By Dr. Susan Crockford
Like the 2017 video of the National Geographic starving polar bear, the 2022 deaths of emperor penguin deaths promoted last week is emotional blackmail. Both are examples of preposterous fear-mongering pushed by activist scientists and the media for political purposes. Don’t fall for it.
Despite the hype last week over the newly published paper by Peter Fretwell and colleagues, there is no plausible ecological rationale for proposing that that a single season’s reproductive failure in four small colonies of emperor penguin (Aptenodytes fosteri), due to La Nina conditions — phenomena unrelated to carbon dioxide emissions — are signs of a future “quasi-extinction” of the species, as proposed in the BAS video here. None of the estimated 282,150 breeding pairs of adult emperors were lost in 2022 off the Antarctic Peninsula and chicks born in several dozen other emperor colonies around the Antarctic continent survived, which means this was a tiny bump in the road rather than a catastrophe for the species.
Background
John Turner (British Antarctic Survey) and Josifino Comiso (NASA) stated in a NATURE paper in 2017:
“Current climate models struggle to simulate the seasonal and regional variability seen in Antarctic sea ice.”
Despite emotional rhetoric about very recent declines, sea ice conditions in the Southern Hemisphere have not responded as predicted to global warming theory (Blanchard-Wrigglesworth et al. 2021, 2022; Comiso et al. 2017; Turner and Comiso 2017; Turner and Overland 2009). This has left activists of all stripes to shoe-horn any ecological anomaly into a narrative of impending doom, which the media spoon-feed to a naive public, even though a recent review showed Antarctic species dependent on sea ice are thriving (Crockford 2023).
For years now, several British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientists and their allies have been lobbying the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to up-list the emperor penguin conservation status to “vulnerable” on the basis of predicted “quasi-extinction” due to future sea ice loss caused by global warming (Jenouvrier et al. 2009). They want what polar bear scientists got in 2006, on similar shaky grounds.
In October 2022, under pressure from litigious activists in the US, emperors were added to the Endangered Species List as “threatened” (USFWS 2022). Out-of-date predictions of Antarctic sea ice known by industry experts to be flawed, combined with extreme climate scenarios known to be implausible (Blanchard-Wrigglesworth et al. 2021, 2022; Hausfather and Peters 2020), were peddled by penguin experts to support a preposterous narrative of climate change disaster in Antarctica (Jenouvrier et al. 2020; Trathan et al 2020).
All this drama despite evidence that by 2019 about 600,000 emperor penguins were breeding in 54 known colonies scattered around the Antarctic continent, as the image below shows (Fretwell and Trathan 2020), including a number of previously unknown colonies discovered using satellite imagery, as well as an updated sea ice model suggesting stable ice cover should continue until at least 2050 and decline only slowly after that (Rackow et al. 2022).
But as of 2018, the IUCN held out, stating [my bold]:
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. [Birdlife International 2018]
This decision was clearly unacceptable to emperor penguin specialists, who still fervently desire the coveted IUCN “vulnerable” status for their species as well as “Specially Protected Species” status under the Antarctic Treaty, which was rejected in 2022 (Fretwell et al. 2020). Peter Fretwell, who is a remote sensing expert for the BAS, told the BBC in 2019 (9 October):
“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.”
Newest nonsense
Fretwell and his buddies are at it again, funded by the WWF and egged on by media outlets committed to promote the human-caused climate change agenda.
Summer sea ice around Antarctica has always virtually disappeared over the summer (down to 15% or less than winter extent) and no one pretends that emperor penguins require summer sea ice for survival. The loss of fast ice that struck in 2022 off the Antarctic Peninsula occurred in austral spring (late November), just weeks before emperor penguin chicks were fully fledged and able to survive on their own. This was an unfortunate, one-off mortality event associated with a localized sea ice anomaly likely caused by La Nina conditions in the Southern Ocean, as Fretwell and colleagues concede (Fretwell et al. 2023:5).
Yet these authors egregiously frame the assumed loss of more than 9,000 chicks as a significant portend of future catastrophe.
Claims that the 2022 loss of chicks was unprecedented are also nonsense, since a much larger colony failure happened in 2016 (involving perhaps 14,000-25,000 chicks) due to early sea ice breakup caused by bad weather that was similarly pegged as a disaster for the species. Except it wasn’t: subsequent research showed adult birds simply relocated to other areas the following year and successfully raised their chicks in new colonies, since suitable habitat exists all around the continent.
A BBC report on the 2022 penguin colony loss contains a sea ice chart for 15 Novermber (copied below, with additions), which shows how localized this event really was. The region circled in red (by me) in the Bellingshausen Sea is where the failed 2022 colonies were located, while the X marks the area of the 2016 colony failure:
As Jim Steele pointed out yesterday on X (formerly Twitter), there are also some inconsistencies in the Fretwell and colleagues claim that early breakup of fast ice in 2022 caused four out of five colonies off the Antarctic Peninsula to be lost [my bold]:
- The Pfrogner Point colony was only discovered in 2019. Its estimated population of 1200 pairs bred on a stable ice shelf, not on fast ice. Yet they still abandoned the colony in November.
- There was no breeding failure on the Rothschild Island colony because there, fast-ice persisted as needed until the end of December.
The location map for the above-mentioned colonies from the Fretwell et al. (2023:3) paper, copied below, shows the abandoned Prfogner Point colony well outside the area of early sea ice breakup and the surviving Rothschild Island smack in the middle of it:
Bottom line
There is no scientific rationale for proposing that a single season’s reproductive failure in a few breeding colonies out of dozens is a sign of future “quasi-extinction” for emperor penguins. None of the estimated 282,150 breeding pairs of adult birds were lost in 2022 and chicks born in about 50 other colonies around the Antarctic continent also survived, which means this was a tiny blip in the life of emperor penguins rather than a catastrophe for the species. Activist scientists and the media are shamefully using emotional language to describe an almost inconsequential mortality event in order to manipulate public sentiment and force influential conservation organizations to accept a scientifically unsound political agenda.
References
BirdLife International. 2020. Aptenodytes forsteri. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2019: e.T22697752A132600320. Downloaded on 26 October 2022. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/22697752/157658053
Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, E., I. Eisenman, S. Zhang, et al. 2022. New perspectives on the enigma of expanding Antarctic sea ice, Eos 103. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EO220076.
Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, E., Roach, L.A., Donohoe, A. and Ding, Q. 2021. Impact of winds and Southern Ocean SSTs on Antarctic sea ice trends and variability. Journal of Climate 34(3):949–965. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-20-0386.1
Crockford, S.J. 2023. The Polar Wildlife Report. Global Warming Policy Foundation Briefing 63, London. pdf here.
Hausfather, Z. and Peters, G.P. 2020. Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading [“Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome — more-realistic baselines make for better policy”]. Nature 577: 618-620
Fretwell, P.T. and Trathan, P.N. 2020. Discovery of new colonies by Sentinel2 reveals good and bad news for emperor penguins. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation [open access], in press. https://doi.org/10.1002/rse2.176
Fretwell, P.T., Boutet, A. and Ratcliffe, N. 2023. Record low 2022 Antarctic sea ice led to catastrophic breeding failure of emperor penguins. Communications Earth and Environment
Jenouvrier, S., Caswell, H., Barbraud, C., Holland, M., Stroeve, J. and Weimerskirch, H. 2009. Demographic models and IPCC climate projections predict the decline of an emperor penguin population. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 106: 1844-1847. Available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23951047_Demographic_models_and_IPCC_climate_projections_predict_the_decline_of_an_Emperor_penguin_population
Jenouvrier, S. et al. 2020. The Paris Agreement objectives will likely halt future declines of emperor penguins. Global Change Biology 26(3): 1170-1184. [paywalled] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.14864
Rackow, T., Danilov, S., Goessling, H.F. et al. 2022. Delayed Antarctic sea-ice decline in high-resolution climate change simulations. Nature Communications 13:637. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28259-y
Trathan, P.N. et al. 2020. The emperor penguin – Vulnerable to projected rates of warming and sea ice loss. Biological Conservation 241:108216. [open access] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108216
Turner, J. and Comiso, J. 2017. Solve Antarctica’s sea-ice puzzle. Nature 547:275-277. https://www.nature.com/articles/547275a
Turner, J. and Overland, J. 2009. Contrasting climate change in the two polar regions. Polar Research 28(2):146-164. https://doi.org/10.3402/polar.v28i2.6120
USFWS 2022. ‘Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Threatened Species Status for Emperor Penguin With Section 4(d) Rule.’ Federal Register 87(206):64700-64720.
