Most idiotic climate claim ever?
I’m pretty sure some people lay awake at night trying to come up with new ways to demonstrate that planet is going to hell in a handbasket. As I pointed out in Why climate change communications is like ‘Shaka, when the walls fell’, it’s all about imagery, not facts.
What better imagery then than turning lobsters into B-movie crustacean cannibals by making a lame-assed “experiment” that you put up on YouTube, complete with movie titles. Of course the non-thinkers are eating this right up, and they don’t even need drawn butter. Watch:
From Climate Desk:
Noah Oppenheim’s plan was simple: Rig a young lobster underneath a waterproof, infrared camera; drop the contraption overboard off the coast of Maine; and see who comes along for a bite to eat. The takers, he expected, would be fish: Cod, herring, and other “groundfish” found in these waters that are known to love a good lobster dinner. Similar experiments conducted in the 1990s showed that apart from being snatched up in one of the thousands of traps that sprinkle the sea floor here—tools of this region’s signature trade—fish predation was the principle cause of lobster death. Instead, Oppenheim, a marine biology graduate student at the University of Maine, captured footage that looks like it comes straight from the reel of a 1950s B-grade horror movie: Rampant lobster cannibalism.
First, lobsters are scavengers, so they’ll take advantage of anything that is stressed, dying, or dead. No surprises there.
Second , the fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous. So of course, they’ve survived some of the warmest periods of Earth’s history.
Third, it seems there’s a hockey stick in lobsters, all while that warmth induced cannibalism is going on:
![lobstergraph[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/lobstergraph1.jpg?quality=83)
Source of data: Maine Dept. of Marine Resources.
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3…2…1 It’s worse than we thought!
This is like the superstitious dark ages where the faithful would blame/credit any given phenomenon, real or fabricated, as a manifestaion of their beliefs. What is pitiful is that the sort of anti-rational junk made up in this and far too many other stories is widely and unquestinoingly accepted.
We all know about confirmation bias. Is there also “confirmation stupidity” involving putting baby lobsters in the path of hungry adult lobsters and then claiming warmer temperatures drive lobsters to cannibalism? And, ‘We are encouraging this’? Who’s ‘we’, white man?
Well, on the face of it I’d say they are indeed encouraging this, by putting defenseless baby lobsters in front of hungry adult ones.
Did they bother to check the temperature of the ocean to bolster their argument? What happened to the ‘control’ baby lobster in colder water? Was he eaten at a slower pace?
How soon until they start trying AGW skeptics as witches? Seems to be the same kind of thinking.
Lobster eating lobster, oh my.
They have been doing that for eons, that is why they get those lovely rubber bands before being put in the holding tanks at the so called lobster pond.
I note that the “Climate Desk” story ends with a short paragraph saying that in order for people to survive this warming, they may have to adopt cannibalism. I guess when you have nothing useful to say, spouting nonsense squared must make sense?
Oh God……
What about the Earth disintegrating?
Wow, who’d have thought that more lobsters could be spun as a bad thing. Amazing.
I myself don’t care much for lobster, but my wife is a lobstaholic.
My anecdotal research says 100deg C water for 15 minutes (large lobster, or 12 minutes for a medium-small lobster) is just about perfect for a Maine lobster .
We were at a party
His ear lobe fell in the deep
Someone reached in and grabbed it
It was a rock lobster
Rock lobster
Rock lobster
We were at the beach
Everybody had matching towels
Somebody went under a dock
And there they saw a rock
It wasn’t a rock
It was a rock lobster
[snip – take your ugly comments about a tragedy elsewhere – Anthony]
Bruce
Lobsterholicism is a serious condition warranting medical intervention…..
You have my sympathies..Beware you don’t suffer excessive carer strain.
I’m just trying to help.
Okay, the overabundance of lobsters in Long Island Sound allowed disease transference among individuals, as they tend to gather around obstructions on the sea floor and avoid large open areas of the Sound bottom. And, at the same time, the oceans were reaching a warm peak (late 1990s) in the western LI Sound, stressing the population and making them more vulnerable to disease. LI Sound also has large influxes of fresh water and muddy runoff can decrease the dissolved oxygen content. As I describe below, that puts lobsters in LI Sound in a precarious position physiologically.
Lobsters have always eaten each other given the chance, which is why the juveniles hide from the larger lobsters, and lobsters who have just molted hid until they can harden their shells again. Quite often, if a lobster molts while in a trap or holding box, they will be eaten by the other lobsters. This is NOT NEW and NOT CUASED BY CLIMATE CHANGE.
As the climate has not warmed significantly since 1992, cooled since 2002 and actively cooled since 2006, nothing they report could possibly be caused by global warming.
A Known East Coast Ocean Cycle – at least to the lobstermen
Lobstermen have known for decades that there is 30-some year cycle to the ocean temperatures off the coast, such that lobsters are most abundant in the midrange between a warm peak and a cold trough of the 60-year temperature cycle. It makes total sense that lobsters would adapt to the middle range as that is the range in which the ocean spends the most of its time. The oceans are cooling, so lobsters are thriving as the temperature passes through their optimal range. Yes, they might grow faster when warmer, but they also need more food. The abundance is great for people who like lobsters but that also lowers the price for the fishermen and that’s just real life; it’s called market forces at play.
In the opening statements, the commentator says that lobsters carpet the sea floor. That’s just plain stupid and shows that he knows little about lobsters.
Lobsters have four main stresses in their lives. First, not getting eaten by the adults, allowing them to become adults themselves. And then there’s three physiological factors: water temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen content. They can stand fairly larger fluctuations in any one of the latter three factors, which allows them to handle intertidal environments. But, if two of these factors are already off their optimal values, a slight change in the third factor, disease, or parasite can be fatal. Imagine that their cells have a certain amount of total metabolic energy that can be devoted to handling these factors. If two are already drawing too much of this power, then a slight change in the third can overwhelm the system.
There is also the myth that lobsters migrate to deeper water in the winter. However, winter scuba diving has clearly shown that the lobsters do not go anywhere. When the water is cold, they simply move much more slowly and thus enter traps more rarely. They move so slowly, they can even build up silt on their upper surfaces.
Also, since cooking a dead lobster is really, really a bad idea, lobsters have been boiled alive since the dawn of time. Can’t wait for that to be the next PETA cause célèbre, as they already condemn it on their website.
http://www.peta.org/about-peta/faq/what-is-the-most-humane-way-to-cook-lobsters-boiling-them-or-steaming-them-in-the-microwave/
Did they check the temperature of the waters and compare to previous years? The Labrador Current comes straight down from the cold arctic waters along the Canadian coast. That water hasn’t really warmed. So what does climate change have to do with the temperature of the waters in Maine?
Also lobsters eat whatever is available. They are cannibals, so are crabs, which are known and very delicious in the Chesapeake Bay region. That is what makes the meat good! 😉
If the kid putting out this tripe was guided on this ‘work’ by a professor, he should sue for malpractive and get his tuition back.
It should also be mentioned that few lobstermen really make a good living off lobstering. Those few are called High Rollers. Most only make a few or several thousand a year from this hobby, once the boat fuel and materials are all accounted for. At least up in Maine this is the case; most lobstermen have at least one other job.
You can tell by looking out for the shore how the lobsters are doing, interns of abundance. When there are a lot of lobster buoys in the water, then lobsters are scarce as the “fishing effort” has to go up to catch the normal amount. (This was true in the late 1970s when the ocean temperatures were cool.)
When they are abundant, the number of buoys drop as there is no reason to use some much equipment to catch a reasonable amount; gear is money, save the money. (This was the 1980s to early 1990s as we warmed through the optimal temperature range.)
This up and down swing in lobster abundance has been observed for two hundred years by fishermen. An old Maine lobsterman told me about this pattern back in the late 1960s and it has held true ever since.
Lobsternado!
Simple solution, shut down the Maine lobster industry based on one YouTube video and global warming claim. I mean if New Englanders are as serious about climate change as John Kerry and Sen. Markey, they should shut it down now as a precaution and save the planet.
According to the precautionary principle we need to isolate cannibalistic lobsters from the human ingested harvest in order to prevent MAD LOBSTER DISEASE from infected the populace at large.
“So of course, they’ve survived some of the warmest periods of Earth’s history.”
Not for nothing are they called Lobster Thermidor!
In the spirit of the immortal Bugs Bunny – what a “can-o-bull”.
Oh noes, next they will be supersized!😉
I see the lobster catch has gone up 6 fold since the 80s, from 20 million pounds to over 120 million.
Oddly, the industry is about to get its Sustainability certificate.
http://bangordailynews.com/2012/12/19/business/after-five-years-maine-lobster-fishery-nears-sustainability-certification/
Data on other species shows some declining, some increasing, but the value is going up regardless.
Total landings is increasing over the record, and total value.
http://www.maine.gov/dmr/commercialfishing/documents/lobster.graph.pdf
http://www.maine.gov/dmr/commercialfishing/historicaldata.htm
In line with “male polar bears eating (others) cubs” …
… still waiting for “male lions eating (others) cubs” …
This comes to mind:
* Children 3-6 may evolve phobia for imaginary things, obviously even higher ages …
* Phasmophobia – AGW and the harassment of of CO2 is a ghost hunt …
* Thermophobia – as warmth/heat is good for life …
* Gnosiophobia & Sophophobia – well, obvious and don’t need any further explanation …
* Bogyphobia – The carbon boogie man …