Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
‘Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
“You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt & his buttons, & turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and Sharks are around,
His voice has a timid & tremulous sound.
Over in the Tweetiverse, someone was all boo-hoo about the eeevil effects of “climate change” that he claimed had “already occurred”. He referenced a publication from a once-noble organization that sadly has drunk the “CLIMATE EMERGENCY” koolaid, National Geographic.
So I read it, and the only thing in that, other than what “might” and “probably” and “could” occur at some uncertain time in the future, was a mention of “oceanic heatwaves” in Maine and surroundings, viz:
“The U.S. is already grappling with climate change’s heavy costs, like when a powerful ocean heatwave struck the Northeast and devastated the region’s lobster fishery.”
As a long-time commercial fisherman, that piqued my interest. So I looked to see what I could find out. Of course, over at Forbes, Priya Shukla can be counted on to repeat the latest alarmism. In this case, her article is entitled How Ocean Heatwaves Are Threatening The Gulf Of Maine.
Here’s the area that she’s discussing, on the Northeast coast up where the US meets Canada:
Figure 1. The Gulf of Maine. The state of Maine extends from between Portland and Portsmouth at the south end to Passamaquoddy Bay near the north end. You can see the deeps of the Jordan Basin off the coast of Maine.
Regarding 2018 ocean temperatures, her article said :
“The Gulf of Maine is currently experiencing its third-warmest year in 37 years, with satellite data showing that water temperatures are nearly 3 °F warmer than average – even in the depths of the Jordan Basin (which is over 600 feet deep). This anomalous warming has only been exceeded during ocean heatwaves in 2012 and 2016. Although waters within the Gulf were only warming by one degree every two years for nearly two decades, research by Dr. Andrew Pershing, Chief Scientific Officer of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, shows that warming in the Gulf of Maine suddenly accelerated in 2004 to nearly ten times that rate so that the Gulf is now warming 99% faster than the rest of the world’s oceans.”
OMG, everyone stand back, it’s the horrible “ocean heatwave”!
(I can’t help but note that if it was warming at one degree every two years, and it “suddenly accelerated in 2004 to nearly ten times that rate“, that would mean it was warming at five degrees F (~2.8°C) per year. That made my bad number detector go off, so I did some more research. If you go here, you can investigate that claim. The buoy out in the Jordan Deep shows that far from changing at 5°F per year, from 2004 to 2005, the peak temperature in August dropped by three degrees F. In 2006 it warmed to where it was in 2004, and after that, peak temperatures remained unchanged for the next five years until the warm year of 2012 … but I digress …)
Okay, so we’re looking for aquatic devastation in the warm-water years of 2012, 2016, and the third-warmest year, 2018. Plus we’re looking to see what happened as the Gulf of Maine waters warmed at an accelerated rate since 2004.
Next, I went to find some data bearing on the question, and you’re gonna either laugh or cry about what I found.
First, I got the total commercial landings for all ocean species in Maine. Maine is the state that has the largest border on the Gulf of Maine, so total landings in Maine are the best indicator of the health of the Gulf. Here’s that graph:
Figure 2. Total weight of all commercial fishery landings in Maine from 1964 to 2018.
Here, you can see the horrible effects of the “ocean heatwaves” in the Gulf of Maine in 2012, 2016, and 2018. In all three cases, catches were higher than in the cooler years before and after.
Next, I looked at the lobster fishery, since the National Geographic article had claimed that “ocean heatwaves” had “devastated the region’s lobster fishery”.
In this case, I was fortunate in that I found enough data to calculate a most important statistic, what in the study of fisheries management is called “CPUE”—Catch Per Unit Effort.
Why is catch per unit effort important? Suppose a given year, a certain fishery catches twice as many fish as the year before. Does this reflect an increase in the numbers of fish in the ocean? Or does it just reflect twice as many boats fishing the same numbers of fish in the ocean? It’s a crucial distinction with many consequences for the management of the fishery.
Now, in different fisheries, the “unit effort” has different meanings. If it is a longline fishery, for example, they catch fish on mile-long lines with hooks dropping from them at intervals. So the “unit effort” would likely be “hook-days”, the number of hooks times the number of days that the hooks are in the water. And the CPUE would then be pounds (or kilos) caught per hook per day.
For lobsters, it’s much simpler. Each fisherman is allotted a certain number of traps that he can fish, no more than 800 traps per boat. So the unit effort is the number of traps fished, and the CPUE is pounds per trap.
With that as prologue, here is the CPUE for the Maine lobster fishery.
Figure 3. Lobster catch per unit effort, Maine, from 1964 to 2018.
Look at the awful outcome of the “marine heatwaves” of 2012, 2016, and 2018 on the Maine lobster fishery … they actually increased the lobster CPUE. And check out the result of the “accelerated” ocean warming since 2004 … steadily increasing lobster catch rates. I told you you’d either laugh or cry.
I swear, they’re getting so desperate that they are simply making things up out of the whole cloth. They hear a rumor, multiply it by “EMERGENCY”, add a soupçon of “IT’S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT” and a heaping teaspoon of “EVERYONE PANIC!!”, and write it up as if it were fact, with bonus points for using a new alarmist term like “ocean heatwave”.
They say “The truth will out”, but man, it’s taking longer than I thought …
w.
My Perennial Request: When you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing. I began asking this after years of people saying “Willis, you claimed X” when I’d said nothing of the sort. Quoting the exact words avoids endless misunderstandings.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I personally gave up on NatGeo a long time ago when they jumped on the climate alarmism bandwagon. They and the other alarmists will not, unfortunately, engage in even the simplest fact checking for any claim that supports the climate alarmist agenda; nor will they be deterred in any way by the actual presentation of facts. Their “religion” is the antithesis of true science.
Willis,
You researched Lobster.
You should have researched Lobsta’
No one in New England knows what a Lobster is.
Not just Lobtsa. Big adult boneless filliped Cod cooked poached In Bahston is called Scrod.
You can order Scrod with Lobtsa anywhere in Bahston. Just get extra Butta to go with the Täters
Ok. Confess I lived there for 8 years of University plus two career since before going to Munich professionally. Loved the seafood. Accents are all from now failing memory.
Was there any spraying of pesticides to suppress mosquitoes that carry West Nile Virus off Maine? That is suspected to cause the crash of the lobster fishery in Long Island sound beginning in 1998. Note water temperature increase was thought by fishermen not to affect lobsters.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.greenwichtime.com/news/amp/Pesticide-effect-on-lobsters-studied-3849925.php
I discontinued my subscription to National Fisherman this year.
Partly because of bizarre claims similar to the one you are responding to.
Partly because they allow activists to publish screeds as if they were factual.
Partly because instead of in-depth detailed articles about commercial fishing, fishing equipment, commercial crews and commercial fishing boats; instead they publish fluff pieces, short comments about boats, usually customized boats and fishermen, er, fisherladies.
Last month, I complained about their article about the drop in fishing success in the Gulf of Maine.
Early in the article they whined about rising ocean temperatures causing fish to migrate.
Later in the same article they complained about low temperatures harming the lobster catch.
By the data you supplied above, Willis; I see National Fisherman was wrong on both accounts.
Thank you! Excellent article!
If you look at the actual article, there is a video that features a graph of temperature anomaly (against 1982-2011) versus year. The dots don’t fall exactly above the yearly ticks, so I’m guessing the years covered are 1982 to 2018.
The line (which I assume to be a best-fit) from 1982 to 2012 has a slope of 0.04°C/year, which equals 0.15°F per 2 years, not the 1°F per 2 years that Priya states. Interestingly, the 2018 value plots almost exactly on that linear trend, although the line is not extended past 2012.
2005 was the second-coldest year between 1982 and 2018, with an anomaly of -0.75°C. Then there’s a rapid rise to 2013 which hit +2.1°C. This is an increase of 0.35°C/year or 1.3°F per 2 years which is “nearly ten times” the average trend (Golly, she got that right!).
Then, from 2013 to 2018 there is a cooling, at an average rate of -0.2°C/year or -0.73°F per 2 years (cooling almost five times as fast as the average warming trend!!).
Of course it’s spiky data and anyone can see that at a glance. Picking a trend from the second-coldest year to the hottest year and claiming it as an acceleration is fr@udulent, especially when not mentioning the subsequent cooling.
Priya Shukla is “an ocean and climate scientist …….. currently a PhD student at the University of California, Davis“. I know educational standards aren’t up to what they were in earlier times, but her misrepresentations are so egregious that I find it hard not to believe they are deliberate fabrications.
Then it hit me – could she be related to Jagdish Shukla of George Mason University? He of the #RICO20 fame?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/02/jagadish-shuklas-rico20-blunder-may-have-opened-the-largest-science-scandal-in-us-history/
Perhaps she’s not related to the unlamented Jagdish. Perhaps she’s not just changing the numbers at will to make a scary story. Perhaps she’s just really, really dumb.
I was wondering the same thing. It seems that Priya is not in Jagadish’s immediate family.
UC Davis? You mean Commie State! Right up there with the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs and the Humboldt State honeys with their Birkenstocks and unshaven armpits for the most radical campus in the once great UC system. Why would someone study ocean “science” in the middle of the Sacramento Valley?
UC Davis, where a coed back in the 70s told a flasher; “Ooooh, looks like a p&ni$ only smaller!” That was back in the day when college students were allowed to think for themselves apparently; my niece and nephews that attended Davis are all alarmists who deny any science that contradicts their beliefs. But I repeat myself.
Ah, one of my favorite subjects, lobster. How fortunate we are to enjoy this delicious shellfish.
I like lobster, but I hate lobster shells with a fury and a passion. So, my lobster consumption is at best sporadic.
I did some diving in the southern Gulf of Maine in the mid 1970s doing research on kelp which is part of the algae-lobster-urchin-groundfish ecosystem. An hour at 60 feet in a wetsuit was invigorating, but I was young and having fun. The Gulf is cooled by the Labrador current the bends around Nova Scotia and circulates counter- clockwise. It has warmed in the last forty years, but probably from mixing with a warming North Atlantic, not human-cause climate change. Lobstering there is highly regulated and licensing restricted. One worry is that lobster shell disease which is becoming more common south of Cape Cod probably aided by warmer water will advance north.
I used to have a Nat Geo map of the Arctic from the 1960s or ’70s. As I recall, it showed the average extent of the ice cap, either in summer or winter, or both.
As to Santa’s reindeer, it was originally Dunder, then Donner, but if it is now Donna, so be it. Has anyone examined these reindeer to ensure they have broken the glass, or maybe ice, ceiling?
Most interesting post Willis, and it made me go in search of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ which led to other delights.
Can we go back a step, please? What is an ‘ocean heatwave’? I know pools of warmer water move in the currents around the oceans but is that a ‘heat wave’? I thought that was a natural event, occurring cyclically.
Hello Willis,
I found some more interesting things about the article from Priya Shukla. To her credit (or the credit of her editor) she included many links on which she is supposed to have based her article. And to her embarrasment, she cited wrong most of what she cited.
For example, she says “the Gulf is warming 99% faster than the rest of the world’s ocean” (i.e. at twice the speed) but her reference says that “the Gulf is warming faster than 99% of the oceans” which is a completely different thing that doesn’t put numbers to the speed. Amazing what a small change in the order of the words can create.
Another thing that the article she references says, right at the top, under the photo, is the following:
“The warmer water has created ideal conditions for lobsters and contributed to an overabundance in recent years, causing prices to tumble to their lowest point in nearly two decades in Maine”
And later on, near the end, the article continues with this idea, under the header “Warming credited for overabundance of lobster“. You can see it by yourself, this is the article:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/gulf-of-maine-warming-faster-than-99-of-world-s-oceans-study-1.2753983
Amazing huh? How can someone read an article and get everything so incredibly wrong? The article is still somewhat alarmist, but not really alarmist about lobsters. It is alarmist about other fish species that would be departing. Lobsters are doing great.
Then there is the rate of warming since 2004. Here again she cited the article wrong. She says that the previous warming was half a degree every two years, but the article says 0.05 degrees (Fahrenheit) per year, in line with the rest of the oceans. So she has multiplied by 5 the rate of previous warming. And now the rate would be half a degree per year, which is obviously the product of calculating a trend over a too short ammount of years (2004-2018) with two of the last three years showing a heat wave. Amazing.
Correction, she said “one degree every two years” so she multiplied by 10, not by 5, the previous warming.
Thanks as always, Nylo, good to hear from you. The whole thing, as I said, is made out of nothing. And even if the alarmism is about other species, it’s not just lobster landings and CPUE that has been increasing. As Figure 2 shows, it’s all species that are increasing.
w.
Nylo: Raising the question of why Forbes – or anyone else – would run articles by such a person. Good on you for your careful reading.
The lobsters are on the streets nowadays:
All dressed up in red.
Extinction rebellion.
No watermelons any longer?
Oh Willis, Willis, Willis. Only a denier would stoop so low as to use facts. How dare you question climate science. It has the label ‘science’ in it.
Is there a good chart somewhere showing ocean temp in the Gulf of Maine going way back in time? I would find that interesting to put the “heatwaves” in a broader context.
Go here, select “Gulf of Maine”, click on “Show Below” …
w.
Thank you!
I do that and see a chart starting in 1979 from “August to October” showing declining temps.
So I confess to being confused.
Do you know why the chart seems to default to those months?
Relatedly, is there a standard ocean temp dataset that goes back farther back than 1979? I find everything in your article fascinating, and would love to couple the info in it with something showing (even estimating?) long term Gulf of Maine ocean temps. From my layman’s perspective, a big question is: how different is the temp there now vs., say, the 1950s.
Sorry to bother you about it! But maybe you have a ready answer.
I don’t know why it defaults to those months. I assume it is because those are the three warmest months.
The HadSST sea surface temperature dataset goes back further than 1979 … but the problem is that before then data gets very scarce very fast. So it’s hard to do the kind of comparison you’d like.
Regards,
w.
Thank you. My guess is that the prevailing temp in that area is cyclical, and that we’d see peaks and valleys if we had data back to the 30s or the 50s; then the question would be how does any recent peak compare to previous ones. It is frustrating to see so many charts starting around 1980.
w. ==> The interactive charts at NERACOOS site do not actually show any heatwaves in the Gulf of Maine….not in any normal sense.
NERACOOS is an acronym for “Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems” it is obvious that there have been cooler and warmer times, but the claimed heatwaves are a vast exaggeration.
The real question is: Does a 1-3 degree water temperature difference for a month or two makes a biologically important difference. At what water depth? For what species?
w. ==> The major study on this was Le Bris et al. [2018] which states : “Here we show that interactions between warming waters, ecosystem changes, and differences in conservation efforts led to the simultaneous collapse of lobster fishery in southern New England and record-breaking landings in the Gulf of Maine. ”
The difference is “we show that harvester-driven conservation efforts to protect large lobsters prepared the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery to capitalize on favorable ecosystem conditions, resulting in the record-breaking landings recently observed in the region. In contrast, in the warmer southern New England region, the absence of similar conservation efforts precipitated warming-induced recruitment failure that led to the collapse of the fishery. ”
The study shows SSTs but not temperature at the depths where lobsters live and reproduce….just an oddity. The text of the study is equally obtuse as to what temperatures they considered in their study…the text at one point says “The “temperature” simulation used constant temperatures equal to the mean of the first half of the time series (1984–1999) to evaluate the role of the recent rapid warming in the northeast United States. ”
The pertinent temperatures are bottom temperatures and near-shore bottom temperatures. Maybe they used them in their models, but they do not talk about it or chart it.
Thanks, Kip, most fascinating.
w.
Not an ocean expert but temperatures in that large bay are probably more influenced by the average wind direction than the implied “global warming”. It’s well known that when winds blow onshore for long periods of time, warmer surface waters pile up and can reach impressive depths. On Lake Superior (same approximate latitude) during the summer, warmer surface water is usually just the top 20 to30 feet but last summer in August warm water was well over 100 feet deep at one location, beyond the depth we wanted to drop our temperature probe. We’ve never seen that before but it was an anomoly of sustained onshore winds. It was probably the opposite somewhere else on the lake. It probably happens once in a while too we just never had the temperature probe to know. And did it devastate the fishing nope it was the same as always, maybe a bit better.
Great post Willis, bit of poetry and graphic licence added the gourmet sauce to a solid meal of seafood information…
Being untutored in matters ichtheological I wonder ’bout them graphs, the cod and lobster catches. Is there a connection between the precipitous decline in the cod catch and the simultaneous increase in lobster harvest?
A friend with marine biological knowledge way beyond my pay grade explained it thus: cod, like many schooling fish reproduce in an indiscriminate collective orgy, a sort of clusterf..renzy, to avoid using the colloquial that comes to mind. Females discharging eggs while the males dash about ejaculating their milt produces the next generation of codlets.
The survivors of the simultaneous feeding frenzy head for the sea-bed where they mature dining where possible on lobster spawn.. and who can blame them, until old enough to school. Netting the cod schools in flagrante delicto collapsed the cod population and triggered a boom in the lobster population.
Any endorsements or rebuttals of this theory would be welcome.
cheers
Mike
I look forward to when brilliant Mr. Eschenbach addresses the MOTIVE for demonizing carbon dioxide. Just look up! ‘Elite’ puppeteers are pulling the strings for their eco-feudalist new world order, with an army of Useful Idiots & greedy tools. And if we don’t stop tiptoeing around them we’re screwed.
Carbon: 6 protons; 6 neutrons; 6 electrons.
They love diamonds. They hate seeing them burned. And burning diamonds produces CO2.