From ClimateREALISM
The media is abuzz this week with stories related to the first-ever cancellation of Alaska’s Snow Crab season for 2022. Media outlets like Bloomberg are wrongly attributing the decline in snow crabs to climate change, citing nothing more than opinions offered by favored experts. This is false. The evidence indicates other factors have led to a steep decline in snow crab populations.
In a Bloomberg article, titled, “Alaska’s Snow Crab Collapse Is Likely Tied to Climate Change,” writer Zahra Hirji claims:
Alaskan officials recently canceled the Bering Sea snow crab season for the first time ever after scientists discovered an unprecedented decline in crab numbers. Climate change is the number one suspect in the dropoff. (emphasis mine).
“We’re still trying to figure it out, but certainly there’s very clear signs of the role of climate change in the collapse,” said Michael Litzow, shellfish assessment program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which runs an annual survey of Bering Sea snow crab numbers. (Snow crabs are also found in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska.)
In reality, the climate change link is nothing more than an opinion.
Another story, sourced from the Alaska Journal of Commerce, republished in the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) by Elizabeth Earl, also blames climate change for the crab decline: Scientists point to climate change as likely cause for Alaska snow crab decline. Saying: “There’s no complete consensus about why the stock crashed in the first place. Increasingly, however, the models seem to indicate that it’s due to temperature increases linked to climate change.”
No consensus, but let’s trust computer models over actual data. Where have we heard that before? As Climate Realism has repeatedly discussed, here and here, for example, climate models for air temperature are seriously flawed making projections that are far higher than recorded temperatures. There’s no reason to believe sea temperature models would be any better.
Multiple factors are contributing to snow crab decline. Long-term climate change is not prominent among them.
Fortunately, not every media outlet is as gullible as Bloomberg or ADN, appropriately attributing the snow crab decline to those other factors like predation, overfishing, and naturally warming waters.
The Guardian, for example, which is almost always blames climate change for anything bad that happens, noted in their story, Alaska cancels snow crab season over population decline (emphasis mine):
“Causes being researched but likely included increased predation and stresses from warmer water.”
No mention of “climate change” by the Guardian. We’ll return to the “warmer water” issue later in this article.
Back in 2017, when crab populations first started declining, The New York Times (NYT) had this to say in China’s Appetite Pushes Fisheries to the Brink.
Overfishing is depleting oceans across the globe, with 90 percent of the world’s fisheries fully exploited or facing collapse, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. From Russian king crab fishermen in the west Bering Sea to Mexican ships that poach red snapper off the coast of Florida, unsustainable fishing practices threaten the well-being of millions of people in the developing world who depend on the sea for income and food, experts say.
Surprisingly, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) echoed that point in the story, “Illegal Fishing Puts Crab Populations at Risk,” noting “A new WWF study has revealed populations of crab in the Russian Far East are at risk of collapse due to overharvest from illegal fishing.”
Laughably, Elizabeth Earl, the journalist who wrote the Anchorage Daily News story had previously written in February 2022, Bering Sea snow crab deemed ‘overfished’:
In October, the National Marine Fisheries Service determined that with its current low numbers, the stock of Bering Sea snow crab — also known as opilio crab — is officially overfished.
But now Earl is blaming climate change.
While so-called experts that have the ear of low-information journalists blame warmer water on climate change, that isn’t true. Rather, an extended La Nina event has increased temperatures in the seas inhabited by snow crabs.
As an October 2020 at Alaska News Source story, titled “Strongest La Niña underway in a decade,” reported:
La Niña is part of the natural climate pattern known as El Niño Southern Oscillation, a scientific term that describes the oscillating temperature changes between the ocean and atmosphere in the Equatorial Pacific. La Niña is known as the cold phase while El Niño is known as the warm phase.
The most current satellite imagery of sea surface temperature shows the massive La Niña pattern in blue in Figure 1 below.
The downside of this particular and ongoing La Niña ocean pattern is that it is affecting the Bering Sea, changing ocean currents so that warmer water is pushed northward.
These El Niño and La Niña events are natural patterns that have been going on for millions of years.
The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has a page on the issue which factually reports El Niño and La Niña ocean patterns are entirely natural. The U.N. reports humans have no impact on them, stating:
Is El Niño caused by climate change?
No. El Niño events are not caused by climate change – they are a natural reoccurring phenomenon that have been occurring for thousands of years.
Can we prevent El Niño and La Niña from occurring?
No, El Niño and La Niña are naturally occurring climate patterns and humans have no direct ability to influence their onset, intensity or duration.
Crab population crashes have happened before, well before climate change became a cause du jour in the media. Note this graphic from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing Bering Sea crab populations back to 1980 (Figure 2, below).
According to the data in Figure 2, in 1985, the Bering Sea crab population crashed.
What happened then? The 1984–1985 La Niña event.
The evidence clearly demonstrates that the current large crash of the Bering Sea crab population is due to combination of overfishing and the largest La Niña event in a decade. One doesn’t have to be a scientist to understand this.
Sadly journalists like Hirji and Earl, and corporate media outlets like Bloomberg and the Anchorage Daily News, would rather promote climate change scare stories than the truth about the causes of the snow crab decline. Climate change isn’t to blame and trying to prevent future such population declines by fighting climate change won’t help crab populations, but it will waste scarce resources.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Snow crab population reached an all time high in 2018. Check Dr. Ryan Maue’s twitter account, has the chart. The population has crashed in the past, too. Nobody knows why.
I’m guessing that the all time high was caused by the Magic Molecule ™ too?
Anyone test them for Covid?
That’s a fair question. We know that it has animal reservoirs. Following the precautionary principle, animals should be treated, boosted, and masked.
But let’s keep in mind that “biomass” chart is also from a model. I would be interested in how they tested that model, how reliable the input data is and what are the sources of and margins of error.
produced by the Snow Crab Fishers Association…
If anyone has a motive to get the estimates right, it’s the people who depend on the continued health of the Snow Crab population for their living.
I get the decline from overharvesting, but when the waters warm, is it actually a crash? Do they just migrate to colder waters?
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[time out]
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My brief search only turned up suggestions that the snow crabs may have left the area, but nobody knows. Snow crab migration patterns are apparently poorly understood.
I’m thinking nobody has the answer to my question, but they are looking into it according to a couple of the articles that popped up in my search.
Snow crab migrations are poorly understood.
But we do know that they walk north by looking either east or west, so that is a start.
Geoff S
Maybe they get lost because they’re not looking where they are going 🤣
Read somewhere else that Canadian and Russia yields have been very high and both bring in 3 to 4 times what the US does normally.
Oh, so the snow crabs are rootin’ for Putin, eh?
Don’t they have any respect for pResident Brandon’s sanctions on Russia? Just wait ’til the Big Guy hears about this.
😉
As long as he gets his10%, he is OK with whatever.
Crab are bottom feeders. They have to wait for someone to die or poop overhead and sink down onto their dinner plate. Most likely the cause is their food source is reduced. Remember that lesson back in second grade: plankton gets eaten by fish that gets eaten by bigger fish and so on… The cause is way more complicated than just warmer water.
Temps vary all over and by several degrees depending on currents, tides, depths, seasons, storms, etc..
I’m no biologist and I didn’t even have to stay at a Holiday Inn to come up with that better guess.
I’ve heard reports of crab harvest by other nations being “bumper crops”. Two questions. Can anyone put some meat on that assertion? And, Do we really trust the “Counters”? After all these Counters are part of the same government that locked us down for a flulike virus, created a “vaccine” that is worse than the disease for most people, is doing everything possible to crater and destabilize US domestic energy production, has orchestrated the destruction of the economy in record time, has opened up our southern border to 5000 illegal crossers PER DAY, has created policies and responses that have resulted in near record violent crime, etc, etc. Sorry, I don’t have much faith in experts telling the truth and doing good work these days.
One of my two vocations is as a professional diver with about 1000 dives all around the world (including the crab-rich, cold-water environment around Vancouver Island, BC (yes, different kinds of crabs than this article). I am certified by a dive agency to teach ocean ecology courses spanning 6 different areas of biologic taxonomy. I believe I have a very good understanding of the ocean environment and marine species (but I’m not a marine biologist). Based on reports, some cursory study and experience, I suspect the population crash is partly overfishing, partly migration to colder waters (kind of like the massive Antarctic penguin demise reported some years back where they simply moved and were found alive and well after seeing their poop stain on the ice in satellite photos), and partly government undercounting (possibly on purpose, or possibly accepting a number lower than reality because it fits with their catastrophe mindset).
I have a friend who is an Alaska tugboat captain who made a fortune over a 20 year period as a deckhand up thru first mate on Alaska crab boats in the Bering Sea. He seems to agree.
Snow crab as a species has existed for millions of years. They have survived far greater temperatures than the modest modern warm period. The liars attribute everything to climate change in order to fool the gullible.
To fool the gullible and to comfort the believers.
But can they survive the TV show “Deadliest Catch”
Anthony, temperature increases owing to completely natural La Nina effects are still climate change. But, of course, everyone knows that Climate Change is man made, because of the evil CO2 molecule.
Temperature variation from ENSO is not climate change, it is weather.
Remember when all the Red Abalone died in Northern California in 2011? All the news reports blamed climate change then too. I remember. But UC Davis did the investigation and with a stroke of good luck, found that a rare algal bloom was toxic and killed them all.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/scientists-solve-case-red-abalone-die-using-new-tool-forensic-genomics
Yeah right…
Didn’t we just recently hear about how the waters of that part of the world (Bering Sea) were becoming especially acidic?
yes/no?
Contrary to the claims of (localised????!!!) Ocean Acidification, I asserted that the acid was coming from logging and forestry operations, on either both sides of that stretch of water.
From highly acidic water draing from peatlands, swamps and bogs = just the sameas happened in Scandinavia 20+ years ago and was blamed (by the English themselves) on English coal-fired power stations.
Have the crabs been poisoned by that same process?
And how much Glyphosate is pouring into that little bit of ocean.
Needn’t be a lot, how fast does water move through the Bering Straits, how quickly does it move out into the Pacific?
The increased level of acid reported in the story covered here says ‘not very’
Land Dwelling ‘Crabs’ ## are suffering a similar fate.
## Normally referred to as ‘children’
Yeah you might be on to something because all these things started in 2020. derp
Climate changeglobal warming is the modern equivalent of the angry gods of Norse/Roman/Greek/pagan mythology, the Evil Eye, the Israelite scapegoat upon which the sins of the people were cast, the default explanation for why the chaotic natural world serves up inconvenient events. An extraordinary number of supposedly educated humans are just as superstitious as their ancient predecessors, or just as adverse to critical thinking. The fundamental convenience of blaming global warming for everything is that you can deflect attention from short-sighted human folly like overhunting, overfishing, overgrazing, and foolish policies like not thinning forests and scrub, not conserving water in reservoirs to “protect” marginal, useless species, not building base load power plants to provide reliable energy while simultaneously feeling virtuous and superior for “doing something” by driving an EV, eating “organic” or “locally sourced”, packaging your groceries in your filthy hemp shopping bag, and “recycling” plastic (which ends up in land fills and incinerators anyway).Your comment just says it all, mostly what I have been thinking for decades when confronted with illogical rantings and ravings by the left re: ‘climate…something’. By jove, you’ve done it. Focus on what really is going on by pointing out that modern human beans are no further along than the ancestors who worshipped mystical things as being responsible for things totally unexplainable. Well, except if we realize that ‘mother nature’ is gonna do what she wants, and has been doing for millions of years, irregardless of whatever the occupants of the planet decide to foist upon her. Short of complete nuclear war, man is unable to completely conquer the natural order things of the planet. For the most part anyway.
Common sense and logical critical thinking are needed to keep us from destroying ourselves and our resources afforded us by the aforementioned ‘mother nature’.
Just sayin’.
You can throw in a few witches, also.
It would be interesting to hear what the crab fishermen think, and also interesting to see which other crab species are fine if any.
Northwestern?
Time Bandit?
October 19, 2022 nighttime temperatures in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama drop below 0oC.
It’s a start but still not cool enough for snow crabs.
Pretty sure snow crabs live in water that is warmer than 0 C.
It was warmer in Yellowknife this morning than it was in Little Rock. Give it until tomorrow until this is proclaimed as the new normal and a sign of climaghedon.
La Nina brings another wave of heavy rainfall to eastern Australia as cold fronts collide with the western Pacific circulation. It’s going to be a wet summer in Australia.
Permanent droughts sure seem wet sometimes.
“The Victorian government has ruled out new dams, saying climate change means not enough water would flow into them to make them worthwhile.”
Flannery Fail | Real Climate Science
“Population Crash “
Aaarrrggghhh… the wrong species – David Attenborough, Population Matters patron.
“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.”
Book me on the 1st Starship to Mars, just to get away from all this green crap. I have no data or information on this, but the obvious questions any rational ecologist would ask are
was the population beyond the carrying capacity?
was it over exploited?
what was the rate of recruitment?
etc
“We’re still trying to figure it out, but certainly there’s very clear signs of the role of climate change in the collapse”
Don’t you just love that doublethink!
There’s more CO2 in Mars’ atmosphere than there is in the Earth’s.
Climate Change warmed the Bering Sea water? Try running a tub full of ice water and heating it with a hair dryer for your bath. Don’t scream when you jump in – it will scare the children.
How long will this hoary myth continue to be pumped by those who know nothing of science?
The air doesn’t warm the water and never will. The sun warms the water. Air temperature controls how quickly that warmth is allowed to escape.
this action stinks to high heaven. do the crabs die in warmer water? do the crabs just move to cooler water? what temp is ideal? has anyone performed a temperature study specific to crab habtat? crabs live for days in the holding tanks of the ships, is that water refrigerated? to what temperature? what method is used to estimate populations? where is the data?
Snow crabs are found extensively from the sea of Okhotsk, through the Bering sea and into the Chukchi sea; they are quite common and not considered endangered. The species is incredibly temperature dependant for mating, spawning and larval development to the extent that the crab populations are well known to follow the deep water ‘cool pools’ in a complex migration pattern. The waters of the Bering sea have become naturally warmer in the last 30-40 years with the cooler waters now found further north than previously (maybe as much as 200 km further) but with the US Bering sea crab fisheries only existing since the 60’s in any great numbers, data is scarce on previous behaviour. Chances are that these crabs crossed the border out of US waters looking for deeper, cooler water.
Also worth bearing in mind that the US side of the Bering sea is mostly shallow(ish) water with only a small area of deep water to the south – the Russian side is almost all deep water. The snow crab prefers deep, cooler water with ‘cool pools’ on the sea floor so, even during the best of years, only relatively small populations are found on the US side of the sea.
Crabs live down to 2000m. It seems unlikely that the ocean temperature at depth has changed much. In any case, they have provided no data one way or the other.
Models have predicted that the waters would warm. Actually gathering data would just be a waste of resources. /sarc
Took this long to find a comment actually remarking on the fact that crabs don’t live at the surface lol. I think most of the harvest is from about 200 m of water, but what is the temperature difference at this relatively shallow depth, 0.01 degrees?
Saw something on TV where the snow crabs had gotten loose in Scandinavian waters and now completely cover sea bottoms in areas. Also has become a cash-treasure for fishermen there.
Anybody had the idea that may be crab like all ocean fish and mammals, follow the magnetic lines when traveling along? Same reason the whales are beaching. The current location for the north pole, is somewhere under Siberia. While here I’ll take a shot at the North Pacific sea temperature, underwater volcanos are heating the waters, as the heat plume follows the “Ring of Fire”.
This will give the melted butter population time to recover!
“There has as yet not been a single instance when correlative studies have allowed us to unequivocally separate the effects of fishing and environmental change during a severe stock decline. There is no doubt that the disastrous collapse of the cod fishery in eastern Canada was due to overfishing, but…” Walters, C. J. and S. J .D. Martell. 2004. Fisheries Ecology and Management. Princeton University Press.
I don’t know the crab situation and not quite up to date, but that was the best book on the problem I have seen. They also quoted this (Burkenroad, M. D. 1948. Fluctuation in abundance of Pacific halibut, In A Symposium on Fish Populations. Bulletin Bingham Oceanographic Collection. 11(4):81-129.) which had a published discussion on all papers, this one a somewhat heated one about identifying natural fluctuations. Martin Burkenroad was a “heretic” of sorts, an exceptional biologist who also worked in the Gulf of Mexico. There is an unknown difference between the amount of eggs (fertilized ova) produced by these marine species and the numbers of subsequent juveniles and adults, and while there is controversy and many attempts we don’t even know the orders of magnitude involved.
I doubt that the profession considers 90% of stocks overfished, the term is nebulous, an attempt to estimate the problem from many directions. Check this out. Hilborn is one expert with many other good works.
Melnychuk M. C., N. Baker, D. Hively, K. Mistry, M. Pons, C.E. Ashbrook. C. Minto, R. Hilborn and Y. Ye. 2020. Global trends in status and management of assessed stocks: Achieving sustainable fisheries through effective management. FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Technical Paper. 665. Rome. 152pp. https://doi.org/10.4060/cb1800en
The California sardine failure of Steinbeck fame was due to a natural shift, as many others confounded by fishing. There are many examples of this. As to snapper this attempt with actual field work estimated more than 2X what the modelers claimed. They admitted that many had told them they were wrong, but still….. Sports fishermen are furious at the feds over this. The paper isn’t perfect and there was a committee analyzing it, but from what I know otherwise it is probably more correct.
Stunz, G. W., and 17 other authors 2021. Estimating the absolute abundance of age-2+ red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, NOAA Sea Grant. 439 pages.
https://www.harte.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/GRSC%20Report.pdf
I had experience with this in the Gulf, this one with the famous blackened redfish. Our modeler considering different situations came in and said– “We may need a bounty.” I was cautioned decades ago about the computer revolution. This had a separate section on the models and fisheries managers are still properly concerned about them.The 1962 Texas freeze killed more fish than commercial fisherman had caught for 22 years. Not sure yet about 2021, every freeze is different.
Hoese, H. D., D. W. Beckman, R. H. Blanchet, D. Drullinger, and D. L. Nieland. 1991. A biological and fisheries profile of Louisiana red drum Sciaenops ocellatus. Fishery management plan series. Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Baton Rouge, LA.. 49(1):93 p
“We’re still trying to figure it out, but certainly there’s very clear signs of the role of climate change in the collapse,” said Michael Litzow”
Why didn’t he just say, “We don’t know what happened. We’re still trying to figure out how to blame it on “Climate Change.”?
This is not a climate crisis but a crisis of science and common sense.
Back in the good old days they would always immediately blame pollution due to kemikals in the water. Their ignorance hasn’t changed, merely the name they apply to it.
Over fishing pure and simple.
The Russians did it
They stole the crabs at night!
The Russians then trained the crabs to carry explosives to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline!
From the article: ““We’re still trying to figure it out, but certainly there’s very clear signs of the role of climate change in the collapse,” said Michael Litzow, shellfish assessment program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which runs an annual survey of Bering Sea snow crab numbers. (Snow crabs are also found in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska.)
In reality, the climate change link is nothing more than an opinion.”
That’s the way it always is when it comes to human-caused climate change: A bunch of unsupported opinions and nothing more. No evidence establishing a connection between CO2 and any disaster.
The MSM news model is very simple: If it’s bad news, blame it on climate change (or Trump, or Putin, or all three). If it’s good news, don’t bother reporting it.
If it’s bad news that you can’t really blame on any of those culprits (e.g. unprecedented crime waves, uncontrolled mass immigration, “mainly peaceful” riots, Joe Biden’s health etc.), pretend it doesn’t exist.
“We’re still trying to figure it out, but certainly there’s very clear signs of the role of climate change in the collapse,”
If the signs are so clear, why do they still need to figure it out?
it’s not gullibility, it’s an agenda.
I just bought snow crab at Kroger in AZ for 11.99/lb on sale. Love snow crab.
Overfishing is depleting oceans across the globe, with 90 percent of the world’s fisheries fully exploited
Yet in Australia, in particularly Tasmania, environmentalists are against salmon farms.
Oh the irony.
I’m sure if Global Warming was more of a household word back in the 80s the once vanishing Pismo Clam would have been blamed on that too. Over harvesting was the cause. The Pismo Clam is now making a comeback thanks to regulations protecting them.
https://www.courthousenews.com/once-vanished-the-pismo-clam-is-back-and-pismo-beach-is-thrilled/
If it was caused by “climate change”, why wasn’t it predicted?