It’s a case of coal shrinking fish. Another remarkable discovery of modern seance.
There is a six degree variation across the surface of the North Sea but fish are shrinking because the water is warming by 0.05C per year?
Drew Creighton at the Sydney Morning Herald gets excited: Climate Change affects all levels of life. (By crikey, the banality! It would be legendary if a scientist found one form of life on Earth that wasn’t “affected” by temperature, clouds, frost, ice, storms or rain. How low is this bar?)
First a Prof somewhere notices fish are getting smaller:
Professor John Pandolfi of the ARC Centre of Excellence Coral Reef Studies said while the study encompassed all ecosystems, his particular interest was the sea.
But which fish are shrinking exactly — “commercial fish” — could be a clue?
“We’re seeing decreased yields in fisheries, for example in the North Sea commercial fish have undergone reductions in body size, all of them, simultaneously.”
So how do we know this shrinkage is not due to bigger boats and the increased fish-and-chips factor?
He said the study factored in over-fishing and fisheries induced evolution and separated the two results. “This in in response to ocean warming over the last forty years.”
Well that’s alright then. It must be a pretty hot fisheries model to separate the the multifactorial uncontrolled nightmare of predator-prey changes and temperature shifts too-small-to-measure, spread over decades in an ocean where hot and cold water swirls in eddies right next to each other.
How much warming does it take to shrink fish?
The story mentions “one degree of warming since the industrial revolution.” But that’s air temperature, and fish don’t fly much. Creighton doesn’t tell poor SMH readers how much the water itself warmed. Globally we’re talking about a fifth of a degree C over 40 years (plus or minus 0.5C). We can’t even measure something that small with the equipment we use now, let alone the buckets of 40 years ago.
As far as the North Sea itself goes, see the image above, right. There is a six degree normal variation across the surface of the North Sea but panic now, because fish are shrinking due to water warming at two to five hundredths of a degree per year. (A trend estimated by the European Environmental agency).
The miracle is that life on Earth survived meteor strikes, super volcanoes, continental shifts and lived for hundreds of millions of years, but if the oceans warm 0.2 degrees Celsius “commercial” fish can’t adapt.
Apparently 100% confidence in unverified models is a broad view:
We tried to take a bit of a broader approach and we’re asking what the impact on the biological and ecological processes that sustain life on earth,” He said.
“This very broad view is telling no matter what you look at, freshwater, terrestrial, marine the impacts and responses of organisms are manifest.
No advertising story about the climate religion is complete without meaningless numbers:
They looked at 94 biological processes and found that 77 of them have been being impacted.
At about 82 per cent it is ‘pretty high number’ with just one degree of warming since the industrial revolution.
The study found climate change now affects most biological and ecological processes on earth.
Why not 100%?