Update: MS-NBC edited out the penguins. I’m checking to see if I can find another source.

MS-NBC had to go around the world to get its story on global warming yesterday. In fact, they had to substitute the North Pole for the South Pole. At the 45-second mark in this story about the disappearing ice at the top of the world, take a look at the critters they show on an ice floe:

Those, folks, are penguins — which live at the bottom of the earth, as Nigel points out. The “expanses of water that weren’t there before” were actually never there at the North Pole. All 17 species of penguins live in the southern hemisphere.

Why would penguins make the long and rather warm journey across the equator to appear in an MS-NBC story about global warming?

• Escaping the expanding ice cap at the South Pole
• Conducting their own investigation into polar-bear migration
• MS-NBC’s editors don’t know one pole from another

Something got exposed in this broadcast — scientific illiteracy at MS-NBC.

Update: Via Lawhawk, here’s another example of Michelle Kosinski’s expert reporting on climate extremes:

Note the depth of the water, as measured by the ankles of men walking past Kosinski during this flood in New Jersey.