It's World Penguin DAY!!!!!!!!

penguins suck. go caps.

In the spirit of PCOJ, do penguins serve any real purpose either evolutionarily or creationarily (is that a word?)

I suspect there's some food chain element, but I truly don't know.

animals don't have to serve a purpose...i don't understand the question

They do wear tuxedos, so it makes sense that they would serve.  just sayin.

OK, serious question though.  Maybe "serve a purpose" isn't the right way to phrase it.  I always think of various animals, bugs, etc and think of what they do as well as what do they provide to other animals.  For example mosquitos are annoying, but they provide food for birds and other things so if they were extinct it would effect the birds.

So, I am truly curious where penguins fit in.  They obviously eat something and my assumption is they're food for something else.

oh well they eat fish and seal and orcas eat them.  bacteria eat their excrement, and their bodies after they die.

One of them is a heck of a tap dancer.

Obviously the polar bears need to be enlightened with more tolerance towards the penguins.

I would eat a penguin, a seal, a whale, and a polar bear.

Originally posted by mdg2003

Originally posted by ejshowers Not sure if you were making a joke or not, but to clarify, polar bears don't eat penguins as they in the far northern hemisphere and penguins are all in the southern hemisphere.

I was wondering if someone would catch that…gold star! I got into a heated barroom discussion with a young lady on this very subject some 25 yrs ago. Her theory was that southern hemisphere polar bears were driven to near extinction because greenhouse gas ( remember when C02 was the catchall bababoo? ) was making Antarctica to cold for them. Her claim was that they flourished down there until the invention of the internal combustion engine destroyed their habitat. It was not too late though and she intended to go down there to save the remaining few bears. Flat earthers… sheesh.

Pretty sure it still is.

you realize that it was the conservatives that coined many of these names to make them sound less threatening right?

There's certainly a lot of mocking names out there, but the "climate change" and "global warming" terms are fully from the scientific community and generally depict two different things.  For example global warming is the overall trend which has been upwards whereas the climate change is typically more about weather events such as more severe storms and more drought type stuff.  I tend to think the media takes more liberties with the term "climate change" because they can lump a lot more into it.  "Oh, there was a bad tornado, obviously it's climate change" type stuff

From a general interest standpoint I had always thought "climate change" was a more recent term used and "global warming" was the old term, but here's an interesting graph from a google scholar search looking at the usage of both terms in scientific papers.  The term "Climate Change" was actually used quite a bit before "Global Warming".