From the University of British Columbia via Eurekalert
Fish moving poleward at rate of 26 kilometers per decade
Large numbers of fish will disappear from the tropics by 2050, finds a new University of Britsh Columbia study that examined the impact of climate change on fish stocks. The study identified ocean hotspots for local fish extinction but also found that changing temperatures will drive more fish into the Arctic and Antarctic waters.
Using the same climate change scenarios as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, researchers projected a large-scale shift of marine fish and invertebrates. In the worst-case scenario, where the Earth’s oceans warm by three degrees Celsius by 2100, fish could move away from their current habitats at a rate of 26 kilometres per decade. Under the best-case scenario, where the Earth warms by one degree Celsius, fish would move 15 kilometres every decade. This is consistent with changes in the last few decades.
“The tropics will be the overall losers,” says William Cheung, associate professor at the UBC Fisheries Centre and co-author of this study, published today in ICES Journal of Marine Science. “This area has a high dependence on fish for food, diet and nutrition. We’ll see a loss of fish populations that are important to the fisheries and communities in these regions.”
Cheung and his colleague used modeling to predict how 802 commercially important species of fish and invertebrates react to warming water temperatures, other changing ocean properties, and new habitats opening up at the poles.
“As fish move to cooler waters, this generates new opportunities for fisheries in the Arctic,” says Miranda Jones, a UBC Nereus Fellow and lead author of this study. “On the other hand it means it could disrupt the species that live there now and increase competition for resources.”
This study follows previous research that looked at change in fisheries catch in relation to ocean warming since 1970.
NOTE: Prof. William Cheung is travelling in Europe but is available for interviews. The best way to reach Prof Cheung is by email at: w.cheung@fisheries.ubc.ca
When the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched to its warm phase from 1976 to about 2000 fish with more southerly affinities did indeed move northward. When the PDO turned to its cool phase the migration reversed as had been predicted by fishery experts like Sally Holbrook who were attuned to Ocean regime shifts. As has been noted before a similar cycle happened in the Atlantic and fish have just reached the same northerly limits they reached in the late 50s. I have not read this paper but I doubt they accounted for these cycles. By simply creating a linear correlation with net movement restricted to a 1970s start period, then they could statistically justify a correlation with rising CO2 and extrapolate that to a scenario of future climate hell. My guess is they never accounted for Pacific and Atlantic Oscillations
I’m embarrassed having graduated from UBC in 1964 when it was a good school.
wait long enough, 1/2 of all the fish in the world will be at the north pole. since it will be ice free, you can scoop them up in a net. the other 1/2 the fish, those trying to make it to the south pole are going to have to wait until they evolve legs.
and the rest of the oceans, all now free of fish. Are we to imagine that no fish would stay behind? Please oh learned professors please tell us, of all the oceans of the world, which are currently too hot for fish, so that any change would bring CATAAAAASTROPHY?
Is it the waters of Indonesia, some of the hottest on earth – nope plenty of fish. Or the Red Sea, the hottest in summer. Nope plenty of fish. So please tells us oh learned ones, which waters are so hot that no fish will remain.
Because both Indonesia and the Red Sea, with just about the hottest waters on earth have lots of fish and lots of healthy unbleached coral. Both of which should be impossible according to the science of climate CATAAAAASTROPHY.
Thanks for the reminder about the Red Sea and Indonesia.
Wiki tells me that the average surface water temperature of the southern Red Sea during the summer is 30 °C (86 °F).
Spanish Mackerel move 26km away from the tropics every day in the season, chasing schools of migrating baitfish.
An excellent dish, that Spanish mackerel.
I had great fun years ago doing a few deckhand trips catching mackerel off the Kimberley, up to 250 a day and up to 40kg each (ave 7/8kg)
Great eating.
Yet, it appears to me, at least one species of fish is moving….EAST!!!! How does THAT figure into the model??????
http://www.opb.org/news/article/officials-laud-record-setting-columbia-river-salmon-run/
(For those of you who don’t quite know how this works, the migration North and then back down South in the Pacific Ocean is a natural thing. So don’t worry. Our river will not eventually get clogged from shore to shore with salmon, though it damn near did this fall.)
Outside my home this morning at 7 AM it was 60 degrees F. By 13:00 it was 80 degrees F. I have created a computerized model to extrapolate this alarming trend and project that the temperature in my front yard will exceed 29,000 degrees F within 12 months. Who should I contact to receive my grant in support of further research? Our earth hangs in the balance!
So the fish species are shifting back closer to where they were in the medieval warm period?
“In the worst-case scenario, where the Earth’s oceans warm by three degrees Celsius by 2100, fish could move away from their current habitats at a rate of 26 kilometres per decade.”
Sheesh. That’s a little over 23 feet per day. That’s about as fast as Kudzu grows in the summertime. I wonder how many fish swim 23 feet to the north each day and say, “ooh, that’s too cold!.”
Miranda Jones, a UBC Nereus Fellow and lead author of this study, managed to work in the word disrupt into the press announcement, ala Climate Disruption, but everyone has moved on… the new word is weird, as in Global Weirding.
Catch up!
http://www.bing.com/search?q=Global+Weirding&FORM=QSRE2
What happens when all the fish finally reach the pole? Will the mother ship beam them up and head off in the general direction of Polaris?
Has anyone asked the fish? I have. And of those interviewed, 65% said they would prefer warmer oceans. 25% said about the same. Only 5% preferred colder oceans. And 5% refused to answer on based on their religion, sexual orientation, or privacy grounds. The sample size for this survey was 67 fish giving a 97% confidence.
In the 14th century the onset of the Little Ice Age and cooling oceans forced large numbers of herring from the Baltic to the North Atlantic. This well-documented temperature-forced migration contributed to the eventual downfall of the Hanseatic League.
“…a new University of Britsh Columbia study that examined the impact of climate change on fish sticks.”
Oh, wait. Stocks. Never mind.
I’m hoping that the oceans get so hot I won’t have to cook my catch before eating. Fat chance.
“Can fish swim?” –Jimbo
Multi-million dollar studies at the University of Utah’s Melvin Dumar Institute have answered that question. Their computer model has established at the 99.7% confidence level, based on millions of runs, that fish, despite illusory anecdotal evidence, can not actually “swim.” They are capable of making swim-like motions, but most spatial displacement is a result of tidal and waval action than actual self-propulsion. Not content with just computer studies, Dr. Proetzl von Luniben, PhD, verified his model with an actual fish in a 6″ diameter spherical container. Other than a single semi-rotation of “Nemo” from a prone to a supine orientation, no net motion was observed over a one month interval, thus establishing the robustosity of the model-based study. [The semi-rotation was not replicated in any of the model runs, and is therefore considered due to observation error.]
+1
jorgekafkazar, I looked up that paper and I saw that Dr. Proetzl von Luniben has determined that “more study is needed” regarding the influence of pelicans on the relative motion of fish to the ocean via the pelican’s gullet, which he hypothesizes is a major determinant of fish displacement in the absence of tides and waves. Apparently, the science is not settled.
This doesn’t seem very fast rate of change. At 26km a decade, it would take. A fish 3604 years to get to the pole. That’s slower than a snail at 0.013m/s?
So it’s come to this: Computer modelers assert AGW is responsible for pole dancing fish…..at a 26 kilometer per decade cadence. And by 2100, the tropical waters will be barren….. Oh, the humanity.
It’s so dumb it is physically painful to read and observe. What has become of our world??? What has become of the ‘scientists’ and science we all used to respect and hold in high regard? What has become of the citizens that today believe this irrational crappachino?
I see stupid people… and they don’t even know they’re stupid.
Willis Essenbach showed in a recent post that surface water temperatures in the tropics never exceed about 30C. This is because of the thunderstorm negative feedback. The tropics don’t change that much even during ice ages. (Poleward heat transport however does change.)
As Bill Illis pointed out above if we believe ocean temperature estimates (I dont) then oceans are warming at 0.007 C per year. But with almost no data below 2000m we dont have a clue about total ocean temperature and trends thereof.
A 3C increase in ocean temperature in one century is fantasy that you would expect from a 3 year old child of a drug-addict environmental activist parent.
Not only is modelling not real data. More and more it is being performed by individuals who are sterile of even the most basic understanding of – or even curiosity in – the physics and dynamics of the real ocean and climate. There is a disconnect between climate modelling and climate measurement data. This computer modelling can only be described as political, not scientific.
I wonder if William Cheung has ever seen a fish other than on his restaurant dinner plate during his tax-payer funded world travelling.
Reply to phlogiston ==> Dr. Chung probably has seen a fish or two, touched them as well. Here’s his bio. These kind of senseless personal attacks on scientists (they would be your colleagues if you are a scientist), of whom you know nothing at all, are simply uncalled for. (I think that the idea that it would ever be possible to raise the temperature of “the oceans” by 3°C absurd myself — but that is no call to denigrate Dr. Chung. )
William Cheung
Name: Dr William Cheung
Email: xxxxxxxxxx@fisheries.ubc.ca (obfuscation mine – kh)
Associate Professor
BSc (HKU), MPhil (HKU), PhD (UBC)
Biography
William is an Assistant Professor at the UBC Fisheries Centre since 2011, and is head of the Changing Ocean Research Unit (CORU). William obtained a BSc. (Biology) in 1998, and subsequently a M.Phil. in 2001 from the University of Hong Kong. After working in WWF Hong Kong for two years, he moved to Vancouver and completed his PhD in Resource Management and Environmental Studies in the UBC Fisheries Centre in 2007. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Sea Around Us project for two years. From 2009 to 2011, he was Lecturer in Marine Ecosystem Services in the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia in the UK.
Currently, his main research area is on assessing impacts of fishing and climate change on marine ecosystems and their goods and services, and studying ways to reconcile trade-offs in their management. Specifically, he develops empirical and numerical simulation models to examine the impacts of climate change on marine biodiversity and fisheries, globally and in various regional seas. He applies interdisciplinary approaches to evaluate the trade-offs between ecological, economic and social objectives in managing coastal social-ecological systems. Moreover, his research involves the development and application of original approaches to study historical changes in fish stocks and ecosystems. He works on various interdisciplinary research projects with global collaboration networks in the U.K., China, Australia, Africa, USA and Canada. He has been a member of the IUCN Groupers and Wrasses Species Specialist Group since 2005 and serves on the editorial board of Fish and Fisheries and International Journal of Sustainable Society.
[Has Dr Chung ever been paid to actually catch fish for a living? .mod]
Yes it is a perfectly valid reason to label Dr Cheung as a fool. He may write a nice biography. He may even be a nice person in fact – other than the minor issue that Dr Cheung is deliberately supporting policies that will kill millions of innocents worldwide while paying Dr Cheung hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants and promotions…..
But he is an unrealistic fool too incompetent to live in the real world where he would be held accountable for his results. Isolated in his academic never-never land of fawning liberal bureaucrats and ignorant students and anonymous sympathetic “pal-reviews” being hand-held by editors equally incompetent where he is shielded by promises of government tenure and immune from failure?
Under those circumstances, even I could create a nice biography for myself.
Kip: I agree with RACook.
It is high time that those in research and academics be called to account for their behavior. You cannot point to a single climate model that gives a dependable product. You know it and Dr. Cheung knows it. Science based on climate models is tantamount to fraud, in my view. Every publicly funded climate research is tainted with alarmism. Science has been perverted for political ends.
Reply to RACookPE1978 ==> Repeating an offense — either by yourself or the moderator — is not a valid defense. The offense is attacking the person through denigrating remarks or school-yard name calling.
You are free to express your opinions about academics, government policy, the ideas presented in his paper (which I suspect you haven’t read any more than I have), the unlikelihood of raising the temperature of the entirety of the world’s oceans…etc.
But is is improper to make statements about Dr. Chung, his personality, his motivations and general competence — you know nothing of these things.
Launching personal attacks is against WUWT commenting policy.
Note to Moderator ==> Enforcing WUWT policy is your job — violating it yourself by injecting snarky ad hom comments is the opposite of your job.
Passionate, eh?
Fine.
Ignorance means “I do not know something.”
Ability (with respect to intelligence) means “I have the capability of understanding and discussing something, if told about that subject, or if I research that subject.”
Ignorance is not an insult, but a accurate statement of being, perhaps even a temporary state of being. Ignorance can be “cured”. It IS cured regularly.
But a “fool” can be a permanent state, perhaps even deliberately staying in a permanent state as a “fool”.
I used the term “fool” deliberately.
A “wise” man or woman knows that he is ignorant, and either does not publicly write about those subjects in which he or she is ignorant, or acknowledges the ignorance and learns enough to erase fill the previously ignorant void, or limits one’s writing and speaking around the ignorance with humility – addressing it and making assumptions or approximations needed to continue the conversation. Thus, I do NOT pretend to know the exact speed of every fish species, but I DO know that many can swim faster than 13 kilometers per hour. I do NOT pretend to know the exact distance every oceanic fish migrates, but i DO know that many species swim many thousands of kilometers in their normal lives.
A “fool” writes in public, professionally and as a matter of explicit purpose in taking money specifically to create a report that WILL AFFECT public policy and WILL AFFECT the future lives of billions (as part of the government’s paid propaganda campaign for worldwide CAGW). A “fool” writes about a subject he or she supposedly knows in detail and is proud of what apparently is the climax of years of well-paid government-funded research that contains such blatant errors and exaggerations that reveals the writer’s utter lack of understanding of the exact subject he is claiming as his basis for life and honor.
But this supposed “fish scientist” is a “fool”. He is not even capable of acknowledging a simple fact that a future change in ocean temperatures is not only massively exaggerated by those who pay his salary and his research, but is actually impossible. Then he continues by writing in public – after supposed “peer review” by who are evidently equally foolish “peers” of fish “scientists” that this impossible temperature change will affect fish migration by such a small distance over such a long period of time that the result is less than the distance a healthy fish can move in two hours every day. Much less the migrations of billions of individual fish in thousands of species across distances as far as thousands of kilometers.
An incompetent man would not recognize his error.
A “wise man” would recognize the failure of his research to produce the propaganda result that was desired. A wise man would write his paper addressing the research model, the results, and the NEGATION of the desired propagandic results! “The effect of massive global ocean temperatures was analyzed by geometric and fish school computerized models in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, mid-Pacific and south Pacific. No credible effect on fish migration by global warming was found: Although models predict a 26 kilometer movement in nominal ocean migration paths per decade of theoretical global warming, this change cannot be reasonably differentiated from the normal daily movement of the following species A, B, C, D, ……. More research is needed at sea tracking actual schools of A, B, C, and D migrations.”
But Dr Chueng is a fool. And advertised his foolishness in public, in a professional journal. Was his conclusion bought and paid for by the government in order to get the publicized paper? Well, we do know he was paid by the government, and we do know his resume has been enhanced by one more paper needed by the government that paid him …
If grant-hungry [pseudo]scientists put half as much effort into researching real causes of climate change as they do trying to “prove” anthropogenic global warming, they could make real progress.
When fish moves north the aboundant food sources left behind will be taken over by other fish that can tolerate more heat. Where there are food there are life. So moving north will extend habitat and eventually give room for more fish. Lige is a funnie thing!
And he gets paid for this codswallop?
At the rate of 26 km per decade, the fishes will reach the mid latitudes in 1,000 years and the Arctic Circle in 2,846 years. Global warming could pause or become cooler before that time and reverse the migration. BTW it became warmer since the Little Ice Age. Why are the fishes still in the tropics? The Coral Triangle is at the equator. It is home to 3,000 species of fish and $3 billion worth of fish catch every year.
What is it about fish and the man made globular warming fraud that brings out the worst in these climate scientologists?
Smaller fish and deaf fish and now fish heading for the poles, you just couldnt make it up, unless of course you were fishing for grant money.
+1
you missed the one about fish losing their fear of predators due to CO2:
http://www.eco-business.com/news/fish-acid-lose-fear-predators/
apparently an eco-diver witnessed some mackerel swaggering up to a shark and giving it the … fin-ray, I guess. But they didn’t mention what the diver had just been smoking.
is there a model that predicts how many more stories using models to come out with stories using models to push AGW.
The frequency of AGW scare stories was analysed and found to be periodically forced by, and phase-locked to, the frequency of major international climate
jamboreesconferences. They build up to a max just before each one.Same old, Same old
1951
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/71392865?searchTerm=glaciers%20melting&searchLimits=
SEA LEVELS CHANGE
Even the fish in the ocean know
about it, too. Ahlmann reports that
Eskimos are catcbing and eating cod,
a fish, that they never saw before
1900. Julian Huxley has reported
that herring and haddock have been
moving north off Greenland at 24
miles per year for the last 30 years.
Sub-zero temperatures occur only
half as frequently in northern cities
as they did 75 years ago.
OLD FARMS EXPOSED
Greenland’s Ice is melting and the
ruins of mediaeval farm-houses hid-
den by ice for centuries have already
been exposed.
In Spitsbergen the mean annual
temperature has risen by four degrees
since 1912.
Ships ply the White Sea and Ihe
Gulf of Bothnia three or four weeks
longer than they used to.
In Iceland and the higher latitudes
of Norway farmers are growing bar-
ley in soil that was once frozen for
seven -months each year
The American
geographer, F. E. Matthes, has re-
ported that ”glaciers in nearly all
parts of the world receded regularly
during the last 60 years, but
especially rapidly during the 1 930-40
decade.”
All glaciers examined from Green
land through Scandinavia to Europe
are shrinking. And the shrinkage is
not limited to high latitudes. Some
glaciers in the European Alps have
vanished completely. In East Africa,
the glaciers on three high volcanoes—
Kilimanjaro, Mt. Kenya and Ruwenzori
— have been diminishing since they
were first observed in 1880. The vast
Muir Glacier in Alaska’s ; Glacier Bay
has retreated a full 14 miles’ since
1902.
Are there no reports from that era of climate alarmism and scare mongering?