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?
And not one of the revered journal’s reviewers asked if any of these claims had been validated against real world metrics? Like all these things once you have found one item in an area where it is totally wrong, then you have to suspect that all areas of the journal are also significantly incorrect.
In 1922 it was reported that white fish and herring had “adjusted” their range.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/changing-artic_monthly_wx_review.png
Is it really so hard to recognize a cycle?
Sounds like someone read the instructions on their fish finder .
@Luther Wu says: “published in Nature“- stopped me in my tracks. Reading the article would not advance my purpose.”
Agreed. nature is an advocacy journal. They published Parmesan’ 1996 paper “Climate and Species Range” arguing butterflies were being forced upward and northward. Most of California’s maximum temperatures never exceeded the 1940’s. So instead of using local temperatures, Parmesan argued extirpated populations were “consistent with predictions of a global average temperature”. Ask any university ecology professor and they would immediately thrash and trash any undergrad’s paper using the global average to justify a local extinction. But Nature published it and thereby signaled a “safe island” where any movement northward validate Hansen’s 1988 predictions that rising CO2 is forcing animals northward and upward. I suspect Nature is again trying to give Trenberth’s notion of heat shunted to a deep ocean a little support by once again publishing such a frivolous paper, that does not fully analyze contributions from ocean oscillations and local conditions.
As Pielke Sr. has warned, ” the current publication process has evolved into, at the detriment of proper scientific investigation, are the publication of untested (and often untestable) hypotheses. The fourth step in the scientific method “Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment” is bypassed”
“When I served as Chief Editor of the Monthly Weather Reviews (1981-1985), The Co-Chief Editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences (1996-2000), and as Editor-in-Chief of the US National Science Report to the IUGG for the American Geophysical Union (1993-1996), such papers would never have been accepted.”
Of course the over fishing of tropical areas by the huge trawlers and factory ships operated by China, Russia and Taiwan have nothing to do with depletion of fish stocks in heavily fished areas. I lived on the Eastern Cape coast where the local fish population was almost wiped out by the fleets of Chinese and Taiwanese trawlers in the 1970 -90 period – but, of course, that has nothing to do with the reduction in fish stock …
As someone else has commented, this is shoddy science – in my field it is called ‘Expectation Bias’ – if you go into an investigation with a preconceived idea of cause, the only evidence you’ll see is that which confirms your hypothesis.
Some fish are fat, lazy slobs who sit around drinking lager all day & watching footie in their string vests. When the far more active (& tasty) fish are removed from an area the lazy fish can expand their range because the competition is scarce.
A fishmonger is ‘one who sells fish’….
Let’s expand the lexicon and call these authors….
fish-fable-mongers….
BCU Fisheries Center? OY! These guys have quite a reputation and it is not a good one. Real science has not come out of that place in decades.
After quick look at their paper, in addition to averaging all fishery data into an amorphous average index that obscures local dynamics, they use data from 1970 to 2006 which will be dominated by the warm phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. There is no surprise that there was a warming trend. However recent consensus analysis of the upper 300 meters clearly shows a cooling trend has begun.
In Xue 2012, a consensus estimate by 10 oceanographers (including Trenberth’s coauthor), reported for the upper 300 meters, “there is a consensus that the global ocean increased from 1984 to 1992 followed by a short cooling episode in 1992/93, and then increased from 1994 to 2003/04, followed by flattening or a decrease.” I suspect all warming papers will focus on the warming period up to 2004, and therefore have defensible statistics.
If instead of obscuring fisheries with the average, by reporting on the local dynamics when oceans switch from warm regimes to cold regimes clearly contradict Cheung’s “signature of ocean warming.”
Peterson (2003) wrote “Increased abundances off Oregon and Washington of warm water fish species such as hake (Merluccius productus), mackerel (Scomber japonicus, Trachyurus
symetricus), and sardine (Sardinops sagax) occurred during the 1977–1998 warm regime, …in southern British Columbia waters, these same warm water fish species became abundant, particularly after 1991 [McFarlane and Beamish, 2001].
while cold water fish such as anchovy (Engraulis mordax) and smelts (Osmeriidae) declined over the same period [Emmett and Brodeur, 2000; Greene, 2002]. However after the PDO reversal they reported “Recent sampling of pelagic fishes off Oregon and Washington has found that (warm water) sardines have declined, and anchovies and osmeriids have increased by an order of magnitude [Emmett, 2002].” For a paper like Cheung’s to have any meaning, they must distinguish between trends before and after those shifts. But Nature no longer demands any such scientific rigor.
Xue,Y., et al., (2012) A Comparative Analysis of Upper-Ocean Heat Content Variability from an Ensemble of Operational Ocean Reanalyses. Journal of Climate, vol 25, 6905-6929.
Peterson, W., and Schwing, F., (2003) A new climate regime in northeast pacific ecosystems. Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 30, doi:10.1029/2003GL017528.
World fishery impacts ranked:
1. Overfishing.
2. All other issues combined multiplied by ten.
Thank you, Pat Michaels (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/16/fishy-temperature-proxy/#comment-1307250) for your email to Leonard Bernstein of the Washington Post.
That is exactly the type of response that so-called climate and environment journalists need to get. It makes the points that the UBC/Nature/Pew “study” is so biased that it’s fatally flawed, and that people notice the WaPo’s willingness to publicize such garbage…and it does that without directly attacking Mr. Bernstein’s apparent lack of balance, objectivity or other journalistic skills. Finally, it offers Mr. Bernstein (and, by extension, his editor, assuming that the WaPo has anyone in such an antiquated role) the opportunity to explain how such an unbalanced piece of drivel deserves a place anywhere in what used to be an important journalistic enterprise. Please don’t hold your breath waiting for that explanation.
Ah, you beat me to it, Anthony. I should have a post written about this paper by tomorrow morning.
“Where the food is” is the main reason fish go where they go, not temperature. These alarmists can try baiting their hooks with ice cubes and I’ll sitck with live bait. According to About, the Great Barrier Reef system ranges in temperature from 70 to 90 degrees F and is inhabited by 1500 species of fish, over 5000 species of mollusks, 1500 species of sponges, 360 species of corral, plus dozens of other species including whales, dolphins, turtles, seabirds and shorebirds.
In stark comparison Antarctica has only about 200 species of fish and over half of them have anti-freeze in their blood. Warm water fish cannot survive the cold of cold waters and the cold water fish cannot compete with warm water fish in warm waters.
Every place you look on Earth, the warmer places have more life and more diversity of life than the colder places. Warmer is better, why do alarmists persist implying the opposite?
It may be that cold-water fish do not recover as quickly from fishing depletion as warm-water fish. Thus fishing would give warm-water fish an advantage over the competition.
This confirms my suspicion that fish are not attracted to food, they are only interested in a comfortable life at a constant temperature. They are spoiled!
I would not be surprised to hear that their food supply has the same temperature-based prejudices. Next thing you know they will be driving SUV’s with air con to get there faster.
and then consider the history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoralism . . . One is on land the other on water . . . . I am starting to think that there are “control issues” that will have to be addressed . . . . vs. “adaptation issues” of which have their own problems. . . .
Mike M. “Warmer is better” . . . maybe for you . . . But, everyone wants it to be “just right” or better yet “perfect”. Not the world we live in, and not a reality.
97% of Americans agree, The Climate Changes. When asked; Does the Climate Change? An overwhelming number of respondents said Yes.
Jdallen says:
May 16, 2013 at 11:21 am
“Tonyb” answers your first questions at 11:49 am. You should take from his comment that there is much to be learned from studying historical accounts of things. He is, in fact, an expert at such stuff and by searching for other comments and posts by “Tonyb” here at WUWT and other sites a person can learn much. I have, so I know it works.
I’ll put a link below that comments on over fishing. I’ll add that if one animal is greatly reduced in its native range, others will move into that territory. There will be food (energy) to be used and something will find and use it.
http://rense.com/earthchanges/fishmass.htm
There are Large Mouth Bass and Blue Gill in the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia where warm water is not unknown. The same animals live in noticeably colder lakes and streams at higher latitudes. How’s that work?
It is hard to rationalize why you would insult Mr. Watts with that “glib” comment insofar as much is known about cold water upwelling (See El Niño/La Niña) and the lack thereof [See ‘Callao Painter’] under the subheading ‘Effects of El Niño’ in the following link:
http://biophysics.sbg.ac.at/atmo/elnino.htm
Enjoy the reading and have a great day.
Who is it that are eating all these fish anyway ? (besides other fish).
I can’t afford to eat fish that has been shipped across country.
I tend to stick to renewable resources: like beef, mac and cheese, or pizza.
“Meanwhile in the tropics, climate change meant fewer marine species and reduced catches, with serious implications for food security ….”
===========================
Just eyeballing http://www.climate4you.com/images/NOAA%20SST-Tropics%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
I can’t see any trend in the tropics SST since 1979.
It’s not difficult to connect the dots. Pew is a green NGO that is interested in “greenhouse gases”. UBC is, well, in BC (suzukiville). Nature has no credibility left as a journal. Fish have moved throughout history. The paper uses “models”, and the cute little diagram intrigued my 3-yr old grand daughter.
@Crispin in Waterloo but really in Ulaanbaatar says:
I would not be surprised to hear that their food supply has the same temperature-based prejudices.
Well the food supply actually does have temperature-based prejudices but that is driven by upwelling. In the open ocean where upwelling is minimal, the phytoplankton are smaller and the food web is dominated by filter feeders like salps in Antarctica, or sardines elsewhere and a more efficient recycling of the food web. Those “warm water” species get outcompeted whenocean upwelling is vigorous.
Upwelling zones bring colder water to the surface as well as more nutrients. There, larger phytoplankton like diatoms thrive feeding more robust populations of zooplankton. Anchovies are biters and prefer those cool upwelling zones and bigger plankton. The cool phase of the PDO promotes more upwelling, cooler temps and a robust food supply.
Peruvian biologist have shown that as solar output increased after the end of the LIttle Ice Age, upwelling increased and the whole food web benefited. Global warming of the oceans has improved fisheries overall. Paradoxically despite average warming, a stronger sun increases the Hadley Cell and the trade winds promoting more coastal upwelling. As in Peru, the most productive global waters are in colder upwelling zones. El Ninos and warm phases of the PDO depress upwelling so warmer surface waters can be statistically linked to lower fish production. Unless upwelling dynamics are thoughtfully elucidate, all sorts of bad conclusions are made, like Cheung’s paper. His paper never discusses the dynamics upwelling zones at all, but that would defeat the purpose of linking CO2 to every change.
Gutierrez, D., et al. (2009) Rapid reorganization in ocean biogeochemistry off Peru towards the end of the Little Ice Age. Biogeosciences, vol. 6, p.835–848
Chavez,F.P., et al.(2003) From Anchovies to Sardines and Back: Multidecadal Change in the Pacific Ocean. Science 299, 217.
As a skeptic of the dire warnings associated with the AGW cabal…I am embarrassed by Anthony’s conclusion to this article. It shows an extreme lack of understanding of the source material he’s criticizing AND a general lack of common sense.
Your answer to this study, Mr. Watts, lacks three things:
1) An understanding of how ecosystems change over time
2) An understanding of what is meant by WARM WATER FISH
3) A serious attempt to refute the actual claim of the article.
Warm water fish live where they do because they thrive on eating other species that have naturally evolved to live…in warm water. The mere presence of upwelling will not attract creatures that do not survive well in cold water. That is just false. While it is true that life is adaptable to changes…and that warm water fish might well thrive on eating cold water species, there is no imperative for those fish to move to a different species as their primary diet…why would they migrate north en masse just to eat a different kind of life in a colder environment? That isn’t how evolution works. Nor is it particularly likely that warm species would just randomly walk their way north through increases in their population unless the things they were eating were also increasing in population…and why would that be occurring? The point is…SOMETHING has changed. And the most obvious thing that has changed is water temperature (and salinity, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue).
On top of that, the article does not claim that fish can be used as a real proxy of temperature. It is merely a study on the impacts of KNOWN…MEASURED changes of water temperature on fishery stocks. The essential claim is…the waters have demonstrably warmed…the fish species are changing in a way that matches with this warming on a bio-behavioral level, if that continues, cold water fish will be crowded out of many established fisheries.
Bottom line…it is not valid to claim that this article stands on absent logical ground. Nor is it in your best interest as a prominent skeptic to deny the bloody obvious because you don’t like it. The better things to ask are:
1) Is the warming of the oceans natural or man-made? There is very good evidence in the skeptic library to suggest that much of the change is natural.
2) Is the warming likely to continue? We are already seeing many of those warming trends halting in the last decade. There are papers on that.
3) Can we, as humans, adapt to changing fish aquaculture if the water does continue to warm? That is also bloody obvious. OF COURSE we can. Breathless concern over the loss of stocks of Cod and swordfish don’t worry me in the slightest…we are smarter than fish…we can find plenty of ways to keep our aquaculture business thriving.
This type of “rebuttal” is why skeptics are not taken seriously…please…I’m begging you to think things through before you speak out publicly…we don’t need to give the AGW community easy ways of lampooning us as science deniers.
@R2Dtoo
I was in Suzukiville a couple of days ago and picked up a local paper. It was like living inside RealClimate! OMG how can they stand it. It reads as if Disney is making a climate version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice where a little knowledge becoming a very expensive thing. What happened to the real environmentalists? BC used to be so nice.
Another UBC “climate change” pretext to display utter ignorance of the resulting influence of atmospheric circulation pattern, intensity variations on oceanic currents and upwellings.
BTW, IPCC author and UVic climate change modelling figure Andrew Weaver got elected as a Green MLA on Tuesday… Better in politics than in science…