December 26, 2014 — If you're still a climate change denier even at this point, it's probably best if you don't talk to anyone with any knowledge of ocean climate and fisheries management in the Northeast.
That's because these researchers are throwing themselves headlong into the questions of what is going on out there and what, if anything, we can possibly do about it. And they are sounding alarms.
Fisheries reporters get a lot of e-mail from NOAA, bringing new research reports to our attention. And to be honest, a lot of that material may get published in science and industry publications rather than in a general interest newspaper.
But let me tell you about one or two of the more recent ones. The first arrived last month about the early spring-late fall phenomenon that has profound implications for the fish, and the second one last week, which stated unequivocally that climate change has indeed messed with the distribution of fish along the Eastern Seaboard.
These two reports from the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole fall broadly in the category of "the more we know, the less we know."
The first of those two declared that monitoring of ocean temperatures at various depths revealed a dramatic warming. This year, the arrival of spring temperatures was among the earliest times recorded in the last 30 years. By 2100, the data point to a consistent three to four week shift in the arrival of the summer season, and the same amount added to the other end. The fall transition that's now in November will shift to December.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times