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PrintJuly 20, 2008
Save The Baby Penguins
You might have read recently about baby penguins dying in Rio de Janeiro. For example, CBS News reported that
"Hundreds of baby penguins swept from the icy shores of Antarctica and Patagonia are washing up dead on Rio de Janeiro's tropical beaches."
CBS News noted that "Experts are divided over the possible causes." The possibilities mentioned were overfishing, pollution and, of course, "global warming," where they mean man-caused GW, of course. Notice that natural causes never seem to make the list. And strangely, the pollution explanation is based on the penguins getting into the Campos oil fields which are offshore Brazil, not Antarctica. So how and why did they get there? And the overfishing theory came without any other supporting data, such as Antarctic fish counts.
The Guardian was more direct: it titled it's penguin article "Victim's of Global Warming?"
"Hundreds of half-starved penguins, many bearing the scars of shark bites, have been waddling ashore on some of the world's most famous tropical beaches -- and experts suspect it could be the result of global warming."
So the Guardian and CBS seem to differ on whether the penguins are dead on arrival, or die later, but global warming is a top contender in either case. Both stories note that this has always happened, but the numbers have been greater this year.
How does this global warming thing work? If it is too warm in the Antarctic for the baby penguins, they swim to ... warmer places?
Maybe there's another explanation: global cooling. The area of the southern hemisphere covered by sea ice is at an unprecedented high point. Maybe the baby penguins, when they jump off that ice ledge to go fishing, are already closer to Rio than ever before, so more make the trip than ever before. (A graph of the southern hemisphere sea ice anomaly is available via the University of Illinois, but navigating there isn't easy. In fact, it might now be impossible. This U. of Ill. site is pro-AGW, and does not trumpet this graph. Try here, then click on the small graph at the bottom to get a close-up, here.)
(I think we need a "Climatologist Doll" or maybe just an "Al Gore Doll." Pull the string and it blames whatever you are talking about on "global warming." )
