penguinsunited.com

How many scientists telling you that you have changed the world for the worse will it take? How many studies of melting ice? How many new coal-fired plants spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere do you need? Hummers and SUVs?

It’s not enough that you have ignored the obvious. Now you want to mess with my friends and family to prove what every living thing except humans know.

Give me a break.

How about this brilliant headline:

“Want to monitor climate change? P-p-p-pick up a penguin!”

It turns out “scientists at the University of Birmingham are trying out an alternative bio-indicator – the king penguin – to investigate whether they can be used to monitor the effects of climate change.”

The great idea: put penguins on treadmills. Implant “heart rate loggers” in penguins going to sea.

© mlenny

And why? To see whether we have to work harder and use more more energy and swim further looking for food when fish and food are scarce.

Do you really need to misuse us to learn about the man-made climate crisis? Why not open your eyes and see the melting glaciers? Listen to your children coughing from asthma! Try to see the night sky from your pollution-filled cities! List the rivers you can no longer swim!

Forgive us, but sometimes it takes a while for us to get word of what’s going on. We just heard that Canadian Fisheries spokespeople were disappointed that only 860 seals were killed during the first three days of Canada’s seal hunt. They indicated “that melting ice has depleted much of the herd in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence.”

Only 860! Oh my God – or maybe Oh your God!

Why so low? Well it seems the seals have been drowning before the hunters could get to them.

How can a seal drown? Well it takes a bit of time for baby seals to learn how to swim. Kind of like humans and bicycles. And so much ice is melting that the baby seals have been drowning. They try the best they can to cling to the pockets of ice, but many of them don’t make it.

Courtesy: Rei Ohara


“The quota for all three phases of this year’s seal hunt is 270,000 seals. That is 65,000 fewer than last year, a change imposed mainly because of the toll from the ice conditions.”

What’s so important about seals? “Fishermen sell seal pelts mostly for the fashion industry in Norway, Russia and China, as well as blubber for oil, earning about $78 per seal.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17953506/

We, in Antarctica, send our greetings to our friends up north in the Arctic. We were saddened to learn that things are getting worse for you.

It seems that Human scientists who have measuring the thickness of Arctic ice for 40 years have changed their minds. A few months ago they were warning that the summer ice in the Arctic could disappear altogether in 2040. Well new information gathered from a British submarine – they could have asked a polar bear – indicates “the effects of global warming are much worse than previously suspected and could lead to a complete melting of Arctic summer ice in as little as 13 years … the thinning was already approaching 50 percent and that the ice could disappear by 2020.”
Just in case you think we’re making this up, check this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18039460/

Mother polar bear & cub: Mike Dunn, NOAA Climate Program Office

The melting Arctic ice will not only change life for the worse for our animal friends but for the native Inuit peoples. Houses, roads, railroads, pipelines sit above fragile permafrost.

Not only that, Humans in their infinite wisdom have used the Arctic lands as dumping grounds. “In some part of the Arctic, toxic and radioactive materials are stored and contained in frozen ground. Thawing may release these substances in the local and wider environment with risks to humans and wildlife alongside significant clean up costs.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070410140922.htm

Full moon Arctic ice: Mike Dunn, NOAA Climate Program Office