UPDATE2: To see what is fishy about this story, see Bob Tisdale’s update here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/16/washington-post-headline-worlds-fish-have-been-moving-to-cooler-waters-for-decades-study-finds/
From the University of British Columbia
‘Fish thermometer’ reveals long-standing, global impact of climate change
Climate change has been impacting global fisheries for the past four decades by driving species towards cooler, deeper waters, according to University of British Columbia scientists.
In a Nature study published this week, UBC researchers used temperature preferences of fish and other marine species as a sort of “thermometer” to assess effects of climate change on the world’s oceans between 1970 and 2006.
They found that global fisheries catches were increasingly dominated by warm-water species as a result of fish migrating towards the poles in response to rising ocean temperatures.
“One way for marine animals to respond to ocean warming is by moving to cooler regions,” says the study’s lead author William Cheung, an assistant professor at UBC’s Fisheries Centre. “As a result, places like New England on the northeast coast of the U.S. saw new species typically found in warmer waters, closer to the tropics.
“Meanwhile in the tropics, climate change meant fewer marine species and reduced catches, with serious implications for food security.”
“We’ve been talking about climate change as if it’s something that’s going to happen in the distant future – our study shows that it has been affecting our fisheries and oceans for decades,” says Daniel Pauly, principal investigator with UBC’s Sea Around Us Project and the study’s co-author. “These global changes have implications for everyone in every part of the planet.”
A summary of the study is available at http://www.pewenvironment.org/news-room/fact-sheets/warming-oceans-are-reshaping-fisheries-85899474034.
========================================================
Me, I think it is just that the fish go where the food is, and cold water upwelling tends to make more food available. From NOAA:
The ecological effects of upwelling are quite diverse, but two impacts are especially noteworthy. First, upwelling brings up cold, nutrient-rich waters to the surface, which encourage seaweed growth and support blooms of phytoplankton. The phytoplankton blooms form the ultimate energy base for large animal populations higher in the food chain, including fish, marine mammals and seabirds.
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/02quest/background/upwelling/upwelling.html
UPDATE: Dr. Pat Mciahels writes in comments
Sent this to Leonard Bernstein, who got the story on the front page of today’s WaPo:
Hi Mr. Bernstein,
Congratulations in placing the fishery climate story on the front page! I have a couple of questions/observations that you may find interesting and worth commenting on.
The article cites a release by the Pew Foundation that clam populations that were comercially harvested in Virginia at the beginning of the paper’s study period (1970) are no longer viable and that fishery has moved to New England. If this is true, then the mean annual temperature of coastal Maine now should resemble that of tidewater Virginia in the early 1970s. In fact, data from the National Climatic Data Center show the average for the Tidewater Virginia Climatological Division were around 58degF in the early 1970s, while the Coastal Maine Division is averaging around 46 now. I am very surprised that Pew didn’t do such a simple fact-check test of hypothesis, or perhaps thought that no one else would look?
Further, with regard to commercial species that are fished in the deep ocean, the oft cited data of Sid Levitus and NOAA shows the expected massive dilution of surface warming at increasing depth. The change below 700 meters is a few hundreths of a degree (global average) while from 100 to 700 meters are a mere 0.1degC since 1955. This is where most commercial species live. I doubt that such a change is at all responsible for such substantial migration.
In fact, the attribution of fishery migration to climate change is very difficult. In a famous 2007 paper on distributional shifts and climate change in the Bering Sea, F.J. Mueter and M.A. Litzow wrote:
“A nonlinear, accelerating time trend in northward displacement (Fig. 5D), unrelated to temperature or any other climate parameter we tested (at any lag), suggests that mechanisms besides climate must be contributing to distribution shifts in the Bering Sea…The failure of our exploratory attempts to explain variability among species underlines the difficulties of this research problem.” [emphasis added]
I don’t see any of these issues addressed in Pew’s press release, and it seems to me that what they have provided is sorely lacking. I also have looked extensively at Cheung’s paper and I am once again amazed at what is getting through peer-review at Nature on climate change. They don’t measure any temperatures, they use a derived variable from species distribution data, and the temperature changes they derive are much much greater than those actually being measured in the regions in question. The reviewers should have at least asked for ground-truth temperature data.
Thanks for reading. Any comments?
Temperatures fall some more over the next three years and Nature and it’s spin-off Nature Climate Change will be untouchables in the scientific world.
And fishermen depleting stocks have no influence then?
Fish may also be escaping from regions where people are trying to catch & eat them!
I am a graduate from UBC in Marine Biology. Quite frankly I am embarrassed by studies such as this when a very basic understanding would preclude their “climate change” conclusion. Also a basic understanding of evolution would also contradict the dire warning that these species don’t adapt to changes in the climate and that species DO DIE off from time to time. I just have to sigh at the shoddy and lazy “science”. They go where the grant money takes them.
Here in Pennsylvania, there are many lakes, rivers and streams where there is an advisory restricting the consumption of fish from those bodies of water because of mercury. But I didn’t know the fish had so much mercury in them they could be used as thermometers!
Fish will make worse thermometers than tree rings.
And I wll bet that it turns out that the only way they got their results were through the torture of innocent data and numbers.
Sorry, I just had this ghastly vision of a dread-locked greenie wringing her hands on BBC Breakfast, and complaining that: “Its worse than we thought – if the fish are driven that deep, they will all drown……”
Glib, Anthony. Why didn’t populations move north previously? If upwelling are attracting fish, did they not exist previously? If so, why are they present now? Further, how is it now that warm water species compete effectively now in the areas they have moved too? Your assessment dismisses these questions out of hand.
If this thesis is correct, then surely the cooling in the northern Atlantic and the Western approaches over the last 5 years should show an increase in cold-water species like Cod and Haddock in those areas?
The cold water fish WERE over fished in the 70s and 80s. And worse, that happened right there in British Columbia within 100 miles of UBC.
I spent summers in BC every year growing up sport fishing for salmon with my family in the late 1960s thru the mid-1980s. I lived seeing relatively easy fishing years dwindle to nothing. Every year resort owners, sport fishing conservationists and others complained about over fishing by commercial boats especially in the straits north of Vancouver, a geography that channeled fish runs. The seine (net) boats would move in and whole runs of fish would be gone, sport fishing would go dry for weeks.
Fast forward to the early 1990s when I did the same trip with my parents. We drove the coast of Vancouver Island and in port after port saw the commercial fishing fleet chained up, bankrupt
Sport fishing was near zero, fish size requirements were impossible, catch limits had been cut from 4s/day in the 1980s to 1s and 2s. Small resort towns were shuttered.
It wasn’t climate, it was poor management. The cold water species, which were migrating from Alaskan waters south to spawn, were almost wiped out. When there were no more fish to catch, over fishing became just over.
So not only do these studies support incorrect actions, but they also distract from needed study and management.
Shameful coming out of UBC.
Sent this to Leonard Bernstein, who got the story on the front page of today’s WaPo:
Hi Mr. Bernstein,
Congratulations in placing the fishery climate story on the front page! I have a couple of questions/observations that you may find interesting and worth commenting on.
The article cites a release by the Pew Foundation that clam populations that were comercially harvested in Virginia at the beginning of the paper’s study period (1970) are no longer viable and that fishery has moved to New England. If this is true, then the mean annual temperature of coastal Maine now should resemble that of tidewater Virginia in the early 1970s. In fact, data from the National Climatic Data Center show the average for the Tidewater Virginia Climatological Division were around 58degF in the early 1970s, while the Coastal Maine Division is averaging around 46 now. I am very surprised that Pew didn’t do such a simple fact-check test of hypothesis, or perhaps thought that no one else would look?
Further, with regard to commercial species that are fished in the deep ocean, the oft cited data of Sid Levitus and NOAA shows the expected massive dilution of surface warming at increasing depth. The change below 700 meters is a few hundreths of a degree (global average) while from 100 to 700 meters are a mere 0.1degC since 1955. This is where most commercial species live. I doubt that such a change is at all responsible for such substantial migration.
In fact, the attribution of fishery migration to climate change is very difficult. In a famous 2007 paper on distributional shifts and climate change in the Bering Sea, F.J. Mueter and M.A. Litzow wrote:
“A nonlinear, accelerating time trend in northward displacement (Fig. 5D), unrelated to temperature or any other climate parameter we tested (at any lag), suggests that mechanisms besides climate must be contributing to distribution shifts in the Bering Sea…The failure of our exploratory attempts to explain variability among species underlines the difficulties of this research problem.” [emphasis added]
I don’t see any of these issues addressed in Pew’s press release, and it seems to me that what they have provided is sorely lacking. I also have looked extensively at Cheung’s paper and I am once again amazed at what is getting through peer-review at Nature on climate change. They don’t measure any temperatures, they use a derived variable from species distribution data, and the temperature changes they derive are much much greater than those actually being measured in the regions in question. The reviewers should have at least asked for ground-truth temperature data.
Thanks for reading. Any comments?
Pat Michaels
Director, Center for the Study of Science
Cato Institute
Very well said Psalmon, thank you.
How well did they compensate for changing fishing patterns due to loss of traditional fish-charged areas, and changing fish stock locations due to survivor-benefits to moving away from heavily fished areas?
When you are studying such a non-stable, non-natural situation as fish populations today, it is difficult for me to know if anything you determine is caused by anything “natural”.
In the Sudan there are large groups of people living far from services, without adequate water or arable land, in places remote and unlived a decade ago. Not because the new Sudanese like the tougher life, but because in distant, horrible places without roads or hospitals or water, murdering soldiers don’t go.
Maybe fish are where they are because we aren’t, or weren’t there. Short-term evolutionary pressures, like the last of the wooly mammoths surviving on isolated, small Arctic Islands.
I am interested in the truth of things and reading- “published in Nature“- stopped me in my tracks. Reading the article would not advance my purpose.
‘Fishmometers’ can we calibrate them against ‘treemometers’?
I have to fix my comment, very well said Psalmon and Pat Michaels!
This report covers warming over four decades and it is noted that Pilchard is the dominant fish in warmer waters .
Warm waters Warm temperatures? Could this picture be an indication of both conditions during the MWP?
This is the ancient Pilchard inn in South Devon England with its establishment date of 1336 clearly visible .
http://meetmeforacoffee.com/coffee_shop/4069
Around the area are such places as Pilchard point where fishermen from the 12th century onwards used to search the seas for pilchard. Nearby Plymouth has records of fish catches back to the 1100’s demonstrating the constant movement of fish types according to climate change-herring in cooler years and pilchard in warmer ones.
Minucins Felix, a Christian writer from Africa, living in the second century A.D.,says, concerning the climate of Great Britain, “ Britannia sole deficitiir, sed circumfluentis maris tepore recreatur,” that is, freely translated, ‘‘ Britain has little sunshine, but a mild climate on account of the warm
sea-water flowing round it.” from Hellmann ‘the dawn of meteorology’
Waters warm, waters cool, and fish move to where it bests suits them.
4 decades? So what?
I once wrote an article entitled ‘fish a a temperature proxy’ which once lodged on Climate Audit. Now it’s lost somewhere on the web. If anyone rediscovers it please let me know.. Thanks
tonyb
Now I know why Richard Harris, National Public Radio’s version of Seth (the “Zombie Regurgitator”) Borenstein, had this on the air: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/05/15/183968378/go-fish-somewhere-else-warming-oceans-are-altering-catches
Harris and NPR are major wholesalers of the “climate change” Kool-Aid. I listened to NPR for 30 years but the incessant daily propaganda issuing forth finally put an end to that.
Climate science: still masturbating on that 30-years trend.
We’re quite familiar with fish scientists in Canada. The same scientists who oversaw the complete collapse of the Atlantic cod from overfishing. It was never the water being the problem. European overfishing with modern day bottom trawling, modern day fishing practices, bottom trawling, too much efficiency in species unable to compete with modern methods of indiscriminate fishing. Too many upstream dams, far to little willingness to get tough with the big Russian, European fishing fleets just outside North American coastal limits. Perhaps those idiot scientists have no clue fish migrate. Stupidity knows no bounds.
‘Fish thermometer’ reveals long-standing, global impact of climate change”
Just reading the header and I already knew the purpose and… the content all to to be compacted in a single little word spelled “Hubris”
@Colin says:
May 16, 2013 at 11:00 am
I am a graduate from UBC in Marine Biology. Quite frankly I am embarrassed by studies such as this when a very basic understanding would preclude their “climate change” conclusion.”
Never feel embarreassed by the junk created by others. It’s a total waste of time and besides that it’s impractical because there are truck loads of similar reports floating around. You would feel emnbrrassed for the remainder of your life.
ralfellis says:
May 16, 2013 at 11:19 am
Sorry, I just had this ghastly vision of a dread-locked greenie wringing her hands on BBC Breakfast, and complaining that: “Its worse than we thought – if the fish are driven that deep, they will all drown……”
*
LOL. Thank you for that! That’s going on my wall. 🙂
So it says, quote:
“Meanwhile in the tropics, climate change meant fewer marine species and reduced catches, with serious implications for food security.”…..
which means warm water fish swim up toward the US, while catches (not due to overfishing) in Brazil go down? The warm water near Brazil is getting to hot for the warm water fish and they
emigrate, leaving their Brazilian waters empty and bare? And the situation is “serious”? Am I correct?
It is very true that many fish species follow temperature. The deception is they hype global warming and hijack the effects of ocean oscillations that alter the currents. When the California Current slowed during the warm phase of the PDO in 1976, warm species moved northward and an IPCC paper by Parmesan blamed global warming. However Holbrook who had first reported the shift predicted it was part of a natural oscillation. Sure enough when the PDO cycled to a cold phase, warmth loving fish retreated and cold loving fish began moving move southward around 2000.
In the Atlantic, ocean oscillations pushed cod deep into the Arctic during the 1940’s, then the retreated after 1960 but were pushed back into the Arctic recently. Southward, a biologist studying these range changes warned, “To fully prove the effects of global warming, future changes in the marine biota must exceed those recorded in the 1950s and 1960s.” And to date that has not happened.
Holbrook, S., et al., (1997) Changes in an Assemblage of Temperate Reef Fishes associated with a Climate Shift. Ecological Applications, vol. 7, pp. 1299-1310.
Peterson, W., and Schwing, F., (2003) A new climate regime in northeast pacific ecosystems. Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 30, doi:10.1029/2003GL017528.
Southward, A. et al. (1995) Seventy Years’ Observations of changes in Distribution and Abundance of Zooplankton and intertidal Organisms in the Western English Channel in relation to Rising Sea Temperature. J. Thermal Biology. vol. 20, p. 127-155.