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Climate Change Prompts Emperor Penguins To Find New Breeding Grounds
An anonymous reader writes Researchers have discovered that emperor penguins may not be faithful to their previous nesting locations, as previously thought. Scientists have long thought that emperor penguins were philopatric, returning to the same location to nest each year. However, a new research study showed that the penguins may be behaving in ways that allow them to adapt to their changing environment. Lead author Michelle LaRue said,"Our research showing that colonies seem to appear and disappear throughout the years challenges behaviors we thought we understood about emperor penguins. If we assume that these birds come back to the same locations every year, without fail, these new colonies we see on satellite images wouldn't make any sense. These birds didn't just appear out of thin air—they had to have come from somewhere else. This suggests that emperor penguins move among colonies. That means we need to revisit how we interpret population changes and the causes of those changes."
OK, and this is part of climate change how? They have done it for years, but now it's part of "climate change"?
*ALL* Species, without exception, adapt to their environment. That is how they survive.
Any connection to "climate change" was purely speculative on the part of the article writer.
The research actually suggested that Emperor Penguins always had changed locations periodically. There is no evidence that modern times are in any way different.
The only thing this is "evidence" of is that lots of people today will try to blame anything and everything on "climate change".
Perhaps " If we assume that these birds come back to the same locations every year, without fail" is wrong. Perhaps they go to the best location they can find?
...they got tired of all of the scientists following them around, year after year, tagging them and annoying the kids.
"Y'know, Marge, this place is just getting too touristy for me. Let's go somewhere quiet, farther down the beach."
Underwater volcanoes, not climate change, reason behind melting of West Antarctic Ice Sheet
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/8278/20140610/underwater-volcanoes-climate-change-reason-melting-west-antarctic-ice.htm
...In Highly Evolved Species. Film at 11:00.
They thought decreasing numbers were due to birds dying, but they were actually due to birds changing breeding locations (for unknown reasons).
Basically, and contrary to the headline, the article says they don't know enough about penguin breeding behavior to draw any conclusions.
"Over five years in the late 1970s, the Southern Ocean warmed and at the same time the penguin colony at Pointe Géologie, declined by half (6,000 breeding pairs to 3,000 breeding pairs). The decline was thought to be due to decreased survival rates. In other words, researchers thought that the warming temperatures were negatively impacting the survival of the species...'It’s possible that birds have moved away from Pointe Géologie to these other spots and that means that maybe those banded birds didn’t die,' LaRue said. 'If we want to accurately conserve the species, we really need to know the basics. We’ve just learned something unexpected, and we should rethink how we interpret colony fluctuations.'”
P.S. Want to know why people are skeptical about climate change "science" and advocacy? It's because of blurbs like this one that say one thing in the headline and something else in the linked-to article.
Moving infrastructure and building new cities is costly. Doubly so if you're doing it merely because you have to abandon the old ones (like Miami, which will become a fish colony in a century or two). I thought that not having to spend money (on things that merely preserve status quo, but at an extra cost) is better than having to spend it.
Ezekiel 23:20
That is fantastic. Temperature variations in Antarctica span about 100 degrees, ranging from a low -90 in the winter to about +10 in the coastal areas during the summer and overcast conditions.Considering the range, it's quite extraordinary that less that one degree of change can wreak havoc in the lives of emperor penguins. One must wonder how they survive any temperature change at all if a barely measurable shift over a century in duration can have such a dramatic effect. It is even more strange that these emperor penguins have trouble with increasing temperatures as Antarctic average temperature has dropped slightly over the last half century, even setting a new record low of -93C (satellite measurements) quite recently (2010). This makes you wonder how much BS people can take before they say, ENOUGH!
If it's part of a natural cycle based on solar output, celestial travel, the Earth's core rotation, or other massive-scale events, there isn't a damn thing we can do about it short of building a large screen in space to cut off sunlight.
If it is caused by man, but from reasons other than carbon dioxide, such as waste heat from transportation and industrial activity, there's not a damn thing we can do about it short of halting all industry on the planet.
There are a whole lot of assumptions as to what is causing the temperature increase we have been seeing for about two centuries now.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
They are only assumptions for the ignorant. For example, the total amount of waste heat added by transportation and industrial activity can be easily calculated. A reasonable estimate can even be calculated by a layman with data available on-line. If you would take the effort to produce such a calculation, you would realise that the total heat generated by these activities isn't nearly enough to account for the global warming. If you lack the skills to do a simple calculation like this, you have no business claiming ignorance in others.
I doubt you can easily calculate the total waste heat of all human activity, which is what my second example actually was. Transportation and industry were only examples, not the entire range of of possibilities.
That's not to say that other people can't determine waste heat generated by people. Looking at Wikipedia, it looks like the scientists calculate waste heat will cause a 3 degree Celsius increase by the year 2300. That's not an inconsequential amount.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Total waste heat can be simply estimated by looking at total power consumption, for which we have data available, and assuming all energy is ultimately converted to heat. Total human energy production is about 540 exajoules per year. Total energy we get from the sun is about 3,8 million exajoules. Just the 11-year sunspot cycle makes the solar output wobble by about 0.1%, which is already 7 times more than human energy production, and the sunspot cycle is barely noticeable in the temperature data.
Absolutely. However, I'd like to continue living without having to fight for all my daily resources. I'd also like to have kids, so that we may reach the stars one day.
Yep, it's selfish. All acts are selfish in one way or another. It's how we progress. So, yes, environmental change that a lot of species can't adapt to is bad for them and bad for me.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Seems only to be a blog post of the UoM. Did anybody dig up the publication?
Only two kinds of waste heat matter - waste heat from nuclear power and waste heat from fossil fuel burning.
Waste heat from renewable energy is part of the planets natural heat budget. The heat from wind, waves or sunlight will heat the planet no matter what. It makes no difference if we use it to run an air conditioner, a factory or a truck first. If you're not sure about this, check out the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy.
Nuclear power is so ridiculously expensive that we will never build enough of it for the waste heat to matter.
That just leaves - oooh look! Fossil fuels! Well how about that. Actually I suspect you will find that even that is tiny compared to the greenhouse effect.
It is a simple observational practice with no first principles and a singular assumption: animals are mindless automatons.
With that one assumption, biologists are consistently surprised by what they observe.
Given enough time/resources/interest, they may observe enough to get true understanding.
Unfortunately, they will never ever have enough time/resources/interest.
Biology isn't pointless, but don't call it a science.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I was at the IdeaCity conference this past week, Michelle was there as an invited speaker and gave the first public presentation on this research. It's a great talk: http://www.ideacityonline.com/...
So you can dispute my argument, if you redefine the terms in the argument.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
There are absolutely no assumptions.
We perfectly know what it is.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ofc you can easily calculate the 'waste heat' of all human activity. ... that is your 'waste heat'.
After all the energy production of every country, or 'consumption' of that matter if you just add up fossil fuels are published and easy to google.
Hint a electric plant producing 1GW of electric power is usually at an efficiency factor of 42%. So the total thermal power is something like 2.2GW
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Over five years in the late 1970s, the Southern Ocean warmed." Warming temperatures over a period of years is by definition climate change. If I write 1+1=2, I'm still doing arithmetic even if I don't specifically call it "arithmetic." True there's no advocacy-ready insinuation of man-made global warming being at fault, but that's not what the headline says either. It's an accurate encapsulation of what is in the article.
And don't know where you're getting "for unknown reasons" from. The only material change is that they went from thinking there was an outright population decrease to realizing that the birds were just nesting in a different region. But the article is still correlating the breeding grounds change with the period of oceanic warming.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I didn't redefine anything. You said we couldn't easily calculate total human waste heat, but we can. If you wanted to verify the calculations yourself, all you need is the total consumption of coal, natural gas, crude oil, and uranium, and multiply each by the energy content. A fairly simple task, especially because the consumption numbers are tracked quite accurately.
Your mistake is to assume that we can survive without an ecosystem replete with a shit-load of species whose impact on us is largely unknown. We're about to find out if we can survive with a drastically changed one.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Tech Times headlines this as "Climate change prompts Emperor penguins to find new breeding grounds" The researchers press report is titled like this: "New research using satellite images reveals that emperor penguins are more willing to relocate than previously thought" The reporter from Tech Times basically lied to create a headline. If you read the original press release it says nothing about global climate change. The researchers did not make this conclusion- the fiction writer that wrote the article made it up. http://cse.umn.edu/admin/comm/...
Your first mistake is to assume that we can't survive without an ecosystem replete with a shit-load of species.
We do, in fact, require a shit-load of species to sustain us. You need dozens or hundreds of species just for healthy soil, let alone anything you actually want to eat that you've planted in that soil.
Now, perhaps we won't last as as long as the coelacanth, or the shark, and it will turn out that homo sapiens gives way to some other species after selective pressures generate "homo superior" or whatever nomenclature you'd like to use. Maybe that's sad to some people...but if I was an australopithecus afarensis,
You aren't.
staring down the barrel of extinction with the knowledge that my progeny would eventually be selectively pressurized into homo sapiens, would that be such a bad thing?
This discussion is about whether your offspring would even have a chance, or if some other rodent would eventually evolve into our successor. So yeah, the outcome could be really bad for not just you, but your genetic line.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm assuming you believe evolution is true - do you think it is true, but we should avoid it at all costs? :)
We should avoid being wiped out, so our species can evolve instead of disappearing. In any case, we don't know precisely which shit-load of species we really need, and it may be that we need different shit-loads for different parts of the world. If I could wipe out a species, it wouldn't be this or that lizard or whatever kind of owl we keep fucking up, it would be mosquitoes. If we're going to wipe out species, let's stop doing it accidentally, and start doing it on purpose.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
that's my criteria for actually worrying about the impact of humanity. I will believe that humans are a significant danger to the biosphere when we're able to wipe all mosquitos off the face of the planet. Until then, we're more bark than bite.
Not only is that a completely arbitrary comparison, but all that it implies when we wipe out a species accidentally is that we're more shit than bite. We shit all over everything.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That is the real reason they are moving, but no one wants to criticize the sacred cow of commercial fishing....
First off, that's not "waste heat", that's all heat. The heat generated that actually does useful work is not waste heat, even if it also contributes its share of energy to the system. In that regard, even solar has to be counted, to some degree, since if it wasn't converted to electrical power, a sizable percentage of it would be reflected off the ground and back to space. Instead, it's trapped on Earth and adds to the total energy system.
Second, either way, waste heat it is not a large source of energy in the system, but will add up over time, as the wiki gods state.
Third, it was just a throw away example. Yet here you are chasing it down like it is the most important fact in this discussion.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Maybe they just got tired of walking around all the bird poo that builds up in a location and moves to a "clean" location. It not like it can get wash away in the rain and could coat the ice inches think.