Mass emperor penguin chick deaths prompt dire climate warning

[Tanuki]

Link to tweet

The emperor penguin is at severe risk of extinction in the next 30 to 40 years as a result of climate change, according to research by the Argentine Antarctic Institute (IAA).

Key points:
Penguin chicks succumb to freezing or drowning when exposed to the ocean before they grow their waterproof plumage
If nothing changes, many colonies will disappear in the next 30 to 40 years
Tourist and fishing activity also harms the penguins, disrupting the food cycle

"The emperor, the world's largest penguin and one of only two penguin species endemic to Antarctica, gives birth during the Antarctic winter and requires solid sea ice from April through to December to nest fledgling chicks.

If the sea freezes later or melts prematurely, the emperor family cannot complete its reproductive cycle.

"If the water reaches the newborn penguins, which are not ready to swim and do not have waterproof plumage, they die of the cold and drown," said biologist Marcela Libertelli, who has studied 15,000 penguins across two colonies in Antarctica at the IAA.

This has happened at the Halley Bay colony in the Weddell Sea, the second-largest Emperor penguin colony, where for three years all the chicks died."....(more)

[Mystery sage]

1. The people who cause this think it's a nothingburger

[Kaleva]

8. And I don't see very many people preparing for what's coming

One can tell how serious a person thinks of an issue by what they do in response to it.

[Doremus]

2. :(

We ignore these signs to our peril. Poor babies.

[lamp_shade]

3. This is heartbreaking. I LOVE penguins.

[Moostache]

4. Take a good look at this story, it is OUR future without a massive course correction.

WARNING - I was triggered as hell as I typed out this screed...it is long, depressing and offers NO HOPE. To all offended by that or seeking a silver lining to cushion reality.

Do yourself a favor - DO NOT READ FURTHER.

Last chance.

OK, I assume those reading beyond this point can handle this or are seeking contrarian positions to shapoe their views...

-------------------------------------------------------

The penguins are already doomed. So are the humans monitoring them and writing this story and those of just reading about it.

There is nothing in any "plan" at this point that will REVERSE the damage already done. It will take DECADES for the already released gases to dissipate from the atmosphere - and they are STILL INCREASING ANNUALLY, even when the effects are plain to see and the endgame a mathematical certainty without reimagining damn near EVERYTHING. We have been hand-wringing and navel-gazing as the opportunities to MITIGATE the impacts have streamed past us.

NOW?
Its too late to prevent or save the existence of these creatures. View them now.
Cherish the images and remember them because once they are gone, they are never coming back.

Homo Sapiens givt to Planet Earth?
Mass extinction and unfathomable damage that will take millions of years to overcome. Maybe the next apex species will acquire knowledge to piece together exactly how we allowed greed and "money" to eliminate a survivable climate in the end. Maybe they won't. Maybe Humanity was the first species in the entire universe to get this far...maybe that's a contributing factor to the lack of verified extraterrestial life in the Milky Way. I don't pretend to know that...but I do know that science and math don't really fucking care about whether or not we "BELIEVE" in them. They just keep on happening as predicted and that reality is grim.

I hope it was worth it.
Yachts, ski lodges, luxury cars and apartments...hording wealth and transferriung generational amounts to allow a class of people to exist on the backs of others exploited before the miscreants and heirs were ever conceived...it's endgame result is responsibility for planetary speciecide. Using money and power to mislead and lie to the masses, to protect their incomes for over 75 yearswhile the preventable became the inevitable and now is the extermination for life on this planet as it is currently known.
That is our collective future.

We're at the point now were anyone under the age of 30 who is not ACTIVELY sabotaging things is contributing to their own late 70's hellscape and dystopian future, if not sooner. If I was a teenager instead of an end-of-middle-age fart, I would be conspiring to damage or destroy as much of the fossil fuel infrastructure as possible and legitimately claim self-defense from future harm. If that doesn't start happening soon, there will not be a planet that can support BILLIONS of humans to inhabit 100 years from now. I used to think that was an eternity...100 years.

Now?
WWI was more than 100 years ago.
We're rapidly approaching 100 years since the start of the Great Depression.
Its later than anyone is acknowleding; and the whistling past the graveyard attitude of "someday we'll make progress towards the goals to slow the effects of climate change" is a serious detriment to even HAVING a human history in that not-as-far-off-as-it-seems 2122. For the "Lord of the Rings" fans out there who might read this far...Saurumon and Sauron have already conspired between The Two Towers and the hour is later than anyone is saying.

There are babies born today that may survive that long.
There are people alive today that may live that long too.
I know my expiration date is well before that date, but our collective guilt will survive beyond everyone alive today.

This was penguin colonies collapsing.
There are more mass die-offs in progress already - ants, spiders, many insects...birds, fish, krill population collapses...coral bleaching.

No one really cares.
No legitimate, preventative or retrograde actions are even seriously being applied.
Half-measues like electric cars but no infrastructure to support and facilitate its spread (like home Point Of Use solar, hydro, geothermal electric generation at scale) are not enough.

Politicians will NEVER tell the total truth on this issue...not even when the dams in the Souhwest dry up and the crops fail and the people begin rioting and dying by the hundreds of thousands a month...they'll be called "terrorist" or painted as villains and used to blame the woes of the horrors on an "other".

Today the penguins' tale is told.
Tomorrow nothing will change that could have saved them, because nothing was done 30 years ago when we already KNEW this was coming. What is going to be here 30 years from NOW?

+4 degress C warming is what.

There is no survivability plan for that, its game fucking over.
As I said, I hope the money and perceived power was worth it to the few who collected it.

They are murderers on an unimaginable scale.
But don't fear, they will go out like everything else bigger than a roach by 2122.
It is baked into the current situation and lack of response to course correct.
The brick wall is now almost obscuring the entire road ahead, and the gas is on the floor still.
Brace for impact and remember Force = Mass x Acceleration is a universal concept.

[Kaleva]

9. By the time the world decides to take a massive course correction, it'll be too late.

Mother Nature will then make the correction.

[Moostache]

11. I firmly believe that time has come and gone.

The chances of prevention ended in the 1980's.
The chances of mitigation ended in the 2010's.
The chances of survival may well be ending in our current decisions.

But you are 100% correct that when the REAL defecation slams into the rotary blades, it will be way too late to do anything about it.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is now old enough to gain a driver's license in the USA.
Pretty much nothing in that warning shot has been implemented at scale.
Nothing.

[Ferrets are Cool]

5. We are slowly but surely killing the planet, the very place where we live.

Unfortunately, we are taking huge swathes of wonderful creatures with us.

[hatrack]

6. We will kill as much of the natural world as possible, THEN civilization will fail

So, yeah, kind of a two-fer.

Meanwhile, back at the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial . . . .

[roamer65]

7. Just wait until we reach 1000 ppm CO2.

The cognitive decline in humans from it is about 20 percent.

From dumb to dumber.

[StarryNite]

10. Heartbreaking and horrifying