The World is Losing Fish to Eat as Oceans Warm, Study Finds (nytimes.com)

Fish populations are declining as oceans warm, putting a key source of food and income at risk for millions of people around the world, according to research published last week. From a report: The study found that the amount of seafood that humans could sustainably harvest from a wide range of species shrank by 4.1 percent from 1930 to 2010, a casualty of human-caused climate change. "That 4 percent decline sounds small, but it's 1.4 million metric tons of fish from 1930 to 2010," said Chris Free, the lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Science. Scientists have warned that global warming will put pressure on the world's food supplies in coming decades. But the new findings -- which separate the effects of warming waters from other factors, like overfishing -- suggest that climate change is already having a serious impact on seafood.

[...] As the oceans have warmed, some regions have been particularly hard-hit. In the northeast Atlantic Ocean and the Sea of Japan, fish populations declined by as much as 35 percent over the period of the study. "The ecosystems in East Asia have seen some of the largest decline in fisheries productivity," Dr. Free said. "And that region is home to some of the largest growing human populations and populations that are highly dependent on seafood."

Comments

Overfishing had nothing to do with it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, it's all climate change. Decades of documented overfishing and thousands of studies that correctly connect overfishing with declining fish populations are completely meaningless now.

Re:Overfishing had nothing to do with it

[pr0fessor]

"The added burden of climate change to poorly managed and overfished stocks" would have been a crappy headline so they couldn't even add the first couple of lines of the article to the description.

Fisheries provide food and support livelihoods across the world. They are also under extreme pressure, with many stocks overfished and poorly managed. Climate change will add to the burden fish stocks bear, but such impacts remain largely unknown.

Re:Overfishing had nothing to do with it

[jellomizer]

Who cares what the specialist say. We are going to stick to information that makes us Feel GOOD!
Just think about that, when at work your boss ignores your plead that they are going to do something stupid, because you know what the outcome is, but they just don't want to hear it, because it makes them look bad.

Re:Overfishing had nothing to do with it

[techno-vampire]

Of course they couldn't have added those first two sentences. If they did, they'd have had to admit that Global Warming isn't the main reason for declining fish stocks and that their scare headline was nothing more than BS.

Re:Overfishing had nothing to do with it

[rtb61]

Here is how it works. Fish are genetically inclined to specfic water tempreture ranges. When they change, the fish move or die. In some regions that is worse than others, as the habitat might not be there to move to or they might be trapped in a habitat with to far to move. This combined with existing managed fishing levels lead to over fishing. Then you get stuff like fish size limits, effectively genetically breeding smaller fish or not catching fish that humans wont eat, giving them a huge advantage over fish people will eat. Add in the changes in microbes and parasites that might have been climatically excluded from specific habits are now moving in.

So any significant change in climate will result in pretty large die offs as the populations adjust, either shift or genetically acclimate. For people reliant on those, well they will suffer and suffer a lot, until the fish populations rebound probably over a decade or century or so. Larger land masses tend to do better as greater habitat climate range.

So long..

[wolfheart111]

So long and thanks for all the fish... what else can we say as we head into space...

Are the oceans really warming much at all

[SuperKendall]

Turns out there was a major problem with the study it said it was.

Also the ocean temperature drops rapidly as you go lower, the ocean temperature just a few feet down is not going to be changing much at all. Lots of fish spend most time below the very top layer.

The decline in fish populations is more likely a result of overfishing, something we should be working against - but thankfully there are quite a lot of fish farms these days, so the supply of fish for the world to eat is not as threatened as the summary makes it out to be.

Re:Are the oceans really warming much at all

[bobbied]

The decline in fish populations is more likely a result of overfishing, something we should be working against - but thankfully there are quite a lot of fish farms these days, so the supply of fish for the world to eat is not as threatened as the summary makes it out to be.

Um... I suggest you read the referenced article because they claim to have corrected their number to isolate the effects of over fishing and water temperature. I figure they believe they have found and isolated the effect of water temperature, but I've not seen their study so I have no clue how they managed this. I'd love to see their study, but I've not had the time to try and find it yet.

I'm no climate change zealot (quite the opposite actually) but we need to be accurate here.

Re:Are the oceans really warming much at all

[presidenteloco]

It doesn't matter if one study made a statistics error. That's the process of science working as it should. And that overall process concludes that warming is happening. The overall mechanisms, including ocean thermal cycles, are well understood in their fundamentals. Superkendall's cherry picking and misleading connotations are just destructive rhetoric.

Hmmm...

[Shaitan]

""The ecosystems in East Asia have seen some of the largest decline in fisheries productivity," Dr. Free said. "And that region is home to some of the largest growing human populations and populations that are highly dependent on seafood."

Sounds like a natural correction cycle.

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

When you set out to prove climate change, then everything is because of climate change.

Therefore, the obvious flashing neon sign alternate explanation of over-fishing must be ignored, because shut up.

Re:Hmmm...

[bobbied]

When you set out to prove climate change, then everything is because of climate change.

Therefore, the obvious flashing neon sign alternate explanation of over-fishing must be ignored, because shut up.

Please be accurate here. The authors of the study claim to have isolated out the effect of water temperature form their data. They claim overfishing is the by far the biggest factor, but that they where able to isolate other factors in their data.

I've not seen the study so it's anybody's guess as to what methods they used to interpret their data, or if their results are sufficiently outside the margin of error to be able to make their claim. I suspect there is more to this story they are not reporting and that the truth is they may be just reporting a statistically insignificant variation as a hard fact, when it's not. But the real point here is to justify and secure more funding by generating some PR with the willing press.

I'm sure we had great stats from 1930...

[GregMmm]

This study has a lot of issues. Now I'm not saying we watch what is going on with the ocean and the fish. I am saying there might be some difference in technology from 1930 till now. So there might be some issues with the stat this entire study is based.

Also, just to blame all this on oceans warming is really irresponsible. Gee there couldn't be any other factors, like how much we fish, pollutants, etc.

But, if you put that in your paper, then you will get more funding. Follow the dirty money...

Of what value is that claim

[SuperKendall]

Um... I suggest you read the referenced article because they claim to have corrected their number to isolate the effects of over fishing and water temperature.

That on the face of it should raise red flags. It's not like we have highly accurate data on just about anything related to the ocean going back very far at all, and they claim they have separated out the effects of an unknown amount of warming from an equally unknown amount of overfishing? Yeahhhhh I'm going to need them to work over the weekend on that one.

Sorry but I call bullshit on the whole facade. The only thing of value is studying how different fish populations react to actual warming, but then what do you do with that info when you have no way to really know at the moment if the oceans will warm appreciably at all (and that is even if the climate warms much at all which is also not really a known factor)?

This almost could be construed as an attempt to white-wash over serious overfishing issues that industry and governments are loathe to acknowledge. If you read fishing stories from the 40's-50's set in Florida, you know there were massive populations of huge tuna (each one a ton or more) just sailing around, and a lot of other abundant fish that you can't find much of anymore. None of that was affected by the ocean being 0.00001 degrees warmer on the first foot of the ocean surface...

Re:Of what value is that claim

[bobbied]

Hey, don't take me wrong... I think they are making grand claims on the thinnest of data in an attempt to either justify or secure funding though generating interest and news coverage.

All I'm advocating is that we at least properly characterize what they are claiming, because debating claims they didn't make is a logical fallacy (Straw Man), and doesn't help.

Re:Of what value is that claim

[rickb928]

The Northeast Atlantic has been fished hard all of my life, and before. I expect the fishermen in Gloucester to fight over the last haddock.

Atlantic Salmon have been fished to near-extinction in the wild, on both sides of the Atlantic.

If the contention is that humans have been warming the ocean since the 1930s, they are indeed blaming the wrong thing for the decline in fish populations. Factory fishing, relentless school harassment by Scandinavian and other fleets, pure and simple overfishing is the primary stress.

Look at the North Pacific, they open crab seasons for days. Just days.

But also look at the Maine lobster harvest, fairly well self-regulated. And no, the guns come out over trap placement, not over size regulations.

Re:Why should I care?

[gweihir]

Yes, but maybe you will get reincarnated right into the middle of the mess. Then the joke is on you.

Both true and false

[WillAffleckUW]

The problem is not that there are not enough fish, just that we are losing the top of food chain fish people prefer, while not eating the smaller fish that people don't prefer that live at the bottom of the food chain.

Imagine a Christmas Tree of Fish (or Festal Fish Fellowship):

1 salmon or red snapper
consumes
10 upper mid range fish
consumes
100 mid range fish
consumes
1000 lower mid range fish
consumes
10000 lower range fish.

To solve this problem, you need to stop setting up fish farms for the top 3 levels of fish, which to get 1 L1 and 1 L2 and 1 L3 you need 1110 L4 and 11100 L5, and consume the bottom two levels. This has net positive benefits in that heavy metal and pesticide concentrations also drop. Or you can stop consuming fish and replace them with carbon negative shellfish (not shrimp, sadly, they are net carbon emission increasing) like oysters, clams, and mussels, grown amidst breaker seaweed and breaker seagrass, sucking out carbon from the cycle. The shells of these can then be used to replace many components in concrete, reducing the impact of building. Think of the long surviving concrete from 4000 years ago, which uses this for it's material instead of modern concrete which doesn't survive as long.

More bullshit

[Virtucon]

Stop, enough. it's not about Climate Change, it's about overfishing and using fishing technologies that destroy habitat. We've known about this for decades and yet we still bottom dragging net catches and huge factory ships to overtax the eco system. Species are being wiped out because of their desirability and now sadly, rarity. This has nothing to do with fucking climate hoax and has everything to do with greed and too many people.

Ecosystem is complicated; physics is not

[SuperKendall]

Saying that the top few feet of ocean warming isn't going to dramatically effect the rest of the ocean is silly. Of course its going to effect it.

Not really.

In these waters, surface water temperatures are about -1.9ÂC, the normal salinity of the water keeping it from freezing into ice. The deep waters, being warmer than such surface waters, rise to the surface, as the upper layers sink slowly into the dark ocean depths. Because only very cold surface water is able to sink, it is simple to understand that the deep ocean can never warm up, regardless of how warm the surface ocean around the world may become. No deep lying âoethermal lagâ is going to take place. It is clear that thereâ(TM)ll be no Phoenix rising as a haunting specter.

Re:Oh well, plenty of humans though

[DontBeAMoran]

Don't buy the Soylent Green made from clowns. It tastes funny.