Emperor Penguins Thrive Despite Alarmist Claims of ‘Vulnerable’ Listing

Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes fosteri) populations in 2019 were found to have grown by up to 10% since 2009 – to as many as 282,150 breeding pairs (up from about 256,500) out of a total population of over 600,000 birds (Fretwell et al. 2012; Fretwell and Trathan 2020; Trathan et al. 2020) – despite a loss of thousands of chicks in 2016 when an ice shelf collapsed.

Yet, biologists studying this species are currently petitioning the IUCN to upgrade emperor penguins to ‘Vulnerable’ (Trathan et al. 2020) based on models that use the implausible and extreme RCP8.5 ‘worst-case‘ climate-change scenario (e.g. Hausfather and Peters 2020) that polar bear biologists find so compelling.

Not surprisingly, their unscientific models suggest emperor penguins could be close to extinction by 2100 under these unlikely conditions – but if we reduce CO2 emissions via political policy, the penguins will be saved!

Surprisingly, these researchers are going ahead with their petition to have emperor penguins uplisted despite the population increase and the reservations their colleagues expressed in 2018 about using climate change predictions to arrive at a classification of ‘Near Threatened’ for the IUCN Red List assessment (Birdlife International 2018), as noted below in their ‘justification’:

This species is listed as Near Threatened because it is projected to undergo a moderately rapid population decline over the next three generations owing to the projected effects of climate change. However, it should be noted that there is considerable uncertainty over future climatic changes and how these will impact the species.

Like polar bear biologists, some emperor penguin biologists just won’t give up on the prediction they developed back in the mid-2000s that climate change is sure to drive this species to near extinction.

For example, Jenouvrier et al. (2009) calculated that there was at least a 36% chance of a 95% or more decline in emperor penguins by 2100 (what they called a “quasi-extinction”) due to changes in sea ice distribution.

They suggested a decline of this magnitude would entail a fall from about 6,000 breeding pairs to about 400 in a single colony.

The newest model (Jenouvrier et al. 2020) similarly uses the RCP8.5 ‘worse case’ scenario to predict near-extinction by 2100, as their ‘graphic abstract’ below shows.

This group is also recommending that “the species is listed by the Antarctic Treaty as an Antarctic Specially Protected Species” that would require a Species Action Plan (Trathan et al. 2020).

And as co-author Peter Fretwell told the BBC last fall (9 October 2019):

“Everything we know – all the experts, all the models – tells us that Emperors are going to be in real trouble. We need to pull out all the stops to help them. That’s going to be hard because we know the one thing that’s really going to save them is stabilisation of the global climate.”

Sounds like something a polar bear specialist would say. Except that for polar bears, the catastrophe they keep predicting just won’t happen despite the fact that summer Arctic sea ice has been declining faster than anyone expected – so far, an almost 50% decline in ice has already happened yet global polar bear numbers keep slowly increasing (Crockford 2019; 2020).

I’d suggest that using far-fetched ‘worst-case’ scenario predictions to propose an unlikely but scary-sounding future catastrophe isn’t likely to work any better for emperor penguins than it has done for polar bears, especially when the animals keep thriving.

However, some of the papers listed below are open access, so if you’re interested in more details I suggest you have a look. If you’d like a copy of the modeling paper (Jenouvrier et al. 2020), contact me and I’ll send it along. You’ll find more on the emperor penguin conservation issue in this essay by biologist Jim Steele.


Dr. Susan Crockford is a zoologist (former adjunct professor, University of Victoria) specializing in Holocene mammals, including polar bears and walruses. Her new book is The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Amazon).

Read rest at Polar Bear Science


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Comments (8)

  • Avatar

    Jerry Krause

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    Hi Susan and Matt,

    First, Susan, keep up the good work informing readers of the problems that ‘wrong’ scientific ideas create. You have referred to the MOSAiC Expedition which has been occurring on the ice sheets of the Arctic Ocean since October 6, 2019 and the need to have polar bear guards to protect the scientists doing their measurements on the ice floes. The photos of these bears certainly indicate that these bears do not appear to be threaten and appear to be very heathy.

    Secondly, Ryan, I have have been encouraging PSI to go to Follow Mosaic to see and read about real science in action. But even these scientists seem to be twisting the data being measured to fit the climate change narrative. And Einstein seemed to recognize this fault of too many scientists, past and present when he stated: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”

    Have a good day, Jerry

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Jerry Krause

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    Hi Matt,

    Emperor Penguins are warm body animals (birds) which lay a egg and need to incubate these eggs to near their body temperature on the cold Antarctic ice. And the first male-female pair did not have millions of years to discover this nee by a very slow process. Hence, I conclude this simple fact about the reproduction of birds simply refutes Darwin’s theory of evolution.

    Have a good day, Jerry

    Which

    Reply

    • Avatar

      Herb Rose

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      Hi Jerry,
      Learned behavior is not an inherited trait.Penguins who incubated their eggs on top of their feet became more successful producing offspring that survived, even though it produced greater hardship for the parents. This learned behavior (started by some radical penguin) enhanced the success of those who practiced it. If conditions change and this behavior no longer provides a benefit the radical penguins who abandon the practice will have the advantage and become more plentiful.
      Darwin’s theory deals with inherited traits, not learned behavior.
      Have a good day
      Herb

      Reply

      • Avatar

        Jerry Krause

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        Hi Herb,

        ‘In the beginning Penguin pairs had only one lifetime to get it figured out. How were animals accidentally formed with’ inherited traits? Darwin’s theory is termed to be an evolutionary theory. Not a survival of the fittest theory. And Darwin himself wrote that any of his proposed changes occurred in tiny changes which required millions and billions of years. Hence, birds to survive need to reproduce themselves had only one life time. And I ask again, how did they acquire any ‘inherited’ trait. For to inherit requires an ancestor which already had the necessary trait. So by definition there had to be a first pair–male and female–which had no ancestors from which to inherit anything.

        Have a good day, Jerry .

        Reply

        • Avatar

          Herb Rose

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          Hi Jerry,
          All animals have inherited traits and when a traits allows them to survive and reproduce better than those without the trait they become more dominant.
          Sickle cell is an inherited trait. It causes a reduced ability for the blood to carry oxygen. This detriments should cause the gene to disappear over time. However, the condition lessens the effects of certain diseases, like malaria, thereby providing a survival benefit in those areas where the diseases are endemic.
          Conditions favor different traits and since usually changes in conditions take a long time there are many lifetimes available for a lifeforms to change. Look at the birds of the Galapagos islands.
          Tyrannosaurus Rex had feathers and birds are dinosaurs who survived the change in conditions. The egg came before the chicken.
          Have a good day,
          Herb

          Reply

        • Avatar

          Jerry Krause

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          Hi Herb,

          You almost snuck one past me. Incubation of eggs by birds is not not a trait as you appear to using the word with the example of Sickle Cell is. Incubation of eggs is a behavior that birds must practice.to reproduce. And again the question: How was the ‘first’ pair of birds ‘programed’ to do this absolutely necessary behavior.

          If you look back at what you wrote you will find that you wrote: “This learned behavior (started by some radical penguin) enhanced the success of those who practiced it.” So, according to you this learned behavior automatically became an inherited behavior. Sometimes I do radical things but I do not believe this radical behavior changed my ‘genes’.

          Have a good day, Jerry

          Reply

          • Avatar

            Herb Rose

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            Hi Jerry,
            Incubation is not a genetic behavior that all birds do. A male ostrich builds a nest and different females lay eggs in the nest. The male ostrich sits on the nest (to cool and heat it) and raises the family. Since the male is larger and better able to protect the nest and offspring when the first male began this behavior was more successful in producing offspring that survived and learned this behavior. It is learned not programmed by genes.
            Instincts are learned behavior different from genetics. A cow bird will lay its eggs in a different species of birds nest and have them raise their offspring. When the birds mature they mate with other cowbirds but lay their eggs in the nest of the species of bird that raised them.
            A trait of a bird are a result of genes (like sickle cell) its instincts and behavior are learned. Does your radical behavior show up in your kids?
            Have a good day,
            Herb

  • Avatar

    Koen Vogel

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    Hi Susan, Thanks for calling this out. Many alarmists are overstepping the bounds of the plausible. The IPCC climate models are global simulators, and often cannot reproduce the magnitude or the direction of currently observed regional temperature change, let alone be used for predictions. RCP8.5 is a bit of an oddball, as it extrapolates some aerosol trends in an extreme manner: from Volume 8 “Most components of aerosols and ozone precursors are estimated to decrease toward the end of this century in the RCPs except CH4 in RCP8.5”. I think that RCP8.5 was mainly used as an outlier, worst-case scenario, to determine the extreme effect of aerosols on regional energy balances. “Stabilizing the climate” is this sense is already well under way, i.e. has more to do with aerosols and not CO2. The distinction is probably lost on the general public. RCP8.5’s predictions for future Antarctica are extreme, but as yet unobserved in reality. From Volume 4: “It is very likely that the annual Antarctic sea ice extent increased at a rate of between 1.2 and 1.8% per decade (0.13 to 0.20 million km2 per decade) between 1979 and 2012.” The IPCC reports point out that global warming is currently largely a Northern Hemisphere affair, mainly centered around the Northern Atlantic. Even there the polar bears are learning to adapt to smaller summer ice conditions. (Maybe they are actually thriving because of it?) The recipe seems to be: take a cute animal, claim its going to become extinct, and con a gullible publication to print predictions supported only by a fringe of junk scientists, not by any data. It makes for great click-bait. The only antidote is to keep calling them out.

    Reply

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