Water too warm for cod in US Gulf of Maine as stocks near collaps

Waters in the north-west Atlantic have warmed 99% faster than the rest of the world’s oceans in the past decade due to changes in the Gulf Stream and Pacific 
Cod quotas have been cut but stocks kept falling because of the rapidly warming waters.
 Cod quotas have been cut in the Gulf of Maine but stocks kept falling because of the rapidly warming waters. Photograph: Rick Price/CORBIS
A rapid warming of the Gulf of Maine off the eastern United States has made the water too warm for cod, pushing stocks towards collapse despite deep reductions in the number of fish caught, a US study has shown.
The Gulf of Maine had warmed faster than 99% of the rest of the world’s oceans in the past decade, influenced by shifts in the Atlantic Gulf Stream, changes in the Pacific Ocean and a wider trend of climate change, it said.
Scientists said the findings showed a need to take more account of changing water temperatures in managing global fish stocks usually based on historical data of catches.
Traditional calculations “consistently over-estimated the abundance of cod”, said Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and lead author of the study in the journal Science.
“Rapid changes outpaced our ability to recognise and react to what was happening in the water,” he told an online news conference.
Fisheries managers cut cod quotas in recent years but cod numbers kept falling because the rapidly warming waters were making the Gulf of Maine inhospitable for the fish.
From 2004, temperatures rose by more than 0.23C (0.4 Fahrenheit) a year, culminating in an ocean heat wave in the north-west Atlantic in 2012-13.
And commercial cod landings fell to 1,000 tonnes in the Gulf of Maine in 2013, sliding from a recent high of 6,000 in 2009, according to the US Department of Commerce.
A United Nations climate report last year said that global warming was pushing many fish stocks towards the poles. Cod are thriving in cooler waters such as off Canada, Norway or Greenland.
“The Gulf of Maine cod is a wake-up call” for better coordination between climate scientists and fisheries management, said Katherine Mills, one of the authors at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
She said it was unlikely that cod catches would recover to pre-crisis levels. The experts laid out scenarios that foresaw a recovery to 5,000 tonnes a year by 2030 in a warm scenario or to just 1,800 tonnes in a hot scenario.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Global warming could drive world temperatures up 7 degrees by 2100

Another piece of the  global warming  puzzle has been revealed. According to new research published on Jan. 1 in the journal  Nature , increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reduce the number of clouds that form. This, in turn, will cause temperatures to rise much higher than previous climate-change models have predicted. According to this new research, global temperatures could rise 4 degrees Celsius or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100, and twice that by 2200. Lead researcher Steven Sherwood at the Climate Change Research Center at Australia's University of New South Wales, told  The Guardian  that this level of climate change would be "catastrophic rather than simply dangerous. For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet."   In a  news release , Sherwood said this new research is not an
Read more

Climate Change Skeptics Lash Out At New Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Study That Questions Ocean Temperature Measurements

Image
Share on facebook 227 Share on twitter 22 Share on linkedin Share on google_plusone_share More Sharing Services 128 An estimated 35,000 walruses are pictured crowding on a beach near Point Lay, Alaska, because of a lack of sea ice in this September 2014 photo. A study published June 4, 2015, refuting the notion that the Earth’s temperature rise has been interrupted since 1998 was lambasted by the usual skeptics and their supporters.  Corey Accardo/NOAA/NMFS/AFSC/NMML/Via Reuters A new climate study was released Thursday that refutes the claim that there’s been a slowdown, or “hiatus” in the rate the Earth is warming, but some conservative-leaning media sites skipped covering the study itself and chose instead to promote the views of the minority of climate change deniers, such as  Christopher Monckton . For example, the Drudge Report, an immensely popular headline aggregator operated by conservative Matthew Drudge, prominently di
Read more

Why Is Critical Technology to Stop Global Warming Stalled?

Image
Pumping CO2 underground can help fight climate change but remains untested for the most part March 12, 2015  | By  Howard J. Herzog  and  The Conversation US Injection of CO2 and other gases into geological formations has been practiced for many years.  Credit:  SaskPower There are many uncertainties with respect to global climate change, but there is one thing about which I have no doubts: we will not solve climate change by running out of fossil fuels. Understanding this leads to three posible pathways we can follow to lower greenhouse gas concentrations, and explains why I’ve chosen to focus  my research  on carbon capture and storage. We can: continue to burn fossil fuels with little or no restrictions. We will blow by atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 450 parts per million (ppm), the level many scientists think is dangerous to exceed, and we will keep on going. We have enough fossil fuels to easily go above 1,000 ppm. The impact will be significant, perhaps catastro
Read more