Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
There has been a series of shark attacks off the Carolina coasts. As of last count, the number is 11 shark bites since mid-May.
As one might have expected, from mainstream media’s let’s-see-what-we-can-blame-on-global-warming department comes the CBSNews article “Strange” spike in shark attacks puzzles experts. The news report includes (my boldface):
The recent spate of shark attacks has left many beachgoers nervous.
Dr. Samuel Gruber, the director of the Bimini SharkLab research facility in the Bahamas, says the spike in attacks suggests something strange is going on.
“The trend is normally zero or one attack in that area in any one year,” said Gruber.
Theories as to why this is happening range from time of day, to bait fishing, sea turtle migration, lunar cycles and global warming.
Whose theories? The author doesn’t say.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s another factor at work. Let’s call it the dufus factor, which states anyone who goes swimming in North and South Carolina waters, where there have recently been shark attacks, is very likely a dufus…plain and simple, a dufus.
WHAT ABOUT THE SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES THERE?
Using the coordinates of 32N-37N, 82W-75W for the North and South Carolina coastal waters, according to NOAA’s new ERSST.v4 sea surface temperature dataset, the May 2015 sea surface temperature anomaly was +1.36 deg C referenced to 1981-2010. See Figure 1. But that’s not unusual there. Sea surface temperature anomalies have been higher in the past…especially in the 1930s and 40s. Note also how low the warming rate there has been since the start of the dataset in 1854.
Figure 1
Clearly, the sea surface temperatures off the Carolina coasts have cooled since the 1930s and 40s, so let’s see how far back in time we can go, in 5-year increments, until the data show no warming for that region. The results are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
Based on the linear trend, NOAA’s new ERSST.v4 data show the surfaces of the waters off the coasts of North and South Carolina have not warmed in more than a century.
Once again, mainstream media has failed to do its homework.
SOURCE
NOAA’s ERSST.v4 data are available at the KNMI Climate Explorer
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Maybe, just maybe, dufus people are irresistably tasty.
Maybe that’s what Jeffrey Dahmer was onto.
Asked what was in his lunchbox, he replied “Oh, Henry”.
============
Frankly, after betting most of my wad on the South Dakota sharks and losing it all because of their no show, this time I go with the Southern Carolinas.
Pointman
The sharks endangering us are NOT the marine variety scaring folks in NC.
Hmm, here in the Bahamas, we regularly swim with the sharks, bulls, hammerheads, lemon, etc. No problems as long as everyone keeps the speared fish out of the water.
I just had a 12′ bull shark cruise by me this morning. And of course it is a good idea to avoid early morning or late afternoon when sharks are feeding.
Of course these attacks are due to Global Warming.
The sharks are getting angry because there has not been enough Warming over the last 18 years, and they prefer warmer waters. The sharks are merely sending out a warning, that if we do not emit more CO2, they will continue their civil disobedience protest and bite even more bottoms…
/sarc??
It’s only going to get worse when sharknado season starts.
So the oceans warm and the sharks response is to swim to the shore where the water is less deep and warmers.
Sounds completely logical. /sarc
One Problem, The Atlantic ocean oscillation has turned cold forcing the fish which sharks feed on closer to land where it is warmer… The sharks follow.. People who have watched this happen for 70+ years see the patterns as they reoccur. During the last cool phase (1970’s) this was prevalent as well and there are movies up the wazoo about shark attacks from the 1970’s and 1980’s..
Why is it bad that sharks are coming closer to shore and attacking humans?
Because humans have decided that this is “their” place to bathe and swim. Sharks are evil creatures because the environment that they live in overlaps the environment that humans have staked a claim to.
Why are polar bears presented as cuddly looking, threatened creatures that will struggle to exist if Arctic ice continues to melt? Because very few humans live in the Arctic. It’s ok for them to kill other creatures in that environment because we let them have it. If polar bears lived in lower latitudes where people were attacked more frequently, then they would not enjoy the cuddly mascot for global warming status.
Why is CO2 so bad for life on this planet? Actually, it’s beneficial to almost all life……..with the notable exception of potentially effecting many aspects of human civilization.
A large % of humans have built on or close to the shorelines of the oceans. We must keep the oceans at the levels they currently are. Doesn’t matter that oceans have varied by many feet in the past naturally. In this age, we decide what the right sea level should be, what is effecting it and how to manage it.
Same thing with global temperatures. Doesn’t matter that life on this planet has almost always done better when its this warm or warmer and much worse when its colder……….we have decided that the ideal temperature of the planet was the temperature that it was at a century ago…….and cannot be exceeded by X amount.
We have also decided what is best for every creature on this planet. Strangely enough, our studies show that they all do worse when CO2 and temperature go up(despite life doing better under this environment in the past). We have even found that future crop yields(and good plant growth) will be going down as CO2 goes up by using assumptions and models that overpower the solid science of plants/photosynthesis. Weeds and noxious plants always do much better(despite modern farming being very effective at managing them)
In the few studies that do find some benefits to increasing CO2, the speculative or theoretical detrimental effects are almost always much greater.
Let’s just throw out everything we know, all the bias’s, studies, models and so on and look at what actually happened to life, especially human life during the most recent periods of extended warming(Medieval Warm Period) and cooling(Little Ice Age):
http://www.ancientdestructions.com/greenland-once-a-viking-paradise/
Consider those periods of 2 contrasting extremes, with a great fluctuation in climate from natural causes to be like a giant, real world laboratory that we should use as an observation of how life did/does………….when it gets much warmer………….then, when it gets much colder.
I just heard a new report on the radio blaming salt for the increase in shark attacks. They said that less runoff of fresh water, due to less rain, due to climate change is causing the problem because sharks like saltier water. Are the Carolinas experiencing severe drought conditions? Is California experiencing more shark attacks?
The water in the Pacific Ocean is much colder and people don’t swim and bathe the same as in the Carolina’s. I think that the warmest the water gets on the Los Angeles area beaches is around 70 deg F in August, in contrast to the temperature having topped 80 in the shark attack areas numerous weeks ago.
Somebody else probably knows about the actual sharks that live in that area, which might be a factor.
Inshore in that area they have sand sharks, lemon sharks, threshar shark, black tips and bull sharks. They can also have the rare tiger shark come Inshore. I would guess these are huge sand sharks. Maybe it’s a mix of species. Nobody that got hit described a very large shark. They are simply gorging themselves with the abundant food that is right on the beach like mossbunker.
Standard joke for teenager surfers at our surf club ( Sydney, Oz):
Why do sharks eat turtles?
Because they ( the turtles) look like Boogie boarders.
( Boogie boards are the short surf boards loved by many young surfers.)
I will be on Ocracoke island in about 2 weeks for my annual vacation to that awesome beach. I’ll go in the water, but not very far into the water, just enough to cool off. From what I saw from the locals, it’s been dry in that area, so the fresh water isn’t diluting the salt water near the beach as it ‘normally’ does, so the sharks are venturing in closer to the beach chasing bait fish. I took a small plane ride over the island a couple of years ago and could see many dozens, if not well over 100 sharks parallel to the coast probably 100 yards off the beach. Sharks frequent the outer banks, this year I’ll be more aware of what’s around me in the water. Global warming? Meh. Typical scare tactic.
Can’t wait to get down there! 🙂
I will be there in a couple of weeks also and do plan to go swimming/wading.
Global warming is driving dead bodies into the water in the DC area as well http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/29469556/police-find-another-body-in-dc-water-4th-in-2-weeks
The same idiots claim there is overpopulation…shouldn’t they go for a swim?
In the mid to late 1980’s I worked on the Outer Banks of N.C.
I worked on the docks unloading fishing boats,and sometimes worked on the boats,mainly small gill netters and coastal trawlers catching flounder.
We caught a huge shark in the nets one time when we were fishing maybe 150 yuards off the beach-being young smart as*es,we winched the shark up on one of the outriggers for the nets-and 16 1/2′ shark. Didn’t know what kind until a lady from Marine Fisheries informed us it was a dusky shark.
There were no more kids on jet skis,rafts,etc. in the water after we winched the shark up.
They all hit the beach and stayed there for the next few days.
This was during the fall bluefish run,so lots of shark food in the water,schools of bluefish eat everything in their way,I’ve seen them run schools of speckled trout right up onto the beach.
The guys who long-lined and rod and reel fished for tuna always caught lots of sharks as well-the Gulf Stream is only 6 miles offshore from Oregon inlet,where most of the fishing boats go out from.
It’s a miracle that more people haven’t been bitten on the N.C. beaches.
“It’s a miracle that more people haven’t been bitten on the N.C. beaches.”
Especially when considering the federal government protects the shark breeding grounds for 6 months of the year:
http://www.mpatlas.org/mpa/sites/8564/
Chicken comes into my house… I eat it.
Human goes into shark’s house…
more like this:
we have had 2 shark attacks here in N.S.W. AUSTRALIA in the last 2 days less than 1 mile apart.its the middle of winter and those 2 days have been the coldest 2 days in july since 2012.total crap
Carbon pollution from wantonly burning coal is now creating an even bigger environmental problem, our protected man-eating sharks are now endangered by the protected man-eating crocs:
http://resources0.news.com.au/images/2014/08/05/1227014/566896-17d0ac6a-1c7c-11e4-96c6-79c9953f9ece.jpg
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/08_02/sharkcroc1708_468x311.jpg
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/20/article-2426699-181DFB1B00000578-64_964x569.jpg
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01364/croc_1_1364754c.jpg
http://www.enjoy-darwin.com/image-files/crocodile-eats-shark.jpg
http://www.epicadamwildlife.com/forums/filedata/fetch?id=42&d=1407353396
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eWUk3e30_TA/hqdefault.jpg
http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2014/08/05/1227014/566365-821885f8-1c80-11e4-bde6-647c3cd935f4.jpg
http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2011/07/27/1226102/913103-croc-eats-crocodile.jpg
Charter boat passenger attacked by crocodile in WA’s Kimberley – July 03, 2015
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-03/crocodile-attack-prince-regent-river-wa/659408
White pointers have been having a nibble at surfers here on the East Coast of Australia as well. No doubt the combination of warmer and more acidic seas is making them hungrier. And when the ice caps melt (in 2013, isn’t it?) we’ll all be up to our waists in water. That’s quite deep enough for a shark attack, and especially for a bull shark.
We’re doomed.
Such garbage.
Our Gulf of Mexico sharks seem in good spirits.
Likely the factors involved are complex and interrelated.
If they limited shark-fishing, and the shark population increased, at some point the population will pass an ideal upper limit, and the sharks will get hungrier. SNAP!
If you protect the sea-turtles and their population increases, sharks have more snacks and their population goes up. (Up here in New England we have seen a big increase in seals due to protections, and lo and behold, we have more Great White Sharks off Cape Cod.)
Water salinity and temperature also are factors. When the sixty-year-cycle of the AMO moves from its “warm” to “cold” phase, the cold first appears in the eastern Atlantic, and the warm waters retreat and pool along the east coast of the USA. which we see happening this year. (Note this is local and cyclical, and not Global Warming.)
Things can change in a hurry. If that warm water along the coast brews up a tropical storm, the Carolinas can get pounding surf and drenching rains. When theor brown rivers flood the salinity of the coastal waters changes. This would be well worth further study. Anyone want to supply me with a grant, so I can go to the beach?
What’s that you say? I won’t get a grant if I focus on the AMO? Oh, all right then. I’ll figure out some way to link it to Global Warming. How about a report linking temperature to the size of bikinis, and the number of old men smiling behind sunglasses on beaches? Do they count as sharks?
Another example of the dufus factor. This one could also qualify for the Darwin Award.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/07/04/alligator-kills-man-during-late-night-swim/29694263/
Let’s look at the nuisance animal issue. Some years ago dangerous animals were culled to a point they were no longer a problem and NOT extinct. Enter the environmental groups and voila, dangerous species get blanket protections and their populations explode. Thus now you have a Shark problem. Same goes for bears. This Apex predator was ‘educated’ and learned to fear/avoid humans. Now, thanks to anti- hunting groups, these predators are no longer in fear of mankind and wander into populated (and less populated) areas looking to do what bears do best, find the easiest source of food and that means your garbage. In Maine (and elsewhere), these nuisance bears are regularly live trapped by biologists and relocated to more rural regions where they (having learned the good life in the city), continue their routine. We had one that broke into several houses and chicken coops. One day it showed up at the family homestead and was getting ready to attack the family dog on her run and was shot by a game warden living next door. There were 4 young children playing outside that alerted us to the bear.
Here is the latest on Polar Bears:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/03/us-usa-polarbears-idUSKCN0PD08A20150703?utm_source=twitter
So now we enter coyote’s, wolves, and other feline predators. The same problem exists. At the ZOO there are signs that say DO NOT FEED THE (Insert animal here). That is so true.
As somebody that actually lives on the Carolina coast during the summer, going swimming or wading there does not make you a “doofus”. I live on the Beaufort inlet while teaching at the Duke Marine Lab in the summer (summer session 2 starts Monday). The waters of the inlet are literally full of sharks. There are big sharks, small sharks, full grown sharks, baby sharks, and everything in between. There are at least a dozen species of sharks — three or four of them known to at least occasionally chomp on people — in both the inlet itself and in the waters just outside along Shackleford Banks or Atlantic Beach. I’ve personally seen, or caught, dogfish, blacktip reef sharks, bull sharks, spinner sharks, bonnethead sharks, sand tiger sharks, and a couple of other species I can’t name offhand. My neighbors, who have lived there for over 40 years, have seen hammerheads (one was reportedly spotted in the inlet earlier this year) and tiger sharks (one was also reported swimming close to shore right off of Shackleford around a month ago).
But as a general rule, they don’t bite people. We aren’t what they eat. The two exceptions out of the entire list above are probably bull sharks — arguably one of the most aggressive of the entire list and responsible for a large fraction if not a majority of all near shore bites around here — and tiger sharks, which are rare inshore but which are big sharks that sometimes hunt for big prey near shore.
It is worthwhile to actually look at the statistics before making wild claims. Here is a graph of NC shark attacks back to 1900:
http://www.sharkattackdata.com/place/united_states_of_america/north_carolina
and here is a not as useful picture of lightning deaths in NC:
http://www.wsoctv.com/news/news/north-carolina-in-nations-top-5-for-lightning-dama/nGtgm/
Lessee, since 1900 nine — count them, nine — people have died in NC from shark attacks. That is an average of 0.09 deaths per year. On the other hand, NC ranks between 4 and 5 nationally for lightning deaths, with roughly 4.7 deaths per year. And neither one is even a significant risk to a beachgoing swimmer.
Here is the only risk worth really worrying about:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3136500
http://archive.org/stream/drowningdeathsin00pate/drowningdeathsin00pate_djvu.txt
http://www.jdnews.com/article/20140206/News/302069912
In a five year stretch from 1980 to 1984, well over 1000 people drowned in NC. That’s an average of over 200 a year. In that same stretch, five people drowned in Beaufort alone — an average of one a year. In 2014, six people drowned just from being caught in rip currents while wading/swimming off NC’s beaches. If you swim or boat at all in the ocean in NC, you are many times more likely to be killed by lightning (which again, kills a number of boaters and swimmers every year off of the NC coast alone) and are overwhelmingly more likely to die by drowning in some sort of accident or by being caught in a rip current or from being drunk on the water than you are of being killed by a shark attack.
One last comment. A glance at the statistics on shark attacks in the link above indicates that it is absolutely true that the number of shark attacks per year in NC is increasing, and it is also true that if you look at the clustering of the attacks and the fatalities, they show peaks in the warm 30’s and early 40’s as well as the warm 1980’s through the present. However, the largest source of the growth evident in the chart is almost certainly the increasing popularity and accessibility of the beaches themselves. There are simply more people going into the water more of the time, all up and down the coast. Both the ocean and sound communities are growing as more and more people want to own property at the beach and are affluent enough to afford it, and that same affluence means that more and more people are renting or staying in hotels or just driving down for a day at the beach. More people equal more opportunities for bites. It might even be that the probability of being fatally attacked by a shark has decreased over the last fifty years per exposure, but if the number of exposures keeps going up, you can easily get many more attacks at a lower probability.
As I tell my students at the Marine Lab, every time you go into the sea in NC, you are almost certainly being looked at by sharks. I’ve had sharks break off my line or bite off my bait fishing 70 or 80 feet down from people playing in the surf while surf fishing. I’ve watched 7 foot bull sharks swim right by Pivers Island (where the Marine Lab and NOAA are both housed) at night and watched undergrads swim through the same channel the next morning. I’ve flipped my kayak while fishing in the inlet and had to paddle it upside down over a mile or so of open water and channels that I know for a fact are full of sharks. I was a lot more worried about being pulled out through the inlet mouth into the Atlantic upside down or being run over by a boat (and drowning) than I was being attacked by a shark. We simply are not what they eat. Our beaches don’t really hold large marine mammals like seals, and while we do have a lot of dolphins they are not really shark food either.
The sharks are there for the same reason I’m there. They eat the menhaden, the mullet, the flounder, the small blues, the small spanish mackerel, the hogfish and spots and croakers, they eat the crabs and baby sea turtles and rarely a gull or duck. And they usually feed in the evening and early morning. I’ve had a four foot bonnethead shark make a run straight at my ankles splashing alone in a foot of water early in the morning — it stopped ten feet away, looked up at me, said “Holy s**t, you aren’t a flounder!” and turned and ran straight away from me just as fast. But in the dark it might not have discovered its mistake in time. We advise the students who swim off of the ML docks not to swim in the early morning or late afternoon or EVER at night — night is dumb for many reasons and sharks are just one of them, as there is a substantial current around the island.
I’ve been brushed against by sharks in murky water while surf fishing a number of times. It is pretty spooky — you can tell that it is a shark from the sandpaper quality of the contact, but you can’t see it or tell how large it is or why it is there. In the murk, there is always a chance that you will get “tasted” — not “attacked” but nibbled on to see what you are. A lot of times, an “attack” in the surf isn’t even a shark — at times bluefish will attack anything that moves in the water and have very sharp teeth. But with all of that, the overwhelming risk any time you go out into ANY water — a lake, a pond, your bathtub, the ocean above all — is drowning. Literally tens of thousands of people drown in the ocean every year per shark fatality, worldwide. Even a skilled swimmer who is not intoxicated and who knows the risks of e.g. riptides is at risk the moment they wade out into the water.
As for the big question — why the peak this year? A number of explanations and none at all are likely responsible. A look at the data above shows that this year isn’t really uniquely attackish — there have been five or more shark attacks in a year four times since 1996, and given the general growth in the smoothed average number of attacks per year — currently up to around 3 — the number doesn’t really require any explanation other than random noise. However, other factors (that are still “random”) may well contribute. In the Beaufort inlet, changes in the bottom topography post hurricane Sandy (which washed around a half mile of Shackleford banks away into the inlet) as well as silt from the perpetual dredging that keeps the port of Morehead CIty open has created a bumper crop of menhaden and herring, so small bait is plentiful. Blues and Spanish Mackerel are sight feeders and hence are not efficient in murky water. Dolphins are, and I’ve never seen so many dolphins in the waters in front of our house. At night you can hear them breathing and slapping the water with their tails as they hunt. Sharks use sound and vibration as much or more than sight to localize preay and may be coming in to exploit the same bonanza of inshore baitfish, and with the water murky all the time it is easy to mistake a human foot for a fish splashing around even in the daytime. The hot weather (we had a two week hot spell in what has otherwise been a fairly cool year so far) has also increased inshore salinity, which favors deepwater fish that are comparatively intolerant of fresh water moving in closer to the shore. The increased number could even be due to the general success of measures to protect shark breeding grounds (like the inlet) and reducing the number of sharks taken.
I leave you all with the following perspective:
http://www.scotttaylorphoto.com/sharks09/images/sharks01.jpg
http://www.scotttaylorphoto.com/sharks09/
That’s the same water I kayak all the time, as well. Shackleford and Fort Macon are clearly visible in two of the pictures. Most of the time you just can’t see the sharks, even from a boat, but helicopters and planes flying along the coast or fishermen who spend a lot of time on the water see them all the time, usually a few meters away from where people are happily swimming. They just don’t usually attack people, and the attacks that do occur are usually from a handful of species, often “out of place”.
rgb
Shark behavior is pretty simple. They REALLY like to eat and occasionally have sex.
So I suspect there is something tasty in the waters off OBX which is a bit closer in than usual.
Sharks and Climate Change
“Global warming has made it difficult for sharks to continue living their peaceful existence. It has also increased the tensions among them and humans.”
http://www.sharks-world.com/sharks_and_global_warming/
I thought this was a joke but this group in Miami Florida is serious.
“Peaceful existence?” Don’t we all remember how cuddly and peaceful those sharks used to be when we were growing up? Damn that CO2!!