Guest “drive by” by David Middleton

Alternate Title: “Tarantino does ‘Happy Feet’”

Is Antarctica gaining ice? 01:47

(CNN)A penguin colony in Antarctica has suffered a massive breeding failure, with only two chicks surviving the disaster.

Terre Adélie (Adélie Land) is home to more than 18,000 pairs of Adélie penguins, but this year almost all the seabirds’ babies starved to death, a situation one expert described as “Tarantino does Happy Feet.”

The World Wildlife Fund said unseasonably extensive amounts of sea ice around the colony in East Antarctica had forced the adult penguins to travel further than normal to forage for food.

“This devastating event contrasts with the image that many people might have of penguins,” said Rod Downie, Head of Polar Programmes at WWF. “It’s more like ‘Tarantino does Happy Feet’, with dead penguin chicks strewn across a beach in Adélie Land.”

[…]

CNN

I had to double-check both the website and my calendar to make sure this wasn’t from The Onion and that it wasn’t April Fool’s Day.

Too much sea ice —> “Tarantino does ‘Happy Feet’”

If RCP 8.5 doesn’t exterminate Adélie penguins by 2100, apparently too much sea ice will.  Apparently Adélie penguins lived in a Goldilocks world for the past 37,000 to 122,000 years. From the end of the Eemian interglacial stage, through the last glacial maximum, on through the Holocene Climatic Optimum, down to the coldest part of the Little Ice Age… Antarctica clearly must have had a prefect Goldilocks sea ice extent.

Clearly penguin evolution depended on stable atmospheric CO2 levels…

Cenozoic atmospheric CO2. Older is to the left, x-axis is in millions of calendar years AD (BC). The Mauna Loa instrumental record is depicted by the solid black line at year 0. Oligocene CO2 levels drop from about 800-1,000 ppmv to about 600 ppmv from 32.5 to 30 MYA.

And a stable, unchanging climate…

Cenozoic temperature anomaly. Older is to the right, x-axis is millions of years before present (1950 AD). Earth’s climate rapidly cooled about 34 million years ago.

As usual: Any and all sarcasm was purely intentional.