun.
The MWP aligned with high negative torque on the sun’s motion about its changing point of rotation.
The planets influence on the Sun cause the change in solar activity but the big driver of Earth’s ever changing climate is the precession cycle.
This table has the solar intensity at 60S for the summer solstice for the past 1000 years:
-1.000 511.773509
-0.900 511.550578
-0.800 511.309654
-0.700 511.051205
-0.600 510.775733
-0.500 510.483767
-0.400 510.175853
-0.300 509.852542
-0.200 509.514386
-0.100 509.161925
0.000 508.795691
So daily solar input down 3W/m^2 over the past 1000 years (you would expect the Ross Sea and Southern Ocean to have a cooling trend as observed. So if an imaginary CO2 forcing of 1.3W/m^2 by the time it gets to 550ppm can cause global boiling, imagine the impact of real 3W/m^2.
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Excellent catch, the natural variables illustrate exactly what is happening.
For starters, la Nina dominated during the LIA and El Nino is prevalent in warm times. This suggests that climate change has nothing to do with humans.
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We also know that the Eemian inter-glacial was 8 c warmer than our Holocene and sea levels were 6 to 9 metres higher then.
In fact our climate today is much cooler than it was in the earlier Holocene climate optimum, when boreal forests grew up to the Arctic coastline for thousands of years and today there’s just tundra and ice. See MacDonald et al study.
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Talking penguins ?
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