Several million "canaries" still not dead

Yet another global warming scare story is provided by National Geographic News here, entitled "Antarctica's Adelie Penguins Extinct in a Decade?".

Excerpts:

If the trend continues, Fraser predicts that Adélie penguins will be locally extinct within five to ten years.
...
Since Fraser began to study Antarctic penguins in 1974, he has seen the Adélie population in the western Antarctic Peninsula shrink by 80 percent.

Today there are 8,000 birds left from an original colony size of 40,000.
...
"They are the classic canaries in the coal mine, in that they are responding to changes that are occurring on an enormous scale," Fraser said.
...
As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, southern parts of Antarctica have become more hospitable homes for the species.

Adélie populations in the far southern peninsula have tripled in previous decades, Fraser said.

If you read the entire article, it looks like Adelie penguins are just moving around in response to fluctuations in ocean currents. The article carefully avoids any mention of total Adelie population numbers. Why is that?

Well, if you use Google for a couple of minutes, you should find a lot of Adelie penguin population estimates around 2 to 2.5 million breeding pairs.

That's a whole lot of Adelie penquins. Given that they seemed to have coped well with the last couple of hundred years of climate change, I'm skeptical that they'll go extinct any time soon.

Excerpts from this page:

A total of 2.5 millions pairs of Adélie penguins currently breed on the Antarctic continent and the small islands around it...Studies conducted in several locations have revealed that populations of Adélie penguins are either stable or increasing, but since population trends are highly dependent on the sea-ice distribution, there is a fear that global warming may ultimately affect Adélie penguin populations. Adélie penguins colonize the ice-free zone of the Antarctic continent for the short summer breeding season, and their at-sea activities (90% of their life) depend on the structure and annual fluctuations of the sea ice to a point that they are sometimes referred to as the creatures of the pack ice (sensu Ainley). This intricate relationship is illustrated by the birds’ foraging ranges, which are defined by the maximum extent of the sea ice.

Note that Antarctic sea ice extent recently hit a "record high" for the period since 1979.