It’s surprising how much this headline affects me. Who doesn’t like penguins? And seals are nice, but penguins are so likeable. We’ve really ruined everything.
I get a bit of this looming feeling every time there is discussion about the Awk programming language, because it reminds me we already got the closest thing to a penguin in the nothern hemisphere extinct by the XIX century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_auk
Hope this time around we do a better job of avoiding complete doom for these species.
> While you abide on this island you are in the constant practice of horrid cruelties for you not only skin them Alive, but you burn them Alive also to cook their Bodies with. You take a kettle with you into which you put a Penguin or two, you kindle a fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate Penguins themselves. Their bodies being oily soon produce a Flame; there is no wood on the island.
You're jumping to some big conclusions there, I believe the exact opposite in fact. The IPCC report is always overly conservative and it's gonna be much worse than anyone thinks. Those birds are already dead, as well as most of us cause there's no convincing people to stop driving diesels for two hours every day and flying halfway across the planet for a vacation. I've stopped caring. Burn all the gas you want, blow up as many missiles as you like, it won't make much difference in the end.
I bet some emus will survive though, tough bastards.
I love penguins, and this news has me close to tears
My local zoo has a little event during winter where the king penguins get to go for a little walk around outside their enclosure. I've been a few times this year and they are just such fun animals. It has made me want to get involved with the zoo somehow, maybe not working with the animals directly but something. I don't know.
It makes me so sad how we humans know that we are messing things up on the planet but we keep doing it anyways because the economy must grow
That's really cool! If I'm up near Calgary in the future I'm definitely checking that out. I miss the penguin march they would do here, but I understand why they stopped
It's not as though people intentionally made these endangered because they have insufficient love for penguins. We have unintentionally done it because we have insufficient love (care) for them and many, many other things, creatures, people, etc.
It's because the people who get rich off of fossil fuels are in control, and they are willing to continue this damage as long as it adds to their personal fortunes.
We could "manhattan project" ourselves out of this mess if we wanted to. China, in a sense, is doing just that.
About 15 years ago, I saw on the news in Europe that 8 students had been shot at some random high school in a random US state.
Having been conditioned by my environment to perceive such events as important, I turned to my friend and said “Man, 8 students were shot at a high school in the States!”
He asked me “What am I supposed to do with that information?” That response changed my life.
It made me realize that “important events” are meaningless empathy theater, with the goal of desensitizing people until they care more about random folks dying on the other side of the planet than about the person sitting next to them on the bench.
It’s almost theater to care… the car accident rate is mass slaughter on a scale that dwarfs every school shooting on the planet yet nobody gives two shits. A lot of it is posing.
>“What am I supposed to do with that information?”
...Feel some sorrow? Think a bit about what could cause such a thing? Because one day, it may happen at your kid's school... And it may be your own kid.
An absence of both empathy and curiosity aren't exactly a response to be proud of. An unconscious life. The kind that leads to, one day, spouting the standard response: "I never imagined it could happen to me".
Sorrow for people you don’t know? That’s a category error, and soundbites like that are a big part of the reason why many people now find it difficult to feel genuine sorrow.
Sorrow for your human brethren isn't a category error or a soundbite. It is basic decency. Or do you care only about your tribe?
You can even feel something for animals.
But thank you for another confirmation that the prevailing mindset in America today isn't the Western tradition of Humanism, but a regression towards raw egoism and naked psychopathy. Elon "Empathy is a weakness" Musk, Kristi "I shot my misbehaving puppy" Noem, Trump...
Life on this planet will be OK. Throughout geologic time countless species have gone extinct. The Anthropocene might be tragic for the natural world but not terminal.
But: what are we trading it for? Higher living standards for more people is a noble and good but I don't think there's evidence it requires this rate of ecological destruction. Have we ever seriously tried to decouple growth from extraction?
I'm not convinced a solar punk future exists where technology will eventually close that gap in time. Maybe it will. So far it seems that every efficiency gain gets swallowed by expanded consumption. What seems most probable now is that we don't get a better world but the same dirty one plus a Starbucks on Mars.
For humans it does not really matter whether some kind of life will still continue to exist on this planet. That is a too weak consolation for unrecoverable losses.
Ignoring any ethical or esthetic arguments, every species of living beings that disappears today, regardless if it is a beetle or a whale, is a definitive loss of very important information, whose value we are not yet able to assess. It is equivalent to the burning of a library containing very valuable research papers containing results obtained after many years of work, for which there are no copies elsewhere.
Despite the huge progress of technology during the last few centuries, there are still a lot of essential things that living beings can do, but which we have not learned yet how to do. An example is the energy-efficient capture of the diluted carbon dioxide from air and a huge number of other chemical processes that would be very useful, if mastered by humans.
Every species that is lost might be the one who could save us a lot of work in the future, when we will become able to determine in much more detail how a living being works, which could provide solutions to important technical problems, some of which are actually critical for the survival of humanity, because our current technologies cannot sustain human life without help from a great number of different kinds of living beings.
For some species that have disappeared or that are disappearing we have DNA sequences. However that is not the complete information about a living being, which would allow its reconstruction.
We are still unable to read the complete information about a living cell, because there is a lot of necessary information besides that stored in nucleic acid sequences. It is likely that we will become able to read the entire information in less than a century from now, but by then it may be too late and a very large number of species will be already lost, and even the survival of the human species is not certain, due to its great median stupidity.
Even for the species where you see claims that the DNA has been sequenced, that is only very seldom true.
Especially for the eukaryotic species, where the structure of the genome is much more complex, with many chromosomes and epigenetic information, for a very small fraction of the "sequenced" genomes we have complete information, e.g. including the actual composition of the chromosomes and the locations of the genes on them, which may be important for gene regulation. For most of the existing sequenced genomes, we only have the sequences of a great number of random fragments of the genomes, from which we can make an estimation of the full genome, by examining the overlaps between the known fragments and hoping that they cover most of the genome.
There are only relatively few genomes that are known with great accuracy. Even the human genome, whose study had priority, has features that were finally discovered only decades after the first announcement claiming (falsely) that the sequencing of the human genome has been finished. Determining the sequence of the last unknown 1% of a genome can take more than the sequencing of the first 99% of the genome.
All large land and sea animals are now in danger, except perhaps those that are in some sense semi domesticated, deer, coyotes, raccoons, etc, but the wild ones are dying out due to human competition for resources or there very bodys.
It’s terrible that the side effect of humans creating a world of wealth, safety and comfort (for all?) is that we risk destroying the very comfort we create - but it is also awesome that we have sufficient wealth to allow people to study these birds full time, enough wealth to build communication systems that tell random strangers about the threat they are under and hopefully enough time to correct the problem.
I saw a speech by Carl Sagan that might be relevant - he said (sometime in 1990 judging by haircuts) that the US had spent 10 trillion dollars on defending itself from the threat of Soviet attack since 1945, but that the attack was not “certain” - not 100% sure. So if we were willing to spend trillions to prevent an uncertain catastrophe, why does the same logic not apply to climate chnage?
Many people do not see climate change as certain. Those same people have become convinced that all solutions to climate change involve their lives getting worse. Finally, for those who accept the science of climate change, the “what to do” is not obvious.
In short: not everyone agrees it is a problem. Those that do, don’t agree on the mechanics of the solution.
"According to the IUCN Red List criteria, a species is generally classified as Endangered (EN) if its population of mature individuals falls below 2,500"
Also IUCN, with only 180,000 individuals the Emperor penguin is now classified as Endangered.
That is objectively a wrong summary of how IUCN Red List is calculated. There’s a variety of factors including rate of decline, and any of those factors can lead to a species being in the Endangered category.
the article says 20,000 was 10% of the population
therefore the population is 180,000.
if "something might happen in the next 60 years to wipe out half the population" counts as making a species endangered, every species on the planet counts as endangered.
Please go ahead and read the criteria for how the species are tagged as endangered. Current status and population numbers can contribute to that tag, but if there are active threats that are going to rapidly affect healthy population numbers, they will still be considered endangered.
The die off is accelerating. Krill shortages (mostly due to commercial fishing) and warming temperatures will ensure it’s not going to take 60 years and that’s what the tag means.
61 comments
Hope this time around we do a better job of avoiding complete doom for these species.
> While you abide on this island you are in the constant practice of horrid cruelties for you not only skin them Alive, but you burn them Alive also to cook their Bodies with. You take a kettle with you into which you put a Penguin or two, you kindle a fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate Penguins themselves. Their bodies being oily soon produce a Flame; there is no wood on the island.
Oh dear god.
0. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26353120M/Effective_awk_Prog...
I bet some emus will survive though, tough bastards.
"Trump Administration Seals Extinction Fate for Rice’s Whale in Offshore Drilling Decision"
https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/03/trump-admi...
This indeed a sad story.
My local zoo has a little event during winter where the king penguins get to go for a little walk around outside their enclosure. I've been a few times this year and they are just such fun animals. It has made me want to get involved with the zoo somehow, maybe not working with the animals directly but something. I don't know.
It makes me so sad how we humans know that we are messing things up on the planet but we keep doing it anyways because the economy must grow
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2024/01/08/cincinnati-...
It's a pretty fun little event. The penguins seem to really enjoy it, they're always checking out the crowd
The Penguin walk doesn't run all year, something like Nov-March. It's ended for this year unfortunately
We could "manhattan project" ourselves out of this mess if we wanted to. China, in a sense, is doing just that.
Having been conditioned by my environment to perceive such events as important, I turned to my friend and said “Man, 8 students were shot at a high school in the States!”
He asked me “What am I supposed to do with that information?” That response changed my life.
>“What am I supposed to do with that information?”
...Feel some sorrow? Think a bit about what could cause such a thing? Because one day, it may happen at your kid's school... And it may be your own kid.
An absence of both empathy and curiosity aren't exactly a response to be proud of. An unconscious life. The kind that leads to, one day, spouting the standard response: "I never imagined it could happen to me".
You can even feel something for animals.
But thank you for another confirmation that the prevailing mindset in America today isn't the Western tradition of Humanism, but a regression towards raw egoism and naked psychopathy. Elon "Empathy is a weakness" Musk, Kristi "I shot my misbehaving puppy" Noem, Trump...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_4uEaZQ2Kg
[0] https://youtu.be/qVJzQc9ELTE?si=R8K7ow2cuSuAOfex
But: what are we trading it for? Higher living standards for more people is a noble and good but I don't think there's evidence it requires this rate of ecological destruction. Have we ever seriously tried to decouple growth from extraction?
I'm not convinced a solar punk future exists where technology will eventually close that gap in time. Maybe it will. So far it seems that every efficiency gain gets swallowed by expanded consumption. What seems most probable now is that we don't get a better world but the same dirty one plus a Starbucks on Mars.
> The Anthropocene might be tragic for the natural world but not terminal.
I'm not so sure. I'm reminded of this quote:
“How did you go bankrupt?" “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Ignoring any ethical or esthetic arguments, every species of living beings that disappears today, regardless if it is a beetle or a whale, is a definitive loss of very important information, whose value we are not yet able to assess. It is equivalent to the burning of a library containing very valuable research papers containing results obtained after many years of work, for which there are no copies elsewhere.
Despite the huge progress of technology during the last few centuries, there are still a lot of essential things that living beings can do, but which we have not learned yet how to do. An example is the energy-efficient capture of the diluted carbon dioxide from air and a huge number of other chemical processes that would be very useful, if mastered by humans.
Every species that is lost might be the one who could save us a lot of work in the future, when we will become able to determine in much more detail how a living being works, which could provide solutions to important technical problems, some of which are actually critical for the survival of humanity, because our current technologies cannot sustain human life without help from a great number of different kinds of living beings.
For some species that have disappeared or that are disappearing we have DNA sequences. However that is not the complete information about a living being, which would allow its reconstruction.
We are still unable to read the complete information about a living cell, because there is a lot of necessary information besides that stored in nucleic acid sequences. It is likely that we will become able to read the entire information in less than a century from now, but by then it may be too late and a very large number of species will be already lost, and even the survival of the human species is not certain, due to its great median stupidity.
Even for the species where you see claims that the DNA has been sequenced, that is only very seldom true.
Especially for the eukaryotic species, where the structure of the genome is much more complex, with many chromosomes and epigenetic information, for a very small fraction of the "sequenced" genomes we have complete information, e.g. including the actual composition of the chromosomes and the locations of the genes on them, which may be important for gene regulation. For most of the existing sequenced genomes, we only have the sequences of a great number of random fragments of the genomes, from which we can make an estimation of the full genome, by examining the overlaps between the known fragments and hoping that they cover most of the genome.
There are only relatively few genomes that are known with great accuracy. Even the human genome, whose study had priority, has features that were finally discovered only decades after the first announcement claiming (falsely) that the sequencing of the human genome has been finished. Determining the sequence of the last unknown 1% of a genome can take more than the sequencing of the first 99% of the genome.
I saw a speech by Carl Sagan that might be relevant - he said (sometime in 1990 judging by haircuts) that the US had spent 10 trillion dollars on defending itself from the threat of Soviet attack since 1945, but that the attack was not “certain” - not 100% sure. So if we were willing to spend trillions to prevent an uncertain catastrophe, why does the same logic not apply to climate chnage?
Many people do not see climate change as certain. Those same people have become convinced that all solutions to climate change involve their lives getting worse. Finally, for those who accept the science of climate change, the “what to do” is not obvious.
In short: not everyone agrees it is a problem. Those that do, don’t agree on the mechanics of the solution.
Literally everything he described in there is precisely the world we live in today
Also IUCN, with only 180,000 individuals the Emperor penguin is now classified as Endangered.
I think someone has been out hunting headlines.
https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/categories-and-criteri...
No one is farming for headlines.
if "something might happen in the next 60 years to wipe out half the population" counts as making a species endangered, every species on the planet counts as endangered.
The die off is accelerating. Krill shortages (mostly due to commercial fishing) and warming temperatures will ensure it’s not going to take 60 years and that’s what the tag means.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/record-maximum-sea-ice-in...
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=3613794165505253&set=gm...