Polar Nightmare

Go ahead and add king penguins to the list of animals whose ultimate fate depends on how we handle global warming.

While environmentalists have been pressuring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to declare Arctic polar bears endangered (the first species to be potentially labeled as such solely because of climate change), new studies show similarly frightening prospects for Earth’s second-largest penguins.

Time reports “that a 0.47 degree F increase in the temperature of the Southern Ocean—considerably below current forecasts for the next several decades—would reduce penguin numbers by 9%, enough to touch off a population collapse” for the king penguins and other biotic cohabitants of the Antarctic ecosystem.

The scariest part, however, is that even if we finally do our part and “manage to slow the growth in carbon emissions, the poles will likely continue to warm.”