A Million Penguins Can’t Be Wrong!
By Paul Homewood
Comment of the Week Award!!
Earlier today, I posted this revelation:
On an expedition to an icy island chain off the Antarctic Peninsula’s northern tip, researchers discovered a massive supercolony of more than 1.5 million Adélie penguins, according to a study published March 2 in Scientific Reports.
Scientists had known of an Adélie penguin colony (Pygoscelis adeliae) in these Danger Islands, but satellite images revealed more guano on the rocky islands than could be explained by the colony’s expected numbers.
Even though the tiny island chain is only about 10 kilometers across, researchers hadn’t realized the extent of the penguin population, says study coauthor Heather Lynch, an ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “In the Antarctic, distances are so vast, something major could be just around the corner and you wouldn’t know.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/penguin-supercolony-discovered-antarctica
Reader Joan Gibson commented:
“Even though the tiny island chain is only about 10 kilometers across, researchers hadn’t realized the extent of the penguin population, says study coauthor Heather Lynch, an ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York. ‘In the Antarctic, distances are so vast, something major could be just around the corner and you wouldn’t know.’”
Sorry, Heather, that does not cut it in the true scientific world. It is your job to rule out other colonies before bleating they are “toast”. When you have “toast” as an hypothesis, it is incumbent on you, as a scientist, to rule out other colonies before declaring “toast” as settled science.
Modern ecologists (for the past 4 decades) have been guilty of glittering generalities. It used to get them in trouble. They made assumptions, failed to follow up by actually looking, published and had egg on their faces when someone (usually a taxonomist) actually did look. Either they were too lazy to look OR, more likely, did not want to find a slew of penguins–bad for their “the sky is falling” statements. She says with the distances you wouldn’t know. It is their job to find out.
Thank you Joan.
I just wish our so-called scientists had half as much common sense!
Trackbacks
- Delingpole: Penguin ‘Supercolony’ Discovered in Antarctica; Another Global Warming Scare Story Bites the Dust – The Ray Tribune
- Delingpole: Penguin ‘Supercolony’ Discovered in Antarctica; Another Global Warming Scare Story Bites the Dust – Proud Conservative
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2462/climate-change-may-shrink-adelie-penguin-range-by-end-of-century/
penguins, i luv ’em.
We have a few daft old birds up here, most of ’em flock in Westminster, they spread the dosh and liberally at folk (alchemists at Penn state and pigeon fanciers of one type or another) to tell ’em that the world and his flora/fauna is going ‘extinct’ IF, IF!! if we don’t do this that and the other to do with a life giving gas.
All the birds down south, think we are gone totally bats.
Note that those penguins are at the very tip of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, which probably has just about the mildest climate in all of Antarctica:
Yet we’re supposed to believe that warming threatens the penguins? Seriously??
Obviously, the penguins seem to prefer a warmer climate than most of Antarctica currently has. Unfortunately for the penguins, “polar amplification” of global warming seems to only work in the northern hemisphere (and nobody knows why). Even the Antarctic Peninsula (contrary to widespread misinformation) isn’t warming significantly, and Doran et al 2002† found that, although the Earth as a whole experienced 0.06°C/decade of warming during the 20th century, there was “a net cooling on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000, particularly during summer and autumn.”
† Yes, that Doran!
Ecologists such as Heather Lynch suffer (along with cognitive dissonance) from the “all swans are white” syndrome. Which is why they cannot be classified as scientists.
Well said Joan Gibson.
If something is just around the corner, it is just around the corner. It is irrelevant how big the total area then is. And if the area is so large you cannot know, then SAY SO.
It is utterly absurd to make definitive claims, then when shown to be wrong to say “well we didn’t actually look everywhere.”
Even in the austral summer, the ocean surrounding the archipelago is filled with the kind of thick sea-ice that ships try to avoid.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43250744
Quite so.
So a million-strong colony was in the ‘middle of nowhere’ but only a few miles away while experts were in blissful ignorance. What does that say about previous assertions that increasing Antarctic sea ice (due to man made climate change, of course) meant penguins had to walk farther to reach the sea and thus their chicks were starving to death before parents could return with food?!
Contradictions everywhere. Climate science is just a relentlessly hysterical production line of penguin poo.
Thank you, Paul, for the shout out!!
When working on my PhD at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1980’s, studies were being done by ecologists from Duke on the natural grass balds found along the Southern Appalachian Chain. The very large Big Yellow in NC is well known and they were studying it. Articles were published on the communities of grasses and sedges. They made the assumption that it was just as other grass balds, species wise. Sedges, especially, are nasty to identify, particularly when “sterile”. The “fruiting structures” are really the identifying characteristics. A woman graduate student at UNC was both a taxonomist and ecologist. She had taught herself to identify them when sterile. She was also working on Big Yellow and found that the other ecologists assumptions that it was the same as other balds were false. Oops.
Since the 1960’s, ecologists are notorious for not knowing any taxonomy. They consider themselves above such tasks as actually being able to identify plants. In fact, they look down their noses at taxonomists who are to be hidden away in herbariums for the purpose of identifying THEIR collections.
I had a TA (Teaching Assistantship) in the ’60-‘s at UNC. Mostly we taught the introductory botany labs. The last lab in the spring was tree/shrub identification. One of the taxonomy grad students went into the lab set up for an ecology student to teach and “made” all of the opposite-leaved specimens in the jars of water alternate-leaved by taking off one leaf of the pair down the stem. Our poor ecologist was in a panic as he could not key them out. He did not know enough to look at the stem and see the scar left with the removal AND the little bud which is in the axil of each leaf.
Once again reality fails to deliver on what the settled science tells it to do