“Thousands of dead crabs have washed up along the Kent coast, with environmental experts believing the cold weather in Britain is to blame,” London’s Daily Mail reports. In an MSNBC/LiveScience report, we get the simple explanation. ’tis the snowfall on the beach that melted wot dun it:
“It’s been a phenomenon for probably a third year in a row,” Tony Child, Thanet Coast project manager, told LiveScience.
The crabs come closer to shore at this time of year, Child said, where they feed on the seaweed. In the past, environmental scientists ran tests to check for disease or other physiological problems with the crabs, coming up empty-handed. But Child said every year the die-offs have occurred after there was snow on the beaches. The meltwater causes temperatures near shore to drop, and Child said the deaths must be linked to hypothermia.
Now, get load of this quote from another person in the Daily Mail Article:
“Coastal warden Tony Sykes said: ‘We suspect that climate change and warmer weather has lured the crabs towards the shoreline.”
Warden, what are you smoking dude? Have a look at the SST’s for Britain, what were they doing, swimming towards Spain?
Note the colors around the southeast part of the U.K. – barely above freezing SST’s.
Source: http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/fields/FS_km5000.gif
Note the quote:
It’s been a phenomenon for probably a third year in a row,” Tony Child, Thanet Coast project manager, told LiveScience.
Hmmm….now what could possibly have happened in the UK during the last three winters? BBQ Summers?
Here’s the press release from the Thanet Coast Project:
Marine wildlife hit by cold weather
Around 25,000 velvet swimming crabs and marine wildlife have become the latest victim of the recent cold weather in Thanet.
Volunteer coastal wardens from the Thanet Coast Project have surveyed the coastline and reported hundreds of dead creatures washed up on the shore. Casualties have been reported from the Nayland Rock, Margate and in bays to the Kingsgate area, with further sightings between Dumpton and Ramsgate. The discovery was made following the Christmas period, following on from the recent heavy snow falls.
So this claim from coastal warden Sykes isn’t the same ridiculous claim we’ve been hearing lately, that global warming causes cold weather. Nooo… the problem here seems to be that the crabs made the mistake of believing in global warming.
Here’s the link to the Daily Mail story with the quote.
H/T to Mark Duchamp for the email.
Let me get this right. Various marine animals have been misled by a recent spell of warming only to be severely punished when temperatures drop.
Should we take any lessons from this?
@kadaka
“On my Linux box, in Unicode, that’d be Ctrl-Shift-u 2014. What normal human would go to the trouble of using such a special character for mere separation? Especially someone self-identified as “Lazy” by their handle?”
You may be on to something here KD! Maybe LT is a Kataclysmic Kid from Kambridge?
‘World could be plunged into crisis in 2014’: Cambridge expert predicts ‘a great event’ will determine course of the century
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1287271/World-plunged-crisis-2014-Cambridge-expert-predicts-Doomsday.html
(just for you RGates)
And my heating bill is less this year because instead of it being 0 degrees like it was 4 years ago, it is .013 degrees warmer today. Oh joy. Thank you lowly CO2. Heat wave.
My math was off! It is .052 degrees warmer than it was 4 years ago. Bikini weather! I’ll tell that to the frozen fish you can see through the ice in the Lostine River.
R. Gates, don’t worry, I knew it was sarcasm. You might have added that they were also disoriented by the whopping 3mm rise in sea level over the last year.
R. Gates says:
January 8, 2011 at 10:34 am
“Moderator, please put a “sarcasm off” at the end of my last post, just before I said (for you Anthony)”
It was obvious, even though i never expected that from you.
A different thought:
The enormous AGW funding lures all kinds of crooks and nutcases into the warm academic waters the AGW meme has created; will a sudden drying up of the AGW funding lead to a mass death of academic careers for the crooks? And would we, in that case, say that AGW is real because it caused such a mass extinction of academic careers?
pat says:
January 8, 2011 at 8:26 am
“Just who the hell do you think you are? climate change!”
ROTFLMAO ! Great!
Hi all, in the case of this story- you will be glad to hear the skeptics/ realists have a man on the ground! I live in the very Palm Bay, Margate Kent, that this article is about. Approximately 1/2 a mile from the beaches mentioned in this story. I’ll pop down the beach tomorrow and take a few pics and post the results on a blog. And yes, it has been flipping cold here the last few winters- global cooling has killed the crabs- not warming!
No, no. You all have it wrong and the AGW cult have it right. What happed was that the crabs and fish and birds and manatees etc. all evolved to better adapt to AGW. Now they were unprepared to deal with this sudden warmcold snap so in a very real sense these die offs are the result of AGW (Do I really need the sarc tag?)
John of Kent says:
January 8, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Any chance of checking the local papers archives for yet more evidence of prior instances?
DaveE.
John of Kent says:
January 8, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Further to my last comment. Local library might be a good source of microfiche copies of defunct local papers.
DaveE.
Thanks to a quick-glance misread of the usual phrase, I now know what the follow-on will be to Anthopogenic Climate Disruption: ACD; Anthropogenic Climate Damage!
The climate is being injured, and doesn’t know what to do!
vigilantfish says:
January 8, 2011 at 1:46 pm
R. Gates says:
January 8, 2011 at 10:32 am
LOL! Glad to see evidence of an excellent sense of humour – are you straying towards a lukewarm stance?
________
Once in a while my skeptical nature really takes hold and sends out a blast of cold sarcasm to fight back the warm winds of my confidence that AGW is happening. Yet I look at the Arctic sea ice extent at record (satellite record) lows for this date, and think of all that cold air that has been pouring out of the Arctic from the very negative AO, and from a nearly persistent Dipole Anomaly…and wonder what it will mean for this summer’s ice extent, and when, if ever, we’ll see the Arctic sea ice have a positive anomaly again…
R. Gates says:
and when, if ever, we’ll see the Arctic sea ice have a positive anomaly again…
And what if we don’t? What if the southern hemisphere begins to freeze over, and the north slowly warms?
“David A. Evans says:
January 8, 2011 at 7:36 pm
John of Kent says:
January 8, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Further to my last comment. Local library might be a good source of microfiche copies of defunct local papers.
DaveE.”
That is a good idea- provided the local paper microfiches have some kind of searchable index system! How far back should I go for news reports?? There are two main local papers, the Kent Extra and the Thanet Times. Although, I guess I only need to skim through the months of Dec- Feb for each paper. The rest of the year has very mild weather here in coastal East Kent.
Dave F says:
January 9, 2011 at 12:25 am
R. Gates says:
and when, if ever, we’ll see the Arctic sea ice have a positive anomaly again…
And what if we don’t? What if the southern hemisphere begins to freeze over, and the north slowly warms?
_____
Then all that we know about ocean currents, atmospheric circulation, and laws of physics will have been proven wrong.
John of Kent says:
January 9, 2011 at 4:54 am
Probably the mid to late ’30s would be a good place to start. If I recall correctly, cooling started about ’41
Probably a dumb question, but has anyone confirmed that these are actual dead crabs and not moulted shells? (Do devil crabs moult?) I only ask because we had a big washup of “dead crabs” on the shores of Port Phillip Bay (Victoria, Australia) a while ago. The media went crazy about climate change being the obvious culprit, until someone pointed out that these were moulted shells – mass moults like this being perhaps uncommon, but not unknown.
Now, we have dead gizzard shad washing up on the shores of Lake Michigan!
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2011/01/big-fish-die-off-along-lakefront.html
This used to happen all the time in the 1980s with the alewives, but I haven’t heard of a big shad dieoff before. At least the ducks & geese are enjoying them!
Clearly, global cooling….