From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

The BBC reports that Antarctica’s gentoo penguins are “flourishing with climate change,” while CBS News reports that an iconic chinstrap penguin colony has suffered a “population collapse” driven by climate change. This bipolar framing is highly misleading. The observations show different penguin species responding differently to local environmental conditions, food availability, habitat, competition, and their own biological adaptability, while the evidence for attributing individual population changes specifically to human-caused climate change is considerably less certain than the headlines suggest.

In its October 2026 article, “Inside an active Antarctic volcano, gentoo penguins are flourishing with climate change,” the BBC reports that gentoo penguin numbers increased about 11 percent globally between 2013 and 2020 and approximately 23 percent along the West Antarctic Peninsula.

Then, on October 7, CBS News published an AFP report titled “Iconic penguin colony sees ‘population collapse’ driven by climate change, study finds.” That article reports that the chinstrap penguin population on Zavodovski Island in the South Sandwich Islands declined from approximately 1.09 million breeding individuals in 2011 to 402,000 in 2025, a decline of about 63 percent.

So, there you have it. Penguins are flourishing because of climate change, and penguins are collapsing because of climate change. Apparently, whatever happens to a penguin, climate change gets the diagnosis.

The BBC describes gentoo penguins as successful “climate-change winners,” citing their ability to tolerate warmer and wetter conditions, change prey, replace lost egg clutches, and adjust breeding schedules.

CBS presents a much darker picture. British Antarctic Survey researcher Norman Ratcliffe told AFP concerning the chinstrap decline:

“We think that climate change operating through food webs is probably the main driver.”

The key word is “probably.”

That is an appropriate scientific qualification. CBS’s headline, however, transforms “probably” into a population collapse “driven by climate change.” The difference matters because observing a decline is not the same scientific task as determining its cause.

The proposed mechanism involves ocean conditions affecting krill availability, which then affects penguin feeding, breeding, survival, and ultimately population size. That is plausible, but it is a chain of ecological relationships, not a thermometer directly killing penguins.

And then there are the penguins that apparently didn’t read the climate script.

On the very same Zavodovski Island where chinstrap penguins declined 63 percent, CBS reports that macaroni penguins increased from approximately 338,000 in 2011 to 433,000 in 2025, an increase of about 28 percent.

The chinstraps and macaronis inhabit the same island. They are surrounded by the same ocean and exposed to the same broad climatic conditions. Yet one population declined dramatically while the other increased substantially.

Researchers offer a perfectly reasonable biological explanation. Macaroni penguins have a broader diet than chinstraps and therefore can exploit alternative food sources when conditions change.

Exactly.

That demonstrates why simplistic climate attribution is so unrealistic. Species-specific diet, competition, prey abundance, breeding behavior, habitat, predation, migration, volcanic activity, and adaptability all influence wildlife populations. Climate may influence some of those factors, but simply observing a population change does not establish climate change as its dominant cause.

The BBC’s gentoo story reinforces that point. Gentoos are highly adaptable. They eat a variety of prey, alter breeding behavior, and tolerate a broader range of environmental conditions than some other Antarctic penguins. Their success is a reminder that living organisms are not passive objects waiting helplessly for environmental conditions to change.

Adaptation is one of the most fundamental features of biology.

There is also an important historical warning against treating every disappearing penguin colony as evidence of catastrophe. In 2016, alarming headlines claimed that roughly 150,000 Adélie penguins at Cape Denison might have died after the giant B09B iceberg grounded nearby and greatly increased the distance birds had to travel to open water. Subsequent reporting raised an obvious alternative: many of the missing penguins may simply have relocated.

A reduction in penguins counted at one breeding colony is not necessarily equivalent to that number of dead penguins. Birds can skip breeding, disperse, or establish themselves elsewhere.

Then came an extraordinary discovery. In 2018, researchers reported a previously unknown “supercolony” of more than 1.5 million Adélie penguins in Antarctica’s Danger Islands. Satellite imagery showing extensive guano stains led researchers to the remote colonies, which had escaped scientific surveys for years.

As Watts Up With That reported at the time, the discovery demonstrated just how incomplete Antarctic penguin population inventories could be.

Those birds were not proven to be the missing Cape Denison penguins, an important distinction. But the episode demonstrated something equally important: scientists cannot confidently describe continent-wide population changes if substantial populations remain undiscovered.

Penguin movement has also been directly documented elsewhere. The British Antarctic Survey reported in 2019 that the Halley Bay emperor penguin colony experienced catastrophic breeding failures when unstable sea ice broke apart before chicks were ready to survive in the ocean. Yet researchers simultaneously observed a large increase at the nearby Dawson-Lambton colony, indicating that adult birds had moved to another breeding site.

That does not erase the genuine chick mortality at Halley Bay, but it demonstrates that penguin populations are dynamic and that colony counts can reflect movement as well as mortality.

Scientists themselves have learned from this. A 2017 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution study acknowledged that earlier emperor penguin models had inadequately represented movement among colonies and incorporated dispersal into later modeling.

The BBC’s story provides another reminder of how complicated Antarctic ecology actually is. Its headline suggests gentoo penguins are “flourishing” inside an active Antarctic volcano on Deception Island. Yet the article acknowledges that penguins do not presently breed inside the caldera. The photographed birds are visiting the area while molting, taking advantage of its warmth and shelter.

Even more interestingly, the British Antarctic Survey reported in 2017 that eruptions near Deception Island repeatedly devastated local gentoo populations during the past 7,000 years.

Apparently volcanoes can be good for penguins when they’re providing geothermal heating and bad for penguins when they’re erupting.

Different biological responses to environmental change are entirely possible, of course. But if every possible population outcome can be presented as confirmation of the same hypothesis, journalists should be especially careful about distinguishing observations from attribution.

“Collapse” describes what happened to the number of chinstraps counted on Zavodovski Island. “Flourishing” describes the increasing gentoo population reported by the BBC. Neither word establishes why those changes occurred.

Antarctica is enormous. The Antarctic Peninsula, South Sandwich Islands, East Antarctica, Ross Sea, and other regions have substantially different ecological conditions. Gentoo, chinstrap, macaroni, Adélie, and emperor penguins have different diets, breeding strategies, relationships with sea ice, habitats, and abilities to adapt.

It would be remarkable if all of them responded identically to environmental change.

Indeed, the observations being reported by the BBC and CBS paint a much more interesting picture than either headline suggests. Some penguin populations are declining. Others are increasing. Some move. Some exploit different food sources. Some tolerate changing conditions better than others. Volcanoes, sea ice, prey availability, breeding habitat, predation, competition, and weather all matter.

Climate change may be one factor influencing those systems, but attributing an individual population increase or decrease specifically to anthropogenic warming requires evidence demonstrating the causal chain and weighing competing explanations. The CBS researcher’s careful use of the word “probably” reflects that uncertainty, and then the headline largely eliminates it.

The real lesson from these stories isn’t that penguins are simultaneously being saved and destroyed by climate change. It is that Antarctic ecosystems are complicated, penguins are adaptable, population monitoring remains imperfect, and wildlife populations have never been static.

The media should report that complexity instead of forcing every population change into the same climate narrative. Otherwise, the formula becomes absurdly predictable: Penguins thriving? Climate change. Penguins declining? Climate change. Penguins missing? Climate change. Penguins discovered somewhere else?

Who knows? It seems the media makes it up as they go along.