If you've ever been around a big stockyard, like a cattle feedlot, a big auction barn, or a hog production facility, you will have noticed that those places have some characteristic odors. One of them, a sharp, tingling scent that makes your eyes water, comes mostly from water running off animal manure. It's part of what makes manure good fertilizer - ammonia.
Call it poop, poo, manure, guano, or anything else, it's still the solid or semi-solid assimilated residue of the digestive process of all vertebrates. It's good fertilizer.
Penguins, of course, produce it too, and considering that in Antarctica, there are a lot of penguins, their droppings can have quite a local effect. But a recent Bloomberg piece is using that to excuse the fact that Antarctic ice is actually increasing while keeping up the climate scoldery, and that's... well, a big pile of poo.
The B.S. doesn’t get any more odorous than this. Bloomberg News is waving around fecal matter as a method to prevent Antarctica melting from the ever-present climate boogeyman of global warming.
Reporter Aaron Clark filled the toilet on Bloomberg News’s website May 22 with a story headlined, “Penguin Poop Could Limit Global Warming’s Impact on Antarctica.” Yes, this is an actual story.
Clark, who based his argument on a seemingly wacky new study published on the leftist site Nature.com, heralded how “[a]ccumulated penguin excrement — or guano — emits ammonia, a gas that can contribute to the formation of clouds and which is likely generating a cooling effect by creating a buffer between the sun’s heat and Antarctica’s ice and water.”
For the record, I'm not related to this guy.
So, there are feedback loops in nature that can actually self-correct things like the local climate. Imagine that.
Now, the argument isn't complete BS - or PS, if you like. Accumulated excrement does indeed emit ammonia. Ammonia can contribute to the formation of clouds, which can reduce solar warming. And clouds, in that part of the world, produce snow. Snow, when it accumulates, forms ice. In time, glaciers.
That's where Antarctic ice comes from.
JunkScience.com founder Steve Milloy dunked on Bloomberg News for treating this nonsense as a legitimate news story in comments to MRC Business. “Recent research has (again) inconveniently shown that Antarctica is cooling and gaining ice,” Milloy noted. “The ‘penguin poop’ study seems to be a rather pathetic effort to explain the cooling without having to admit that emissions-driven warming is a hoax.”
Clark tried to drum up fears about melting ice on the continent: “Scientists point to the impact warming oceans are having on the continent, and have warned of significant risks to sea levels if huge ice sheets begin to melt.” Here’s the problem: Nowhere did Clark point out that “[t]he Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) has shown signs of record-breaking growth after decades of contributing to global sea-level rise,” as the New York Post just reported May 5. In fact, the Post noted based on another study that “between 2021 and 2023, the AIS gained mass at a rate of 108 gigatons per year — a remarkable reversal from the rapid loss seen in previous years.”
Here's the thing: For most of the Cenozoic - think, post-dinosaurs - Antarctica has been through various periods of increasing and decreasing ice, no human influence needed.
See Also: Don't Panic—Antarctica Isn't Melting
Another Study Confirms: Antarctica Isn't Melting
Antarctic ice sheets began forming in the Eocene and increased somewhat during the Oligocene. Parts of the ice sheet declined during the Pliocene, three to five million years ago, and there were no coal-fired power plants then, nor were there any SUVs or gas stoves. Meanwhile, in the Pliocene and the Pleistocene, in the northern hemisphere, mile-thick glaciers were, on the geological time scale, going up and down like window blinds.
We're in an interglacial period now, in fact, when it is - no surprise - a little warmer.
There are a few relevant facts here: first, Antarctic ice has been, in recent years, increasing. Bloomberg's Aaron Clark (again, no relation) is trying to explain this while keeping up the climate scoldery. Yes, ammonia from penguin poo can indeed have a regional effect on cloud cover. But this is a specious argument; there are billions of factors that have regional and systemic effects on climate. We don't and likely never will completely understand them; the global climate is, as I keep saying, too vast, too chaotic, with too many inputs for us to completely understand it.
But the scolds will bend any argument into a pretzel to justify us taking drastic actions, actions that will reduce our standard of living, to deal with this issue that we really don't understand very well.
That's the main takeaway from this pile of penguin poo.
