Young King Penguins are big and brown. Photo by Paul Carroll on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
Scientists had so much money they were able to follow 17,000 penguins for, wow, 24 years. They discovered they were breeding 19 days earlier now than they were then. It all sounds rather dramatic — with penguins “bringing forward their mating cycles” in an “unbelievably big change”.
It’s like penguins have been forced into teenage pregnancy or something.
Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash
But then there’s the quiet line slipped in there: “….with greater success rates for chick survival.” which seems rather important, or perhaps, even the whole point? Is there any better marker to measure penguin health and happiness than seeing their baby penguins frolic? There can’t be too many penguins who enjoy watching the babies die?
So the ABC writes the catchy headline:
“King penguins successfully changing breeding habits in face of climate change”
But they could have said:
“Climate change saves baby penguins”
And we all know why they didn’t.
Their first line lays it on thick:
Climate change is putting pressure on many animals and their food chains at the extremes of our planet.
In ABC training school perhaps they learnt that 2001 was the perfect year for penguins, and thus that somehow their behaviour is being pushed far out of past norms. Except of course, that the past norms are what’s wild, and the penguins have been making baby penguins in much colder and hotter times for thousands of years.
It’s quite likely that penguins haven’t brought their breeding cycle forward — they’ve just restored it to what it was before.
They’ve somehow survived a thousand cycles of warming and cooling. This is just the last 10,000 years.
REFERENCE
Bardon et al (2026) Multiannual environmental forcing shapes breeding phenology and success in a sub-Antarctic seabird, Science Advances, 11 Mar 2026 Vol 12, Issue 11
A King Penguin has got to do what a King Penguin does.
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They’re only there for the fish. Not the weather.
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They’re smarter than alarmists and greenies.
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Penguins are adaptable, they move location or change breeding timing according to the prevailing climate of the time, which as we know is not static like warmists think but subject to constant change. Even in historical times we’ve had the natural climate changes of the Minoan, Egyptian, Roman and Medieval climate optima. What did the penguins do then?
Penguins acting according to natural climactic changes is no big deal:
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David Maddison,
Nah, they do it according to the prevailing weather.
Anything that changes the climate *must* have changed the weather first, and the penguins will look out the door (so to speak) and decide whether today is a good day to make little penguins. I very much doubt they’ll be working on a 30-year average.
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What about Punkxatawny Phil? He was an avid watcher of climate change as in Groundhog Day. Maybe he could get a job with the IPCC?
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It would have to be cheaper than monitoring 17,000 highly mobile fishing King Penguins on the Antarctica Peninsula, which after all is NOT Antartica and likely outside even the Arctic circle. You can see it in the green snowless background by definition at sea level. Not 3.5Km of solid ice which is most of the Antarctic plateau the size of two Australias.
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Sub-Antarctic Strongholds: The largest breeding populations are located on the Crozet Islands, Prince Edward Islands, Kerguelen Islands, and South Georgia (over 100,000 to 400,000+ pairs)(54.4 degrees South)
Habitat Preferences: They prefer ice-free, level ground such as beaches, valleys, and moraines.
Expansion: While rare on the Antarctic continent, they are sometimes found on Elephant Island and the South Shetland Islands.
So if on South Georgia, what has this to do with Vostok temperature data? Vostok is at 78 degrees South, a massive 20 degrees South of South Georgia island at 56 degrees. And Vostok is not low land as in the photograph and surrounded by non frozen ocean but ICE 3,000 to 4,000km thick.
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I think Vostok was used because it is the best available long-term temperature data for this region, I am probably wrong, so this is just a suggestion. Anyway, looking at the data, it appears that whilst the long-term trend from 4500ya to now is slight cooling of 0.5C, from 1500ya to now it has been warming about 1C, so that might help the penguins extend their breeding season.
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Climate change saves baby penguins, Now we need climate change to save the 72 million human babies murdered every year. That would be an achievment worthy of note.
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It might be interesting to clearly identify a couple of things:
The “Demographic” pattern of those “participating”.
Their IQ “curve.
Abortion is NOT “contraception. It is a “post-action” act.
In places where actual contraceptive technologies / techniques are actually known and used, what is the rate of abortions?
How many women in that cohort, when it is “politically” timely to reproduce, discover that all that proudly proclaimed previous scraping, sluicing, etc. has rendered them STERILE.
A possible “Darwin award” pending? Removal from the gene pool is not restricted to fatality befalling an individual, it includes inability to pass on genes in the time-honoured way. A possible benefit to the overall population?
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Just as the Left want to keep CO2 levels down so we remain close to a mass extinction event which will happen around 150-200ppm, but at current levels enhances crop and forest growth, they also want to keep down natural temperature increases that aid baby penguins.
They are penguin haters!
We are lucky CO2 is naturally increasing. It was way too close to mass extinction levels but we are still not comfortably out of the danger zone. Hopefully it will keep increasing to maybe 800ppm.
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Yes, the fate of the earth before the human race, did appear to be a slow decline in CO2 with longer and longer ice-ages until it got down to around the 150ppm mark when not only almost all plants stopped photosynthesizing, but the ice-age would appear to become permanent. In other words a cold lifeless earth.
In short: the Green Utopia the warmists all want.
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Those wokey leftists are so busy.
When they’re not supporting authoritarian misogynistic murderous regimes, they’re pushing to reduce CO2 by more than 50%.
Just a hint of evidence might be required Dave ?.
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Nah. He defined them so he has the IP on lefties.
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A definition can be simplified to: anything you don’t like.
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Another Biased Commentary
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Another climate disaster from the BBC for emperor penguins.
If you listen carefully to the end you discover that the claim is free of any actual proof.
https://youtu.be/oWmrYkuaAbg
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On the subject of penguins, there is a colony of Eudyptula minor at StKilda Pier in Melbournistan, Australia.
Back the day the common name was the fairy penguin but wokesters decided this name was offensive to a certain community so they renamed them to the little penguin.
For overseas readers, even though some penguins live in Melbourne, it is not cold and miserable like Antarctica, just miserable under Australia’s most extreme Left regime. It’s like the Australian version of Commiefornia, New York City or London.
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What really gets to me is that my “fairy” friends think the name change is ridiculous, and everywhere else, except Victoria, they are still called “fairy penguins”.
There is also a colony in Port Jackson, aka Sydney Harbour.
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I still call them fairy penguins, a nice name for a pretty little penguin. I get fed up with the misuse of old, perfectly good words.
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There was no name change
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Yes. Some places that used the name Fairy have switched to Little. But I think what Gee Aye is saying is that Little Penguin has been their official name since the 1700’s. Calling them Little Penguins instead of Fairy Penguins is just adopting more broadly their proper name rather than the colloquial name. The name change you have when not actually having a name change.
They have also been called Blue Penguins at different places.
Sea World may have adopted official name for a dumb reason. But the reason stated is so silly that I wonder if it was said as a joke at the staff meeting when someone asked why, and the PR department fell for it.
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Little penguin – Wikipedia
Fairy penguins (Eudyptula minor) are increasingly referred to as little penguins or little blue penguins to align with scientific terminology and international usage. While “fairy” is a traditional Australian term, the shift to “little” emphasizes their status as the world’s smallest penguin species.
Key Aspects of the Name Change:
Official Recognition: “Little penguin” is considered the standard common name by many ornithologists and researchers.
Scientific Name: The species is formally known as Eudyptula minor.
Regional Differences: In Australia, they are commonly called “fairy penguins,” while in New Zealand, they are often known as “little blue penguins” or kororā.
Misconceptions: Reports sometimes suggest the change was made for political correctness; however, it is largely a move toward standardizing their name to match their physical characteristics and scientific classification.
Alternative Names: They are also known as blue penguins or kororā (Māori).
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Would it help to rename them Tinkerbells?
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Thanks again Jo for trying to make our donkeys think for themselves, but perhaps we shouldn’t hold our breath?
That Vostok graph tells us the temperature over the last 12,000 years and I wonder what caused that short temperature spike about 8 + K years ago?
Co2 levels then were about 280 ppm, and about 425 ppm today. Anyone have any ideas?
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Meh, those king pingus are mere Lord Farquhars, midgets with attitude: we used to have Giant Penguins over 6ft tall marauding what is now the Waitaki River area – sadly, yet not unexpectedly, that earlier warmer climate changed to today’s (5-8*C colder with lower sea levels) and those monsters’ remains have melded into limestone bluffs and canyons with their fellow ancient sharks, turtles, whales, dolphins, plesiosaurs and even crocodiles.
Sometimes ‘change’ is a good thing.
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It’s interesting looking at the underlying paper: Multiannual environmental forcing shapes breeding phenology and success in a sub-Antarctic seabird.
To me, they seem to have done some worthwhile research into what influences the breeding success of the penguins, but this stuff is only in the main body. Then (I guess) they layered on the climate change stuff to ensure publication and future funding. It’s similar to the IPCC reports where the summary doesn’t reflect the main body of the work.
Somewhat amusing to look at the three graphs in Fig. 2. Picture them without the trend lines and confidence bands: where would you draw the lines? Only the third one seems to have a proper trend. It just relates breeding date to breeding success, with no climate change nonsense to mess it up.
Also amusing that they use year number as their climate change variable. Not sure how the penguins are expected to know year number. If they really want to see the relationship with climate change, shouldn’t they be plotting it against whatever the global mean surface temperature was on the date of breeding? (now, now, don’t laugh, climate change is serious)
Highlighting another thing on the graphs: notice that more than half the actual sampled values lie *outside* the shaded 95% confidence bands. It’s usually the case, because the 95% confidence band isn’t what it says on the tin. It’s saying the *expected* value (the mean) is somewhere in here, but says nothing about the potential range of values you *might* see. Worth bearing in mind with all statistical graphs.
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Presumably they installed a weather station in the vicinity of the penguin colony 24 years ago. Meaning they can accurately determine the relationship between prevailing weather conditions and penguin reproduction. And of course they measured ocean temperatures and food supply.
No? Never mind.
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For gourmands out there – what do penguins taste like?
(Note, it’s illegal to eat penguins these days. Protected species.)
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Again, many exotic animal bones were dug up under Trafalgar Square in Britain during the construction of Nelson’s column.
Lions, elephants, rhinos, hippos etc roamed this area during the hotter Eemian interglacial 130 K to 115 K years ago.
And these elephants were huge at 4 metres tall and up to 13 tons in weight.
Of course these animals vanished in Europe during the last ice age.
https://brightonjournal.co.uk/elephants-in-trafalgar-square-the-story-of-britains-lost-megafauna/
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Those penguins are taking the mickey out of those scientists.
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Here, I’ll fix it for you ABC plus Mr Bardon et al. Mr Bardon and all his mates spent a lot of money studying some king penguins for a relatively short amount of time. Had a great time doing it, was lots of fun and made many friendships. Yep, we noticed a few things, including possible changes to breeding times and cycles. But, really we cant make any major conclusions because the data is basically just a snap shot. Anyone linking this study to possible effects of man-made climate change is a moron.
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BTW that Vostok temperature graph trend line seems to be falling over the last 3,000 years.
Perhaps we should further increase our co2 emissions ASAP? sarc.
https://joannenova.com.au/wp-content/vostok-last-12000-years-web.gif
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The Holocene is drawing to a close.
Something interesting happened 8,200 years ago and off the top of my head it looks like the 8.2 kilo year event.
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Here is the full story for those interested in climatology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2-kiloyear_event
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But that graph was for Vostok in the Antarctic whereas the Wikipedia article deals with Northern Hemisphere.
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It appears to be a bipolar seesaw, I’ll dig deeper.
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Technically it wasn’t a seesaw.
Lake Agassiz broke its banks and the fresh water flowed into the Atlantic, shutting down the conveyor belt.
In Australia ‘a period of time spaning ∼8200 to ∼5500 years ago temperatures were higher than today. We refer to it as the Holocene Hyspithermal. Coincident to this period, lake levels and postulated rainfall were extraordinarily high and vegetation spectra in places very different compared to today.’ (Patrick De Deckker 2022)
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How many King Penguins are there in Antarctica? Did the Scientists count them all?
If so, what percentage of all of the King Penguins is 17,000 penguins?
The Scientists cannot know what the rest of the King Penguins were doing as to laying their eggs earlier than “normal”. And what is “normal”?
What were these King Penguins doing say 100,000 years ago? Laying eggs earlier than “normal”? Later than “normal”?. Just “normal”?
The questions abound.
And what has so called ‘Climate Change’ got to do with anything with laying eggs earlier than…………….?
BTW –
This is a post that I have forwarded from the Penguins of Madagascar.
They send their Best Regards to this Website as well.
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Next thing you know, the UN will be giving birth control to penguins, citing climate change as a catalyst, and urging climate action so we don’t have to keep supplying penguins with essential reproductive health services.
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I’ll be happy if the “researchers” can get in and out without introducing diseases into the penguin population or otherwise interfering with their habitat and behaviours.
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Just what we need, penguin pox to follow monkey pox.
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Who is the King of the king penguins?!…..
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Their first line lays it on thick?
Their first line is a falsehood. There is no evidence for it whatsoever.
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King Penguins vote for climate change, have more babies – the headline
Down in the article you quote “….with greater success rates for chick survival.”
So which is it, more babies or more chicks surviving?
You can’t make this up
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